As December devours the daylight, it’s hard to avoid the winter skies.

In the twinkling between dawn and dusk, their restless moods shift from eggshell expansiveness to concrete introspection, hemmed in by the endless ambiguities of a night which suggests the eternal. Jen Orpin is a keen observer of the sky in all its seasons, watching the shifts in its mood, capturing the cherry blossom of its hope as much as the slate grey of its despair. It’s the canvas against which her concrete subjects – bridges and flyovers – are set.

The Architecture of Connection, currently showing at Manchester’s Saul Hay Gallery, brings together a fresh breadth of her works, spanning postcard-sized pieces and larger paintings, as well as the monochrome studies which serve as their blueprints.

It’s been 10 years since the death of her father, and the three month back-and-forth which preceded it; Orpin making the heart-sore weekly commute between her new home in Manchester and  Surrey, where he was nursed in what were to be his final days. Making those long, numb drives, the way-posts of her journey gradually etched themselves into her heart, imbued with the mixed emotions of her grief.

Three years passed before she was able to lay bare those still-healing wounds, painting their outline in oils, leaving herself as open as a confessional singer-songwriter. It was an approach which struck a chord with the public. Personal emails sent to Orpin over the course of the intervening seven years offer moving testimony of how her art has unlocked the doors to the griefs and joys of others, revealing the hidden colours beneath their own grey commutes.

Reflecting this, Orpin‘s works are somewhat flattened by reproduction. Their postcard approximations, the images which run alongside this article, fall short of the vitality of their originals. The works, typically oils on plywood, bloom and respire against the cool white of the gallery walls. Those which make up The Architecture of Connection take the motorway, or – in a set inspired by a trip to Los Angeles before its inferno – the freeway as their starting point, but drive on beyond it, down slip roads and through encroaching night into the B roads and back lanes of an indifferent countryside.

The LA quartet excepted, the subjects are – in the main – as recognisably English as a Constable landscape; their horizons narrow, their skies low. In this context, the unexpected colours and elegant curves of Seoul Connection catch the eye like a pastel-coloured firework, a whisper of other people’s everyday. Where Asphalt Ends, on the other hand, returns the eye to ground level, reminding the viewer that, where the Situationists imagined beaches beneath Parisian paving stones, the slabs of their English counterparts can never quite hold back the more prosaic flourishing of flora which declines to be trampled. It’s an intimation of mortality’s slender scale, as peculiarly reassuring as it is chastening. The same might be said of The Turn, in which the darkness of a country lane, stripped of street lighting, seems to usher in a more ancient terrain.

In the face of these parables of transience, Margins Of Motion sweeps past the dusk at the speed of denial. Whereas, more characteristically, Orpin reaches for an instance of stillness, here she succumbs to the motorway’s impatience, the urgency of the destination leaving only the faintest impression as she reaches out towards it.      

The paradox that lies at the heart of the piece, one it shares with the remainder of Orpin’s recent art, is that, for all that the landscapes bear the marks of their striving, these are works in which there are no human figures. Just the same, the one element that is entirely absent is the one whose presence is most greatly felt. Ultimately, Orpin’s are very human landscapes, emotions sculpted through infrastructure, feelings written across the sky. Less portraits of Brutalism, they are depictions of the underpinning pulse, pulling back the ribcage of architecture to expose the vulnerable heart which we hold in common.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Miles Of Memory by Jen Orpin, oil on birch plywood

 

Jen Orpin – The Architecture of Connection is at Saul Hay Gallery, Manchester until December 21, 2025. For more information, click here.