Artwork Information

In Wide meshed nets, 2024 Milli Jannides takes inspiration from British non-fiction writer Robert MacFarlane’s book Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019) which explores the world beneath our feet, through the myth, literature and the geology of subterranean spaces. Jannides derives interest in McFarlane’s discussion of matter that both passes through the human body, into the earth, and into the deep underground. MacFarlane describes this concept of the interconnectedness of matter from a scientific point of view creating a strong image of our physical interrelationship with Earth at a cellular level. In Underland, a scientist interviewed by McFarlane describes our bodies as ‘wide meshed nets and the cliffs we are walking on are nets too’, reflecting that if we understood this, it would change our perception of matter and of what matters. Jannides titles this, the most significant of the works in her recent exhibition, Wide meshed nets, and uses the range of abstract painted space, colour and even a hint towards a cliff’s edge to describe the concept of interconnectedness through tonal shifts. The colour of the painting is at once luminous and ethereal, reminiscent of painting mentor Frances Hodgkins’ use of abstract colour to imply impression rather than known or real space.