Melissa Huddleston: Primordial Spring

Huddleston’s series of paintings on paper immerse the viewer in a luminous, prehistoric swamp populated with single-celled organisms, imaginary archaic life forms, and humanoid amphibian figures. Seen in silhouette, the figures’ complex relationships hover at the edge of narrative. Not quite land, not quite sea, swamps and wetlands represent a mingling of ecologies, a crossing of worlds. Encounters happen in these places that don’t happen anywhere else. The imagery in the paintings teems with mutation, decay, sex, death, and the magnificent messiness of life.

The paintings in Primordial Spring utilize processes adapted from historic print and book arts techniques. Through an experimental monoprint-style method, paint is applied to the surface of a water bath, manipulated, and then transferred to paper. The resulting paintings are dense with organic activity, and buoyant swirls of colors floating with mysterious levity.

Paper marbling techniques are commonly associated with European scriptural arts, as well as the Japanese art of suminagashi. Huddleston’s interest in these processes is informed by revisionist feminist histories of these works on paper that have reassessed their former status as minor arts, craft, or ephemera. Her paintings boldly intersect aspects of these traditions with the idiom and scale of modernist abstract painting.