Deb Covell - Quicksilver
“Deb Covell makes paint into three dimensional objects. Her works are still paintings, but they inhabit the world of sculpture. She starts by building up layer upon layer of paint on top of clear plastic sheets. She eventually peels the backing off, leaving only the acrylic paint, usually in a square or rectangular shape but often quite large as in her Silver Drape.“ (Petry, Mirror Mirror: the reflective surface in contemporary art, 2025)
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Petry included Covell’s work in his current Thames & Hudson book as it presents a completely different way of using paint as a material, and as a reflective surface. Her method of making allows her to create a maliable fabric of only paint that can then be draped as if it were velvet. It is also as visually and texturally seductive. Her large Silver Drape is over five meters long and has been draped in different ways in every location it has been shown, as well as in her new exhibition at MOCA London.
Covell works with gravity, allowing it to alter the form her works take after she has cut and folded them into shapes that she considers ready to employ. Covell revels in the physicality of the paint, she enjoys the rupture to our psyche when we see what should be two dimensional in three. She makes a dialogue between her paintings and their surroundings. The work often shimmers in the light from their base colour (silver) and her use of high gloss finishes.
Quicksilver brings together four of her works “all made from silver acrylic paint skins, formed using a systematic, intuitive and playful yet discerning process to give the forms a feeling of liquid mercurial states.” The works will include Silver Drape - a sheet of sliver paint suspended from the ceiling with beautiful cascading ripples of paint, which barely touch the floor. Silver Flux 1 and 2 are both wall based works whose right angled folds give way to freer floating unfixed forms that lean away from the wall into the gallery space. The final Silver work Silver Bloom is arguably the most sculptural on display, as it is strong in form but paradoxically touches on the formless through an ‘undoing’ brought about by its silver reflective surface and the movement of the viewer as they walk round it.
All the works are caught in the act of ‘becoming’ - a non-fixed, suspended state. They all have a sensual and seductive inbuilt quality which has ‘the intention of awakening the senses through an alchemical, material transformation’.
