Childhood Memory

 

6th December 2008 – Gallery Opening Show

A collection of artworks by mothers, daughters and sons, highlighting and exploring the differing relationships between mothers and their children.

Childhood and Memories exhibition is celebrating the bond between parent and child, with timeless memories in our minds. The show presents a fusion between different generations of drawings, from parenthood nostalgia, childhood drama through playfully executed moments in time.

The exhibition featured installation by Shian Dora, sculpture by Vera Kovacevska, video clips of fading memories by Snezana Jovanovska, Poem of truth written by Georgia Lewis, Mosaic Plaque by Emma and Reuben Marzalek Gittens, Striking Photography by Cynthia Picard, Sound Mix by Gregory and Neo Mano Epps.

SUMMER TIME LIFE DRAWRING

Lead by Chelsea artist and gallerist Simon Tarrant, the workshops place a strong emphasis on the variety of different models studied. The works on display thus reflect this eclectic approach, exploring the diversity of the human anatomy, indiscriminative of age, race and gender.

A Brief History of History Painting

A Brief History of History Painting focuses on key work by the artist. Faceless figures are seen floating or falling between opposing realms. The poetics of the painting imply that, rather than the specific narrative of an individual, this is the metaphor of a wider human condition.

The exhibition does not look to tie De Freston’s work down to a singular creative vision or painterly type. Instead it embraces diversity, with a firm belief that the works will strike up conversations between themselves, which will be more insightful and accurate than any imposed synopsis.

Other figures (Lovers Discourse) are seen acrobatically flinging themselves across ambiguous stages. The eroticism of their gymnastic energy suggest a mournful dance to an absent other. The melodrama of their plight moves the images towards tragic comedy. Its excessiveness leads us beyond pity. Any pity we do feel is perhaps more aligned to the emptiness and the emotional display.

In Fast Judgement a ‘Welcomer’ draws us in to become spectators of some apocalyptic scene of falling forms. The heroic masculinity of the ‘Welcomer’ is stripped down by his outfit of vibrant boxers and socks. They seem to emasculate him, belying his serious nature and turning him into a figure of ridicule. Along with colouration it seems that emotive oppositions are consciously set up in the image.

Open Entry exhibition-October 2009

 

Studio 106 Open

8- 23 October 2009

Open entry exibition

Studio 106 Arts Gallery first open exhibition. Displaying the work of six artists working in the UK, the exhibition brought together a range of contemporary approaches to painting. Having collectively exhibited in many of the UK’s major art centers, these artists share a fascination with the natural world and its depiction in the painterly surface.  Presenting images of varying degrees of abstraction, the exhibition offered a series of works that are alive with colour and vivacity, providing insights into the relationship between nature, memory and process.

Caroline Cary

Caroline Cary’s work draws on a ‘vast mental archive of images’ generated from years of landscape painting.  Although such work is the starting point for her current painting, her primary concern is to create images that inspire in viewers a heightened awareness of the visual world. Concerned with the relationship between art and music, Cary manipulates colour to create abstract paintings that communicate with often disarming immediacy.

Mary Crenshaw

Drawing inspiration from the natural world, Mary Crenshaw creates paintings that sparkle with vivacious energy.  ‘My imagery comes from memory’ she says, and ‘letting the paint take over’.  Researching plants from her immediate surroundings, close observation is transformed by a dynamic gestural style to evoke enticing visions of the world around us.

Dawn Latham

Dawn Latham is a local artist who makes landscape paintings with an evocative, nostalgic atmosphere. Reminiscent of scenes from childhood holidays, their palette muted by the passing of time, the images are dream-like. Hovering uncertainly in real space, they act as catalysts for memory and imaginative reflection.

Rhonda Whitehead

Nature is the primary source for Rhonda Whitehead’s paintings.  Whether depicting organic form on a microcosmic scale, or the actions of nature on the built environment, her collected works represents a kind of visual biography of continuous landscapes. Revealing patterns and surfaces that are ‘as marked and ambiguous as nature’s chaotic, yet quietly integrative and biotic processes’, these colourful and seductive paintings remind us of the primacy of nature, seeking to capture the universal, ‘the mind that exists in all matter’.

Thomas Williams

Thomas Williams creates what he calls ‘deformed paintings’. These abstract images are created through a complex process in which gestural brush strokes are transformed into biomorphic swathes of glistening colour.

Claire Wiltsher

Working from what she describes as a ‘rich catalogue of ephemera’ gathered from her journeys around the world, Claire Wiltshire seeks to evoke the energy and atmosphere of places she visits. Concerned with the relationship between abstracted image and the imagination, Claire Wiltshire describes her work as the ‘culmination of thoughts, feelings and the tangible objects that accompany living in unknown fields’.