Inside technique, attempts at expression

Sophia Ainslie matches flat passages of color against coursing gestures in India ink in her drawings at Kingston Gallery. These pieces have imperative and agency: They slither and pool, they cut against the white background. Ainslie’s artist statement is reserved — she lets on that the work was put together from sources such as an X-ray, Google Earth maps of Johannesburg, and photos and sketches inspired by her walks in New England. You can see the landscape in her abstractions: The flat passages read like land masses on a map, and the ink drawings portray a more direct and emotional involvement with the landscape, recalling bark, roots, grass, and water.

But art historian Karen Kurczynski, in the show’s catalog essay, provides more background. The color elements are abstractions of fragments of an X-ray of the artist’s mother’s abdomen, taken while she was dying of cancer. The colors Ainslie chooses — browns, blues, oranges, greens — are her own associations to places, such as her native South Africa and Ireland.

So these become maps of loss and the connections that remain, landscapes of grief, which cross time and space. In appropriating the X-ray, Ainslie turns a record of her mother’s decline into something in her own language, something she can master and perhaps better comprehend.

Should a viewer need to know an artwork’s backstory in order to grasp its power? No. A drawing or a painting should stand on its own. I read the catalog essay after I saw the show, so I can say that Ainslie’s works do. “Fragment-J’’ features streams of inky gestures rushing from the central form down and to the right. That flat-toned center is a winglike structure of reddish browns surrounding a flat, shield-like element in orange and blue. The whole looks almost figural, like a posturing samurai. The brash color swatches and the fluid ink marks play push-pull games with the viewer. The largest works here are 5-by-6-feet. I would like to see something even more sprawling, even more like a landscape.