Tosha Albor

The paintings I present here are a departure from the drawings I made for the lockdown exhibition ‘Becoming Trees’, where I produced works from a method of repetition using only the pencil and eraser as rudimentary tools of discovery. For this show ‘Recipes’, I’ve awoken the senses to colour and scaled my compositions to stretch out again–the way one does after a long nap. And yet, the restlessness of lockdown remains, channeled through explosions of bright pinks and oranges—jarring, chaotic and toxic like how I imagine radiation spills to look after a downpour of acid rain on lunar highlands. Or the crackling and fury of the skies from a volcanic eruption. As we’ve seen on this planet, such explosive events come with new life form and land mass—new territory to map out into cartographies of a new world order. In my new world, this is a personal re-mapping of peaks and troughs; ridges and rifts; beneath a curtain of a sky-like quality that portends to new possibilities.