“During the European Summer of 2006 whilst visiting London I helped unpack a dinner service. Each piece of crockery was packed in corrugated cardboard for protection. I used the packaging to paint on and so began this new work…” of colour laid down amongst the high edges and along the concave hollows of the corrugated, fluted shape. (1)

Sarah Guppy has – through the use of what was conveniently to hand (firstly only as a drawing surface) – found a way of working that has become entirely her own. Her use of fluted glass and enamel paints is pioneering and the results are compelling achievements, and remarkable.

These are works in which the chromatics of colour function in a variety of ways. At times, one colour leads to another in a satisfying progression and so patterns emerge, and expand into bands. Some colours sit forward and are seen first, while others hover behind and establish a fluxing distance. And the overall works themselves float in an unusual place: that is, we are viewing what the artist has painted in reverse onto glass and so the colour seems suspended in the glass itself. In this way, some of the effects and properties of glass (the brightness of surface, light refraction, viewing angle, depth) come to play a significant role. Adding to this, the enamel medium establishes softness into and along the fluted lines.

Display of these works is not fixed: there is no absolute top or bottom – the works can be presented on any orientation without their essential character changing. But when altered other implications, illusions, and contrasts emerge (some works come to suggest landscapes, others architecture, the harmonics of sound arise; parts of a rainbow or earth and sky are intuited; coloured space and the edge of a line of colour develops, only to wax and wane).

The surprise of how these works change as the viewer comes to see is paralleled (all puns intended) in how their sounds are variable and change too. In some, there is assonance and in others discordance established by colour contradictions and tensions. Some are bright, hot and high key: the sounds are thus sharp, short, thin, spaced apart.

Sarah Guppy has produced in Corrugated Colour an innovative body of new work that is utterly distinctive and resonant.

1. Artist Statement, December 2007.