‘X Marks the Spot’
Exhibition: Saturday 1st to Sunday 30th April 2017
Open: 09th – 17th 11AM – 6PM
28th – 30th (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), 12 noon until 5pm.
Open at other times by appointment.
Canwood Gallery, Checkley, Hereford, HR1 4NF www.canwoodgallery.org
Exhibition by Hereford College of Arts second year students.
Artists include:
Ellen Audrey
My subject matter is nature: I try to merge the cosmopolitan world we have designed with the effortless beauty of the Earth. I use traditional materials such as inks and watercolours to capture the essence of both worlds as well as handmade collages and photography.
I believe it is fundamental to understand that for us to develop and flourish we must learn not take for granted all the things gifted to us by mother-nature. My work captures the opulence of our ever changing nature and the splendour of the unforgiving natural world.
My work is designed to inspire and pay tribute to the natural world and to also remind us to slow down and reconnect with nature. As forms become transformed into surreal images both worlds blend together to create bizarre imagery.
I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction.
Rachel Barnett
The common themes explored throughout my work are family and loss, these themes are portrayed using a variety of different mediums, i.e 2D Chalk/Charcoal and most recently Screen printing. The works I produce are personal works, that focuses primarily on the loss of my stillborn twin brother and through my Artwork I am able to heal the turmoil and emptiness I feel regarding an event I wasn’t aware of until I was much older. Experiencing a loss of someone close to me that I never knew and feeling a strong bond, inspired the idea of a ‘self healing process’; which enables me to express how I feel about a theme that most don’t understand. The work I create should evoke the viewer to want to know more, so pushing the boundaries to where my work can go is my goal to for the future.
Richard Branczik
Searching for Bell’s Significant Form.
Sandy Brooks
There are buried treasures that lie deep within the heart of my work. They are the precious memories that form the very essence of the landscapes I create.
From this trove of delights I merge the love of the land with my surreal, anthropomorphic figures. They represent those that I have known, loved and lost. With this visual monograph I add a touch of myth and fantasy, the spirits of which I hope to capture within my abstracts depicted in both paint and sculpture. I create what I feel. I work with emotion. I draw from my senses. I look for the sublime.
I have discovered that there are many crossroads in life from which there are many unpredictable pathways. Each pathway scars the landscape, leaving indelible marks that remind us of our mortality, our past, our future and our interaction with the world around us. We leave a footprint.
Roger Fuller
Various interpretations of landscape drive me forward with experimentation. Oil, acrylic and lustres on differing substrates produce infinite variation. A seeking spirit and a deep love of my work reward me with delightful emotion.
Kate Green
I am a short lady with dark hair.
Kate Harvey
My work is rooted in landscape. It is an expression of emotion, mood and thought. The creative process starts with walking, observation, photography and collection of found objects. I see drawing as thinking and recreating towards an abstracted image.
I use objects, both natural and manmade as metaphor for self expression and objects for contemplation. I am interested in the relationship between landscape and the human form, and the impact of man on the landscape as well as the power of nature to reclaim the manmade.
My recent work has been a response to the idea of transformation, decay and regeneration as an expression of loss and grief.
As well as the traditional mediums of charcoal, ink and acrylic paint, I have been exploring the use of found materials borrowed from the landscape.
Ali Hughes
Inspired greatly by the landscape, and the shapes of forms within it, I seek to express this through my interactions with natural found objects, often subjecting my materials to a process of change, bringing about a new identity and vision.
Contrasting light with shadow and the sense of drama to be found in chiaroscuro is compelling to me, and the creation of illusion as a way of expressing our spatial and temporal existence within the landscape is a particular fascination.
Much of my work strives to combine emotion and exploration of self, through immersion in locations where history and memory are strongly experienced; in ancient sites and landscapes, and through materials which have already felt the passing of time and the process of decay or disintegration.
Joe Jackson
I am an artist who likes to work with a number of different techniques. My main motivation comes from my photography, work taken in the many outdoor places that I explore to get inspiration. From my photographs I create drawings often in black and white in my sketchbook and then find ways of applying them to materials such as glass, mirror, clay or whatever I feel can be a challenge.
I try to experiment with new techniques so I can continue to grow as an artist and photographer. This is also so I can come out with the best effects for the artworks that I create. My outcomes depend on what I create, whether it is a message to get across or something that is pleasing to the eye. I treat each piece of art uniquely.
Lady Mel
Working with the world’s natural resource of clay, the primary elements, earth, water and air combine into being a synthesis of discrete substances which fuse into an amalgam of unique potential. The remaining element of fire takes the malleable material and renders it into an immutable material which is rigid and remains fixed in a state of fragility. The process and end results reflect for me that of life itself and become anthropomorphically charged.
This work came about as a direct result of playful experimentation with beetroot during a game invented with my young niece. The vessel I have made, titled ‘Beetroot 7’, symbolises this interaction, beetroot red and the core is accented in vibrant gold. The adornment of the vessel has been determined by a process of application distilled from the essence of creative play. Any flaws have also been highlighted suggesting a natural equivalence between imperfection and essence of experience.
Omar Majeed
Frank Wilczek the physicist said in one of his talks that if fish developed language and extended their consciousness, they would start reflecting on their existence, and their interpretation of a void would be reminiscent of water, just as our concept of void mimics air. I am interested in that limbo space between being and non-being. It is a place where one might hypothetically want to retreat to: neither oblivion or painful self-awareness.
What would this liminal space be like as a geography? What is the architecture of emptiness? Is it possible to recreate a space that is literally ethereal? This work is part of an ongoing investigation into the unknown, the depths that can be glimpsed through the unconscious. I hope this extravegance can be forgiven, for if it is an ambitious goal, I believe it is a worthwhile one.
David Saunders
I burgle language. Breaking and entering through its ambiguities and idiosyncrasies, taking inspiration for a work through a re-construct of meaning, I create works that have an altered, sometimes ironic, existence.
I like to play: quietly pick-pocketing my way through a world where there’s always much more to see than that which meets the eye. Gently eviscerating meaning and concept to reveal an unseen; my work is about otherness, about that which sits beneath conventionally accepted understandings.
I select subject matter and materials that have the potential to say something other. The intention is to involve you in the process of making. If you are, when you are, the piece is no longer something you look at: the piece becomes something you create for yourself inside your head.
Susan Stevens-Jenkins
I am a woman of a certain age.
Drawing on my life experiences, engaging with my surroundings and the rhythms hidden within, I use photography to give a glimpse of a story, inviting viewers to engage their imaginations and weave their own tales.
I manipulate found objects before placing them out of their usual context, aiming to produce surreal but insightful images.
Colour is an important component of my work and even in the mainly monochromatic images there will often be something unexpected.
Importantly, the door in the photographs was a real one, painted red and physically hauled into the landscape. Presented as a triptych, they represent stages of my life when seeming endings have paradoxically been new beginnings, and I invite the viewer to draw their own parallels.
Richard Vine
The compositions shown have an autobiographical presence in time past and time present.
An history realised by integrating imagery whether appropriated ephemera from his extensive collection or his own crafted silk screens.
Ever the pattern maker but here the repetition of the printed image implies rhythm – the beat of time remembered – a time once related to personal location and state.
There is an emergence and a disappearance, the twin phenomena of time itself regarded as a passage.
Time follows time to be inconclusive and dissolved in memory.
An image or text can trigger a resurrection.
Left to the viewer, the past to the present will be in their belief.
Time, after time.
Anna Ward
In these works I explore issues of belonging. Farming, being prevalent in Herefordshire, offers an interesting perspective. Farmers I have spoken with describe themselves as guardians, continuing a lineage that is as much a responsibility, as a reward. Looking at farming raised questions as to whether it is to ‘what’ or to ‘whom’ we belong.
Justine-Diane Winter
‘Using Dark and twisted material as inspiration, such as death and the macabre; I create eccentric and individual pieces to try and make the audience look beyond the piece and to think about the story behind it.
These three pieces are a portrayal of the mental effects of abortion. Each one is slightly different in that the figure gradually gets lighter. This is a representation of the emotional scarring that lingers after the abortion itself.
The title – ‘Termination’
Naomi Wood
Art has often helped me express myself when I was otherwise unable to. Drawing comic book style scenes of violence throughout my angerinfused teenage years became somewhat of a coping mechanism and I have continued to use art to express my many moods since.
Using a range of media I create work to express my own personal struggles with such issues as anxiety and depression.
I often use a mix of figurative illustration and abstract expressionism to convey my various mental states, as well as attempt to bring awareness to mental health and emotional wellbeing in general in the hopes of letting others know they are not alone.
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