Downstream

Downstream was a solo exhibition held in London during September-October 2019. The research question explored the divinatory powers of water through the process of painting as actual, metaphorical, symbolic and magical source. Utilising his immediate locality and family as visual material, Shepherd uses methodologies of ritual, trance, enactment and prediction as means of visualisation; the intuitive and unknowing are decision-making tools. The act of painting and the painted are where the intuitive is constructed into the concrete, a process of revelation through the act of making. Although seemingly of a very personal nature the finished outcomes are made as universal cyphers that act upon the audience; wider social; historical; cultural; political readings float to the surface. Through his lines of enquiry, painting becomes a scrying tool akin to water, reflection, surface and depth are synthesised through the mediating act of painting.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with written contributions by Professor Gavin Parkinson, Tim Russell and a commissioned poem by Miranda Peake. A public discussion between Parkinson and Shepherd on insights garnered in the creation of Downstream took place at the gallery during Frieze week London, drawing an international audience. Ongoing insights into the methodologies and context of the research were questioned through meetings and discussion with publication contributors, resulting in a joint conference paper at Painting Now at the Royal Academy, London (June 2018) and book chapter Dominic Shepherd and Richard Waring, ‘Head, Heart, Hand: Painting in a Post-Digital World’. Painting Now’, which was linked to the Black Mirror Research Network, of which Shepherd is a founding member.