The following paragraphs are from text by Jane Wallace on the exhibition Silo, written for a publication due later this month. Copies will soon be available from the gallery.

"...There’s an elasticity to Tyne Gordon’s new body of work Silo. These are paintings and objects that promise a constant in-between; things that are still themselves even when they expand or contract, entering another, like two rubber bands, like jump ropes for double Dutch, like a fissure in a membrane or the wet ring of an open mouth. For Tyne, the relationship between forms is generative of portals, gateways with some purpose that is as yet undefined...

...The ciphered logic of the silo is a useful way to think about Tyne’s practice. A series of sculptures are central to the exhibition, towers following building-block shapes: Bell, Landing/Holding. These are not sacred geometries, but secret ones. Constructed from found objects, their parts are mostly illegible but bear brief contours of functionality. In Bell, a column of glass elevates an air ventilation panel and a cube like a sweet tooth that’s been orbiting Tyne’s studio for months, gathering a skin of tinsel, resin, glass, cellophane and quartz from St Bathans. The heady materiality makes it seem that the glass panes have risen up from a deeper level, exhuming this glinting concentric stack along with it...

...The private keeping of a secret for oneself is the currency these sculptures deal in. Tyne understands that not everything can be reasoned with. A monolithic encounter is a motif that has often been used in film or literature; David Keenan’s Mary Hanna¹ makes surreptitious sculptures from bags of cement, for no one but herself. Their meaning or origin is unclear and so hold an undemanding irrationality that tends to be stripped from modern life. Tyne’s sculptures behave in a kindred manner, as forms that might stand in for selves and desires; as illusive objects that yield to one’s own projections of utility, beauty, insufficiency, and transcendence. Though resembling monuments, they express a more private memorial than is usually engendered by those public statues that confine their subject to a stony and impermeable past...

...Underpinning Tyne’s practice is also an attention to the domestic and the sublime. As poet Adam Zagajewski² notes in a lucid essay, “The sublime today is chiefly a perception of the world’s mysteries, a metaphysical shudder, an astonishment, an illumination, a sense of proximity to what cannot be put into words.” It is a contact that requires both the high emotion of the almost-intangible and the simpler, more fleeting wonder of the quotidian. It requires an equilibrium that, as Zagajewski observes, we don’t have the language to describe..."

¹ Mary Hanna appears in David Keenan’s books This is Memorial Device (London: Faber & Faber, 2018) and again in Monument Maker (London: Orion Publishing, 2023).
² Adam Zagajewski, “The Shabby and the Sublime,” in A Defense of Ardor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 33.