There’s a sense in which abstraction runs counter to consciousness, reasserting the disorder that the brain’s mistrust of chaos seeks to tidy away into words and pictures.

In the absence of pictures – give or take a few featured images in this review – words will nevertheless have to suffice to convey the sense of what Nancy Collantine describes as a collection of  “twice-removed” landscapes, adding colour and texture to the white walls of UNITOM‘s new gallery space on Manchester’s Quay Street.

Following the topography of the Peak District and other locales, suggested by the gesture of open-air sketching, the canvases are developed in her studio space, and imbued there with other, interior landscapes as the pieces are first worked, then worked over. Collantine, moreover, embraces chance, striving not for the gloss of perfection but the flaws that reveal the uncomfortable and the unflattering. For all that there’s something eye-catching in their colour and composition, the paintings are never merely decorative.

It’s the protracted nature of the process, perhaps, that marks the works out as the preoccupations of Collantine’s unconscious are afforded time and space to find their way through her materials and onto canvas and board. Nor are more corporeal verities neglected. A set of four paintings in particular embody the visceral. Pitch is toned with the flesh of European ancestry, while Idole manifests a totemic masculinity. Or at least that’s my reading.

Crucially, there’s never a nothing underlying the oils and gouache. Collantine‘s disorganising principle, which can entail both obscuring and effacing, though ambiguous enough to be open to the viewer’s interpretation, is nonetheless visibly vestigial in meaning.

As a matter of personal preference, I found myself more engaged by her bolder, more compact paintings. The diptych named Big Orange (Satellite) and Monument fluoresce like visions of the nuclear neolithic; the former radiant with the decaying, decadent beauty of carbon half-life, the latter like a stone left standing in invocation to older, less self-defeating knowledge.

Being a literal soul at heart, the work that spoke most eloquently to me, however, was one of her more figurative paintings. The elegant Yellow Shirt makes its point with a splash of colour and a flash of line work, fleshing out its subject with a louche elegance that would not have disgraced the sleeve of a seven-inch single by Pulp or Suede.

It’s almost certainly not the kind of image that catalysed Collantine, but that’s imprecisely the point. In creating the conditions for chance, Collantine’s body of work evades the definite. Certainty can go whistle.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: copyright Michael Pollard

 

Whistle Down The Wind by Nancy Collantine is at UNITOM, Manchester until September 5, 2026. For more information, click here.