Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Burnt Milk and Honey'
Vivien McDermid
4th - 21st April 2024
PV Drinks Wednesday 3rd April 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Gallery opening hours: Wed - Sun | 11am - 6pm

ARTIST TALK with Vivien McDermid in conversation with Ocki, Blue Shop Galleries Director on Instagram LIVE from Blue Shop Cottage, London to Edinburgh, Scotland. Join us live or catch up later. Saturday 20th April 3-4pm on Instagram. Follow us @blueshopgalleries.

Vivien McDermid (b.1981) is a painter based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She graduated with a degree in fashion design from Edinburgh College of Art in 2005 and began to paint after the birth of her first child in 2007. In recent years she has exhibited in group and duo exhibitions but ‘Burnt Milk and Honey’ is her first solo show.

McDermid describes painting as the language in which she feels she can most fluently communicate and untangle the experiences of being human. For her, the act of painting is a continual strengthening of the bridge which joins the inner and external worlds. 

She explains “Painting often feels to me like a kind of excavation or an unburying of something lost. I dig for what might be tangible within my compulsive daydreams. I like to feel as though I’m unearthing something precious;  something that is all at once mysterious and familiar”.  Taste, bite and colour are often the starting points for new work: Sour sweets, candles, lichen, a glare of autumn sun, glowing flowers in the window of a dark room.  

"I first discovered the work of Vivien McDermid in late 2021 just as the idea for our brand new two storey gallery was born. Vivien travelled down from Edinburgh to see the space in November 2022 just as we were opening the doors and, sitting in the sunlit garden of Van Gogh Café, we discussed the idea of her solo show. Vivien is an artist and a mother so we excitedly scheduled the show for Spring 2024. The work is drenched with femininity, our relationship with the home, and how recurring 'things' seem to embody one's own feelings and place in their own life. Take the untethered birthday balloon - its vulnerability to combustion contrasts with its own symbolism from a happy childhood. These works visually tackle and address McDermid's manoeuvre into motherhood so sensitively and sweetly. She commented on the theme of being a newborn's mother: "No more of the ceaseless daydreaming that had become my habit. A whole other person to keep alive leaves no time for reverie. She grabbed me with her tiny doll-hand and pulled me back down to earth again and again. If I want to be a good mother I need to start building a bridge between my inner and outer existence." McDermid's internal dialogue is painted in every work and the paintings are rich in feeling, drenched in warmth and light with a few recurring dark looming figures and some naughty little critters to keep us guessing." - Ocki, Blue Shop Gallery Director

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Burnt Milk and Honey by Vivien McDermid

I found you deep in December        

In your darkest subsoil chamber.

Wet rags and iridescent fish skin torch.

Chewing old roots and sour jelly snakes,

Spinning a shiny paper plate.   

You had a beastly, lithospheric hunger

For a glug of shale, a drag of gas.

But I found you sucking luminous resin,

Sipping only turpentine and tree sap

From a crumpled plastic cup. 

You were digging for bedrock,

For certainty and breeze blocks  

with a deep unquenched mineral thirst.

But you were chipping only gravel,

From an impossible gritty mass.

You cursed and kicked 

Your broken pickaxe, rusty drill - no socket

And stabbed at stone with a blunt and buckled knife.

You bit down hard into the earth's crust, 

Cracked teeth, spat blood and sugar.

But I saw your rainbow-sprinkled wish smoke.

It gathered like a stormcloud around your temples

A muted, multicoloured vapour.

It hung around the ceiling of your chamber

Then spiralled upwards through hard-packed clay.

It smouldered up through crumbled earth,

Through powdered cinnamon dirt

Sinking mouse bones, cat skulls,

Charred bird bones and silt       

And rose above the mossy floor.

It flooded out into the pink-dusk forest,

Through ancient, tangled undergrowth 

In twisted carbon spindles,

Past tiny silver balls and pastel flowers,

Wax-bark and wick-twigs.

It danced with candle branches

And scribbled circles

Around shivering birds.   

Then swam away with sunset ribbons

Into the winter lemonade sky.