“Nikki Hill-Smith is an abstract painter who, in the blink of an eye, can teleport her viewer from the window seat of a plane destined for some opalescent island in the sea below it to the slide of a microscope in a laboratory. Squiggles and smears; dribbles and daubs of paint simultaneously embrace optics both macro and micro so that, from the very first instance, the art and act of looking at a painting by Hill-Smith is driven by a delicious discombobulation. One that flusters the haptics of space and scale; that disturbs the dynamics of delineation and composition; and that completely confounds the very metrics of time itself. Time which we know zooms around us at the speed of light and yet, here, seems to pause and ponder a coagulation of experiences, efflorescing before our very eyes in luxurious slow-motion.

Like a familiar yet always fractured dream, offering synaptic splashes in the brooding miasma of our (sub)consciousness, Hill-Smith’s mellifluous take on both abstraction as a concept and painting as a practice is a sheer visual delight, but one that always remains intellectually charged. The viewer isn’t just captivated by her painterly fizz but is held captive by the hypotheses Hill-Smith’s paintings arrest. Those centred on the mechanics of conception and perception; the contest for comprehension and, above all else, unveiling and revelling in the simple action of painting. Hill-Smith’s work invites you on a journey, through passes and ages known and unknown – signifying and signified – offering us all the opportunity to stop and listen with our eyes to her euphonic interruption of the infinite.

Hill-Smith’s ongoing series of paintings – a body of work she refers to as Infinitely Interruptible – all begin with the same interrogation of space. Simultaneously flattened in negation to and of itself, yet modelled by a kaleidoscope of colour and movement, space evolves into a pictorial crucible that pulses in perpetual flux. Just as with the work of Wassily Kandinsky, Hill-Smith’s marks deliver a sense of space but without articulating their usual demarcators.

These paintings have no horizons; no perspective; no ‘scape to speak of. The artist somehow seems to stretch the continuum of space and time; place and tense to such a point that everything slows down on her surface. The adagio of her zippy application curiously engendering a largo of contemplation. So it is that space becomes the servant to the very act of painting itself. It doesn’t even offer a ground upon which to stand but rather a turbulence upon which Hill-Smith attempts to make her mark. Which, in turn, explains her ever-moving, always recalibrating flurries of execution. Space does not offer a stage upon which Hill-Smith choreographs in paint. Space devours. It pushes and pulls against any attempt at registration, assaulting any possible cohesion of Image and instead unleashing the euphoria and frenzy of Hill-Smith’s eddy of marks that only – can only – evince their indexical, mystical electricity”.