Painting, for Critchlow, is an experience enveloped in layers of memory, knowledge and reference interweaving together.  Based on the northern edge of Cumbria, the framework and tradition of landscape surrounds her, and is often a starting point for many paintings. In this presentation, the artist manipulates and plays with the boundaries of this established structure and allows for the ‘uninterrupted flux of the world’ (in Sterne’s words) to permeate into the canvases. 

Works unfold over a long course of time, the artist working across many pieces at once.  Painting is undertaken in intense bursts and waves, before the canvases are turned to the wall to be returned to later; products of both frenetic making and periods of silent reflection.  Critchlow manages to straddle the delicate line between the purely abstract and the representational.  Thick, painterly interruptions tumble across the canvas and abstract runs of colour fight and jostle for attention against washed out and paint-flecked grounds.  There are also observed elements from the artist’s surroundings folded into the painterly mix – river banks, blossom petals, insects – that sit alongside art historial nods and responses to poetry. 

In as much as Critchlow sees these works as chaotic fragments of individual experience, in an increasingly heavy and disjointed world, considered as a whole they become more cohesive. They operate as snapshots into an exploration of life in the 21st  century, soaking in a myriad of concerns and visual stimuli, and recorded in layers of paint. Some works offer the wide-lens overview, others zoom in tight on one element of interest, whilst others suspend attention for a moment.