exhibitions & events 2021

Jila Peacock

Shadowfalls

What is the difference between a print and a shadow? One is an impression and one an image of obstructed light, yet both form spaces around an absence.

In the spring of 2020 painter Jila Peacock, isolated in a flat above the Broomielaw, made a series of photographs of Glaswegians in lockdown. In the wall to wall sunshine of that strange May, it was the shadows that told the richer tale of a whole World in silent standstill.

What is the difference between time as it ticks through a busy day and time as it marks out a long wait? They feel immeasurably different, - one moving with the second hand, the other falling like sand filling up an hourglass. Shadows mark time, turning each figure into a walking sundial, fading away as the sun sinks to rise again the next day.

It is one of life’s few certainties.

Peacock has used her Iranian background to combine images from the Persian Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, illustrated by the legendary 15th century master, Behzad, and her obsession with Milton’s Paradise Lost, to produce a whole new body of work, Shadowfalls.

Her technique is to use a combination of oil on monoprint, which she calls mono-painting.

Jila Peacock was born in Iran and graduated in painting from St Martin’s School of Art in 1984. Moving to Glasgow in 1990, she has been a part-time lecturer at the Glasgow School of Art and a member of the Glasgow Print Studio where she exhibits regularly.

In 2003-4, with an award from the AHRC from Cambridge University, she made a hand printed edition of an artists book Ten Poems from Hafez, exhibited at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2005 and the British Museum exhibition, Word into Art, in 2006. Her film Tongue of the Hidden, a short animation made from these images was Bafta nominated in 2008.

Her work is held in national collections in Scotland, England and the USA.

Jila’s works are available to purchase at the GPS webshop: https://website-gps.artlogic.net/exhibitions/15-jila-peacock-shadowfalls/works/

Image: Jila Peacock, 'Shadowfalls', 2020, oil on monoprint. Jila Peacock, 'Invocation (Pink)', 2020, oil on monoprint.