SHO4:
Crescent Arts Studio Holders' Exhibition 2004
An exhibition from May 11th to June 26th
Tuesday to Saturday 10 - 1pm & 2 - 5pm
Free Admission
Every two years Crescent Arts holds an Exhibition to showcase the work of its resident Studio Holders.
Artists showing work are:
PATRICK BURKE
My work is always on the move, searching – constantly inquiring into reality and calling it into question. To question my own self our retched history – the suffering of the innocent. I use the means of painting on canvas to transcend the medium to create a vehicle, thus transcend my reality into physical. Line and colour begin to take on an independent existence. Lines break away creating dynamism and setting up rhythms, which act and interact across the surface. Colour alone expresses form. In terms of flat planes parallel to the picture surface, hovering in a indeterminate space. Objects and landscapes are no longer lit from an outside source: the light comes from the colour itself, vivid spectrums refresh the senses move with internal freedom, without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world.
My work is influenced by intimate human emotions, the paintings of Mark Wroth, the Words of Anne Frank, and the amazing energy we call life.
Studio4site@yahoo.com
DAWN BROOKS: Concealed Forms
These prints are preliminary studies for an ongoing project inspired by the process of pregnancy. The metamorphosis of the body form echoes my own fascination with the relationship between the physical and psychological. Mental states and experiences are rarely reflected within our own physical shape. Pregnancy is an example of how an event can mould our material being. The employment of line functions as a tool to tentatively explore the fragility of human life and inner vulnerability.
squid70@hotmail.com
ANDREW CHEETHAM
My Artwork consists of figurative paintings and drawings. It could be described as documentary, in that I prefer to paint and draw the subjects from life, ie. "in the field". In the past I have been interested in the decaying centres of Industry and Commerce, such as Liverpool and Manchester, the grandeur and the dramatic beauty that I find in the physical remains of their Industrial past. Working from subject matter including derelict warehouses, burned out churches and disused railway lines I try to convey the majesty of decay. I have been drawn to the Coastline around Scarborough in the same way. The ceaseless action of the waves eroding the cliffs creates a landscape where the land seems to be tumbling into the sea. I am also working on a project to document the Scarborough Fishing Industry – an Industry currently suffering major decline. This project has been aided by the award of a grant from Yorkshire Art.
andrew_cheetham@hotmail.com
RACHEL HOWFIELD
I see creative practise as a tool for change, for shifting our sense of reality and making space for new possibilities.
- a means of opening up, and moving through, our own experiences.
- a means of nurturing the little bit in all of us that thinks ‘there must be more than this’.
If we can creatively imagine new structures of existence we can change our experience and our world.
We Make Freedom
This piece of work started as a private cathartic experience with no intention of ever exhibiting the results. I was reflecting on the changes that have taken place in my life in the last seven years, and the relationship between my private world and the world at large. The project gradually changed emphasis as I considered that the concerns that preoccupy me are relevant to everyone the world over.
The piece comprises of a flattened and stitched body cast, made seven years ago during my pregnancy with my daughter Isis. The hemp paper body cast is framed in a soft blanket of handmade felt.
The body cast of my pregnant torso is now old, defunct, a relic of a time gone by. It has changed shape, as does the skin on our bodies, recording a thousand actions and experiences.
"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the palimpsest so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille." Jeanette Winterson.
The fleece blanket both supports and frames the body cast, and provides a safe nourishing environment for new experiences to take hold. The old skin has been put to bed. The felt holds the seeds of new thoughts, new processes that spiral through our lives, never to be answered but always providing a drive.
As for us all, our life experiences raise more questions than they answer. You are invited to respond to some of these questions, to share your ideas with others, to open an arena for positive change.
rachel@rachelhowfield.net
WENDY TATE
To me painting is a process of standing in front of a bare canvas, vulnerable and totally exposed, following some deep heart felt cry that needs expression. On display here is my way of rationalising the range of responses I have had whilst coming to terms with the loss of my unborn baby girl, Hope. To me the biggest privilege of making art is that we are able to create worlds in which we want to exist, and one day, God willing, I will.
Wendy@curtis.go-plus.net
HELEN DONNELLY
My paintings are inspired by landscape of my close environment. My aim is to explore the different ways of expressing the moods and feelings that the landscape evokes by capturing the spatial atmospheric qualities in the shifting movements of light and colour and shape.
Helend74@hotmail.com
SARA ADAMS
Initially I found myself drawn back to the jumble of alleyways and back- yards from where I grew up. I drew inspiration from the disparate, compositionally disjointed collection of images found hidden behind any ordinary street. Like my childhood memories, some yards were shiny, well kept and clean, some were a run-down tumbled mess. I began to explore the parallels between human, psychological decay and displacement, and exterior physical decay, drawing further inspiration from ruined abbeys and derelict buildings. I began to work toward using these sources as my central artistic metaphor. Using paper-clay, wire and mesh I have been attempting to piece together the fragile, crumbling, displaced physical architecture of my own past against a quiet, inner, personal strength which seems somehow to be informed by the very same thing.
saraadams@exite.com
CATHERINE GRAHAM
Through my work I explore the architecture of my surroundings. The canvas frame of reference allows me the ability to edit what I see into the horizontal and vertical. Therefore giving me the ability to idealise my surroundings through formalism.
Interior spaces have cubic depth and play against the flatness of pattern through line.
This play, also realised through colour and tone, provokes memory and association. I seek a universal language connected to spaces in which we have dreamed and imagined. Aspects of the interior are often metaphors for psychological processes.
Caffig@hotmail.com
The Studio Holders are normally busy running the gallery in voluntary hours, holding workshops, selecting and hanging work for the gallery exhibition programme. So this is an opportunity to see the art that the Studio Holders themselves produce.
The Exhibition promises to be an exciting range of media and styles, including painting, sculpture, ceramics and textiles.
Preview: Saturday 8th May from 7.30 - 9pm
For more information please call The Crescent Arts Exhibition Team: Patrick Burke, Dawn Brooks, Andrew Cheetham
For exhibition related events see the calendar
