Tahnee Lonsdale was a name on everyone’s lips during and after last year’s Armory Show. Collectors fought for her work, and Cob Gallery’s booth sold out. A year later, the artist is set to open a solo exhibition at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14. We caught up with Lonsdale, who is finalizing the details of the show, to discuss her work and its evolution over the past twelve months.
Lonsdale’s ethereal compositions are a tool she uses to explore the delicate interplays between consciousness, affection and sorrow. She told Observer that her process is mostly intuitive; the interactions of the colors on the canvas suggesting diaphanous allegorical and symbolical figures that manifest as she works. More recently, her process became even more intuitive as she embarked on a more loosely controlled practice—Lonsdale no longer traces or outlines her figures after spending time at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I had never made anything with ceramics,” she said. “The process is very intuitive. I lost control of it at one point. It was meant to be like a vessel shaped like one of the smoothly curvilinear figures of my paintings, but it just kept growing outwards, with its own life.”
Freed from the line, her mystical presences are made of color and light in a nebulous atmosphere, built up in the painting as Lonsdale would mold clay to make a vessel without any preconceived idea or outline. “I’m now building the painting from a central color,” she explained. “I start with a color field, and then I build the figures from the inside out rather than the outside.” Intuition is important, as is having faith in the process.
That process is like an excavation of archetypes hiding in our collective subconscious. Lonsdale’s intuitive paint application oscillates between opacity, transparency and fluorescence, creating auratic figures that emerge like mirages from an interplay between texture and depth, light and pigment. In this back-and-forth between abstraction and figuration—now much more present than before—those spiritual presences reappear.
But while Lonsdale’s process changed, the themes in her work have not. Inhabiting her paintings are her signature mystical and chimerical feminine spirits characterized by curvilinear shapes… the matriarchal presences that reconnect with all the mothers before us or with the Great Mother Earth. As the process has become looser, Longdsale feels an even more profound connection with them. “It’s more like an energetic color field,” she said. “Like some kind of heat coming out of it, then spreading with movements, and the figures will naturally start to emerge.” When she looks at the figures populating her paintings, many of them are traveling somewhere, fleeing or at least running in a defined direction. “They’re heading somewhere I cannot control.”
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There are no absolute autobiographical references in her work. Her subjects are universal images of womanhood and motherhood with all its implications: carer, guardian, warrior. During our conversation, Lonsdale admitted that her imagination was deeply influenced by the sculptural language of Henry Moore and his struggle to shape and describe humans at a historical turning point. The British modern master’s work was existential in its questioning, characterized by the postwar period; Lonsdale’s paintings capture the present-day need for reconnection with something profound, spiritual and timeless, both inside and outside us, after the pandemic.
In that vein, Longsdale’s work engages with an endless back-and-forth between rationalism, physicality and humanness. “I want them to start to be something,” she said. “I want to define that: I can see ahead; I can see a body. And I want to define it. However, every time I get that, it’s about really slowing down. I’m not going to define anything. I will keep this so slow and unintended and unintentional for as long as I can because if I try to define anything too soon, it feels contrived.”
Lonsdale found additional creative nourishment in her reconnection with Leonora Carrington, reading her writing and immersing herself in Carrigton’s rich symbolic imagination, diving deeper into Mexican culture and the mystical atmosphere in her period there. “They’re very fantastical and mystical, and there’s a feeling of transparency,” Longsdale said. This idea of the veil returns and lives between the painting layers that she creates and the surface of prefiguration she wants to break. “She’s ancient, and you feel like she’s already half in the spirit world and half in the physical realm. Or maybe crossing over.”
Lonsdale’s figures also cross between dimensions, time and space, tapping into timeless and profound archetypes: not just the mother archetype but the broader maternal archetype, which extends to ancestors, like grandmothers, great grandmothers and so on. As she dove further into the genesis of those images, we learned how they emerged in challenging moments as a form of resistance. “I was having a very hard time, and I remember sitting down with my sketchbook and being like, ‘I don’t want to plan what I will draw, and I’m just going to see what comes out,'” she said. “And I just started drawing these weird figures. They were very much about humanness back then. They didn’t feel celestial. They felt like a representation of emotions.” When she was overwhelmed—by heartbreak, by the pandemic—those figures helped her connect with something deeper inside of herself. When she made her first painting of them, they felt like the idea of protection and deeper spiritual meaning even as they embodied strong emotions. But, she emphasized, nothing about them is menacing, threatening or dangerous. They stand as symbolic reference points to offer this opportunity to reconnect with older traditions and the deeper spiritual meanings they’re embodying. “I have a solid connection to the figures in the paintings… they are very much present with me, and putting them on the canvas is just illuminating them.”
Collectively, Lonsdale’s ethereal figures are psychological or emotional shadows marching against the sun… against the light of self-reckoning and personal awareness. “They walk with you,” she said. “They’re just there constantly.” And there with them are the infinite possibilities and potential within women’s identities once they reconnect with a more primordial and wild but still creative feminine energy.
Tahnee Lonsdale’s “A Billion Tiny Moons” opens at Night Gallery in Los Angeles on September 14 and will be on view through October 19.
