It’s May the 5th and I’m up late updating my website. It’s all about my solo exhibition now, so much to do, many people to liaise with regarding the gallery. The last month in the build up to a show has little to do with making the work and I’m glad I started a month before this. This is a big one! The gallery have dropped an extra (large) gallery room last minute…it’s ok. I’m not turning out the lights in that room, I have work, I just have to get it into an exhibition state. Pressure and opportunity on.
The exhibition opening is on 20th May 6-8.30pm.
I have a week to hang the show and once up I will have installation shots taken which I will duly add to my website. On 23rd May there will be a live online ‘in conversation’ event with Mark Halliday which will be edited afterwards to include Welsh subtitles and available for replay online the Elysium Gallery website and on my Youtube channel (yes really, I have a channel!)
Below is an Official Exhibition Invitation.
About the exhibition
Silence - The Messenger And The Metaphor has grown over five years and there are four main parts to the exhibition.
I think of the flat panel paintings as portals in present time, to timelessness and infinite possibility, to oceanic states. In the main painting room I have included fragments of text from Notebooks Of Eurydice by late painter Partou Zia, a text I has been ‘in conversation’ with throughout the project. (1)
The two installation pieces, Forest and Shape Shifter - Bird Lover, have grown from a context of painting but they're in that realm of time and space, where the viewer can walk through, become a part of the work. It can create a sentient experience. Forest, a hanging canvas installation has a mass to it, yet you can enter, get body to body with it, find different view-points and become a part of it. It's like an immersion in an environment where for example, there is no horizon line in particular, there is sensation and hopefully connection. Cloth has so much inherent potential, so I've hung them together or made clothes or put them on a line - the washing line for me evokes a domestic safe space, a place of timelessness, meditation and potential.
The final room shows collage of painted botanical colour on paper or panel with Moon Drawings. These photographic drawings I make during a full moon, using a long exposure with the moon as a light source.
Part of the process is working with seasons and cycles, of nature and of my own. Some processes take days, weeks or months even, and in that, there is a deeper sense of time. .
(1) Several years ago, painter Richard Cook, in Newlyn, Cornwall, gave me a copy of the manuscript (since part published in a compendium) by his late wife, Persian painter, Partou Zia. It has been a companion, a conversation, over the last few years. I have found it beautiful and profound, of a kind of truth and of human experience. I also found that it has helped deepen my understanding of my own work. The similarities of approach to practice and the sacred drew me to want to collaborate with it - Zia lived by the sea and its magic, light and energy come out clearly in her work.
In the mean time, here is a little taster for you - I mentioned a studio documentary in my last newsletter - it will also be screened during the exhibition. The documentary was made by film-maker and actor Huw Novelli. He had three cameras with him including a drone and I think he’s done a great job in capturing the space and making sense of it all. He was also really nice to work with.
Do let me know your thoughts on all of this, your feedback is always appreciated.