Richard Porter: Night Glyph

In his first solo show, Night Glyph, multidisciplinary artist Richard Porter presents a body of work comprising oil painting and sculpture. Together they form an interlocked network of energy systems and symbols, collected and gathered in the artist’s studio over the course of the last year.Inspired by Buddhist teachings of ‘emptiness’ and ‘non-attachment’, Porter’s work explores a desire for truth and cosmic equilibrium through various processes that prioritise stillness and care.

Gestures on canvas move between empty space, energy lines and symbolic forms, such as candles and birds’ nests. Porter draws from a myriad of pagan, Buddhist and Hindu symbols, and their relationship to the natural world. In one painting, flowers fall from a dark hole in the sky. In another, tremulous lines of vivid colour encompass and contain a field of emptiness. The alignment of these symbols does not point to a particular dogma, but rather posits mystical representations of what cannot be known through his own assembled ecology of symbols.

The sculptures combine a number of intricate processes which Porter says helps “attune” him to their final appearance, which is not something known from the outset.