Inside Kay Parsons, born in Wales, studied art at Byam Shaw School of Art and West Surrey Institute of Art and Design 1991-1995. She exhibited at the Cable Street Gallery, London and The Royal Society of British Painters at the Mall Gallery, London in 1999; Art Wales in 2000; the Wales Drawing Biennale in 2002.
Outside Clarissa Upchurch, born in China, studied Art at Sheffield, Harrow and Norwich 1967-1970. She was visiting tutor at the University of Westminster, Department of Architecture 1992-2000. Her solo exhibitions include Hitchin Museum,1986 and 1994; Cheltenham Festival of Literature, 1991; National History Museum, Budapest, 1993; City Narratives, RIAS Gallery, Edinburgh 2000; Maddemarket Theatre, Norwich, 2001. Upchurch won first prize for drawing at Gainsborough House, 1990.

Inside and Outside is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by two contemporary women artists. Kay Parsons works up images of the internal spaces of buildings, whilst Clarissa Upchurch draws and paints the canyons and ravines that comprise the streets of cities. Yet both artists use figurative imagery in order to suggest an inner mental landscape.

In Parsons' case the pictures are of dark dream-like spaces that lead onto and into each other. The darkness of the cavernous interiors is contrasted by light that floods into the space from sources beyond the picture frame. She uses the light to catch the edge of a stair or a hand rail or to give colour and texture to a wall. The surfaces of her paintings are rich in layering and the rubbed and scraped paint on canvas has a burnished character so that the light seems to emanate from the canvas surface. The light in these pictures provides them with a spiritual integrity hovering somewhere at the edges of melancholy and optimism. In her paintings an occasional piece of furniture or an apple on a footstool assumes the mantle of personhood. In paintings with neither furniture nor figure, the light itself takes on a personal quality giving an apprehensive sense of something about to happen. It is this character that gives the pictures their gentle surreal property.

The paintings and drawings of Clarissa Upchurch achieve their interior quality by being filmic rather than dream-like. The vertical format pictures have the dramatic semblance of cathedral spaces. The horizontal format cityscapes owe much to the atmosphere of film noir with their strong contrasts and shadowy presence. However, the European character of the images suggests Wim Wenders' early work. The horizontal format allows her to bring the jagged sky down into the image as a more disturbing formal element creating a quiet anxiety in the picture. The falling sunlight catching the stucco or glinting off the metallic trim of a parked car is reminiscent of Hopper's 'aching light' transposed to Europe.

We catch these scenes in their quiet uneasy moments, or in the frantic moments of a commercial day when nothing in the story has really happened - as yet. The surfaces of the drawings and paintings are very much part of the theatre she invites us to peer into. This is, of course, the achievement of an artist who has developed and exercised a mastery over her media; so that the experience of the depicted scene is returned to the experience of the worked surface.

Both artists in this show are committed to work that expresses human feelings, fears and frailty: the mind's interior. In this their work is a delight to look at and rewards our imaginative attention to the fabrication of picture-surface in which we apprehend the narrative content.

Edward Winters