Starting with an idea of position, Three Miles references an inscription, carved into an inconspicuous mile stone on Denmark Hill: “3 Miles from The Treasury, Whitehall; 3 Miles from the Standard, Cornhill”. Whilst quoting the marker primarily aims at highlighting the artists’ shared provenance of studying Painting at Camberwell College of Art, the title also speaks to distance as a method and as a critical stance within their work.

With traditional forms of painting once again taking up a dominant place in London galleries and the activity surrounding them, it has become crucial for painters entering the scene to consider their positioning to this activity. Painting becomes a game of proxemics, where three miles may have offered a helpful buffer: being set away from the rapidly revolving exhibitions of central London, these artists have had opportunity to think through painting by focusing on a rigorous practice and dialogue with each other. Whilst their respective approaches may often hark back to modernist concerns, such as the materiality of paint as a subject in itself and the obscurity of narrative, their treatment of these concerns situates itself firmly in relation to contemporary concerns of the dominance of media and resulting pace of information exchange.

Across the seven artists, pace is used as a method to put distance between themselves and these contemporary concerns. Each approaches painting with a slow and deliberate relationship to the material of paint, applying it to a surface in order to betray its physical qualities. It is a frank and honest way of engaging with image-making, one that does not lean on the seduction of illusion. Equally, as the nature of image production is changed by the development of digital media technologies, the declaration of the tangibility of painting - as a substance, as object, as a method - becomes increasingly politicised. The pace of making becomes a tool to give painting distance away from an otherwise image-saturated world.