Jen Orpin stands out as one of the most talented and appreciated painters in Manchester's contemporary art scene. She graduated from Manchester Metropolitan University in 1996 with a degree in Fine Art and joined Rogue Artists' Studios in 2000. Her artworks feature in various public and private collections, both nationally and internationally, and have been showcased in galleries in across the United Kingdom and now recently in South Korea. In 2021 her motorway paintings featured in the Guardian online and The Observer's New Review arts and culture magazine. In 2023 she was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Show. A Navigation of Memory is her first solo-exhibition with JARILAGER Gallery Seoul.

Orpin creates beautiful paintings of motorway bridges that mark well-travelled roads across the UK. She captures the essence of everyday topographies, choosing the framed view from the car to encapsulate memories and feelings of nostalgia. The composition of what she calls her 'standard, straight-on landscapes' often feature a vertiginous perspective, where a solitary bridge soars into the sky, cutting through the air with surgical precision, as the eye travels along the road under and beyond its physical boundaries. The paintings embrace complementary notions of time: viewers are suspended between the impulse to dash at motorway speed and the pull of deceleration, emanating from the sturdy structures that dominate the scene. Concrete and metal give these brutalist landmarks, marked with graffiti and occasional weeds, the enduring quality of a monument. Each bridge acts as a focal point, confronting us with its imposing presence and forcing us to re-enact all the memories and emotions that we associated with its sight on our routes to the people and places that mean the most to us.

Emotionalism and memory are key elements to understanding the artist's practice. Orpin started painting motorway bridges as a way of dealing with grief over the loss of her father. On her journey in 2015 to and from the hospital where he was admitted to after having a stroke, she found herself confronted with 'childhood memories, feelings of nostalgia, thoughts of things said and not said, and time snatched away'. A sense of retrospective introspection and a sadness for what had been lost was something that accompanied her on this journey, beneath its skies and the bridges she drove under.

The charge of emotional depth continually informs the works, especially because the bridges are meant to extend outwards to the audience responding to her art. Orpin loves hearing about the stories of joy and heartache coming from the 'sole travellers' who've crossed the same roads and they recognise them in the artworks. She strips away any trace of human presence from the compositions in order to offer an intimacy between the viewer and the works, each paintings journey can be seen solely of that of the viewer without compromise or distraction. In a sense, Orpin is meticulously creating a material archive for the internal geographies and the memory on the road of an entire collective.

Although there is a sort of geometric continuity in Orpin's work, some of her latest works focus on the parts, or the side, rather than the whole. She works on a smaller scale to force a new perspective on the details of the structures and the tension of the curves, there's an interplay between darkness and light in the shadowy areas under the bridges. The portrait orientation of some of these new works give space for vast skies. She spans from miniaturist precision to the potent expressionism of these skies, which are always the first thing to be painted and define the mood of the compositions.

At times it feels as though Orpin is challenging herself, as well as the viewer, to continue looking at the same things anew. In fact, she believes that art is a way of changing how people look at the world: a way of looking at a mundane world that brings out little glimmers of intense joy, desperation, and beauty, even when you are navigating the most dreadful of visual circumstances. Orpin invites us to embrace the idea that whatever beauty there is, it is ours, the one trapped within our memories, the one we want to see.

Press release courtesy JARILAGER Gallery.