This November, Ingleby presents Mia Kokkoni's first major solo exhibition. Bringing together a substantial body of work made over the last year or so, the paintings chart the passing of time and changing of seasons across the landscapes and dreamscapes of the artist’s imagination.
Kokkoni’s daily rhythm involves a kind of deliberate self-isolation. She walks to the studio every day, thinking things through on the way, her phone almost always left behind. She adopts a kind of personal timekeeping, setting her clock in winter to align with sunrise and sunset, ignoring the shifts of daylight saving time. This way of living is indicative of her way of working; she is someone who is entirely content in her personal orbit. In her Glasgow studio, wild strawberries sit on the table, and talk turns to a planned move to a cottage in the country. She doesn't drive, but it doesn't matter – the idea of solitude in the hills appeals to her.
Despite her Greek origins, Kokkoni’s work seems rooted in a world of Celtic storytelling. Pigments are applied with small, gestural brushstrokes, building up in close-toned layers of indigo, jade and cobalt. In her pastoral paintings, constellations, clusters of trees, lonely horses and crescent moons pepper the scuffed surface. Tiny figures - the villagers, one imagines, of Kokkoni's invented hamlet - appear at the edges, refusing to articulate an actual narrative, yet re-enforcing a sense of a world that sits somewhere beyond the ordinary.
Her work sits at a distance from most contemporary painting, indeed it’s hard to locate it in relation to either time or place - a sense that is deepened by the wonky, antique nature of her hand-worked frames, which she makes in wood sourced from Glasgow's salvage yards. There are some art historical touchstones though, a sensitivity that connects with Milton Avery’s off-kilter landscapes in one minute, or to the symbolism of Odilon Redon in another. A book about Chagall – given to her by her father when she left for art school, library-stamped in Greek and dated 1972 – has pride of place in her studio - it is clear the volume has been loved and handled for years with pages falling out and the spine long gone. Looking at it together, we smile at the childlike quality of Chagall’s cows and goats, but note that there is also something slightly sinister at play.
This combination of apparent humour and potential darkness is echoed in Kokkoni's own paintings. Look beyond the first glimpse of a fairytale and a deeper reading emerges – a candlelit procession of little people is both a celebration and a funeral. Three sisters in white walk down a hill on a spring-like day, but something about them suggests they could be spirits of the dead. Nothing is quite as it seems at first glance. There is something enjoyable in trying to decode these fables and messages, but Kokkoni herself gives nothing away; even where a story is implied, she refuses to give up her secrets.
