Pippa El-Kadhi Brown:
Stranger Skies
Holden Gallery, Manchester

Pippa El-Kadhi Brown, The Butterfly, In Memory of George Kuba, 2024

Ethereal skies and shapeshifting, shimmering entities are set against fractured planes as Pippa El-Kadhi Brown dissolves the boundaries between the real and fantastical. Hazily remembered landforms are revisited and absorbed into sugary horizons, while gentle pastels offer an outstretched hand, guiding you into the dreamy minds of these otherworlds.

Stranger Skies tight-walks the line between capturing the ‘thingness’ of being and the ‘beingness’ of a thing. The works playfully toy with degrees of realisation, moving between the ambiguous and rendered to play with our predisposition to recognise the human form in emergent shapes.

This shapeshifting extends into space itself: in Where the Wings Wander, a multi-planed sky dotted with candied meteors exudes an inversion of reality, a nostalgic realm of visual sumptuousness. These larger works can be read as Möbius strips: there’s a perpetual bending over and under, whether that’s an amorphous form
bending into an arm, or a wing as in The Fly, or the viewer themself bending, stretching around the mise-en-scène of Monkberry Moon Delight; a summer dusk in four dimensions.

Taking influence from the strange cosmographic events recorded in the sixteenth-century manuscript The Book of Miracles, El-Kadhi Brown’s anthropomorphised comets and clouds beautifully merge the real and phantasmagorical to form human-celestial chimeras. The boundary between the human and non-human grows fuzzy as body forms slip into the landscape, which is, in a way, closer to the unobservable atomic truth
of things.

Whether a celestial eruption or a fiery plume melting into whipped clouds, the smaller scale paintings carry us along paths that curl and swoop. Kaleidoscopic brush marks like those in Carousel resemble atomic particles crashing against the frame – chemical reactions of selenium greens and barium blues. Or perhaps they’re zaps of light in a choreographed dance against a windowpane.

Meanwhile, the works on paper offer up an alternative perspective of this otherworld. A caesura of earth tones in amongst the exhibition’s largely pastel palette, the imagined landscapes in oil pastels and charcoal swing from a charming simplicity to an uncharacteristic weightiness. There’s an urgency to these works, as if El-Kadhi Brown is scrambling to capture a memory before it dissolves.

Stranger Skies promises to transport visitors into other-realms; whilst we can’t step inside these multidimensional worlds, El-Kadhi Brown’s sweeping forms will leave viewers reimagining the mundanity of everyday life, imbuing grey skies with colour and turning them upside down.