This capsule collection will provide a visual overview of the gallery roster and serve as a taster for the ongoing exhibition programme at their gallery overlooking the cathedral in Wells, Somerset.
About the artists
Emily Allchurch (UK). In the words of the Financial Times’ photography critic, Francis Hodgson, Emily Allchurch “has made herself a specialist in a kind of extreme collage.” Her starting point may be an old master painting by Bruegel, one of Piranesi’s prints of imaginary prisons or one of Hiroshige’s sublime Views of Edo. Using hundreds if not thousands of photographs, always taken herself in appropriate, yet present-day urban environments, she digitally recreates these masterpieces. However, her seamless collages are never slavish copies; that is not the intention. Rather Allchurch reasserts, sometimes even subverts, contemporary life and culture by means of its re-evaluation through the template of past masters.
Jeffrey Blondes (US). Originally a landscape painter, Blondes’ last 15 years have been devoted to making high definition films ranging in length (to date) from 9 to 104 hours. The preoccupation of these films is the point at which landscape and time meet. (This will make sense to anyone familiar with his painting as his primary instinct has always been to watch, wait and record en plein air the subtleties of nature at play in any given landscape). As Drs Bray and Ede observed in their essay on his work: “Although Blondes is still the mediator…, film provides [the viewer] with such direct exposure to his subject that it is as though a veil has been lifted. Nature has essentially been brought inside our domestic space and because we see landscape out of its normal context, the viewer is even more acutely aware of it. Watching the films, time seems to pass inexorably slowly with the effect that one is transfixed when at last we see some movement in the landscape.”
Keiron Leach (UK). Living and working in north Devon, Leach’s work is decidedly rooted in that landscape. His tiny intense yet exquisite drawings in Indian ink and wash are the visual equivalent of haiku poetry, celebrating the wooded hills and valleys that border Exmoor and the weather and light that bathe them.
Georgia Moors (UK). The work of Georgia Moors allies technical virtuosity with an intense scrutiny of her subject. Her engagement with that subject – usually inanimate, plucked flora, from root to flower - will often last many months, the finished work slowly being built up layer by layer, mark by mark. She may be seen as a worthy heir to a small, quiet tradition of British artists who have engaged with the natural world at its most fundamental, from Nathaniel Bacon to Eliot Hodgkin.
Magnus Petersson (Sweden). Petersson takes his inspiration from his immediate surroundings, living as he does for much of the year amid the vast forests that swathe Sweden. He also has a summer house on the southern Swedish coast and his work beautifully evokes both landscapes across all the seasons. As one might expect, light - and sometimes the lack of it - suffuse his paintings. Although largely - though not exclusively - expressed through the medium of watercolour, his work can clearly be seen as following in the rich tradition of Scandinavian artists - and perhaps most akin to the great Harald Sohlberg - in celebrating the inimitable landscape that surrounds him.
Jenny Pockley (UK). Pockley established her reputation with paintings of monumental cityscapes where the structures and shapes of urban sprawl are seen in diffused or minimal light. More recently, she has begun to focus on the more natural, if not less monumental, phenomena of landscape: mountains, sea and sky. Her paintings, even the cityscapes, are generic attempts at rendering the sublime, the ethereal, by means of thin layers of oil paint emanating from perfect surfaces and endowing them with intrinsic luminosity. The resulting paintings teeter on the verge of colour-field abstraction, with clear nods to Rothko, Richter and perhaps even Turrell, hinting at the fragility of our environment, urban or otherwise.
Graham Rich (UK). An artist with a passion for boats since the age of ten, Graham Rich has long recycled the random wood and boat fragments that he collects during voyages along the coasts of Devon and Cornwall. Ranging from large scale installations to small intimate panels, he uses marine paint and scratching out to fashion atmospheric and totemic work, that brood on our complex relationship with the sea. Often dwarfed against a backdrop of sea-worn paint and the marks left by maritime use, his carved motif of small sailing boats serve as symbols of hope and struggle against tribulation.
Gill Rocca (UK). Gill Rocca’s imagined landscapes are fleeting figments that seem to allude to some kind of hidden narrative. Devoid of human presence yet anchored by the familiarity of the glow of streetlights or markings on a road, her paintings have a brooding aura and are rendered with quiet skill. We all have those connections to a place or places, be it from our childhood, a particular journey or even from a film, a painting, a photograph or envisaged from a book; Rocca is, in a sense, subliminally realising those places for us, stirring the recollections.
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Rocca’s practice is her use of birch ply tondos or roundels in her ongoing Figment series. While the philosophical and aesthetic properties of a circle are well established, for Rocca the form accentuates the liminal space between her intentions and what subconsciously emerges during the process of painting. The tondos – and indeed all the paintings – are meticulously layered with thin coats of gesso and sanded back prior to the application of multiple layers of thin oil glazes that slowly and gradually build up the image. For many years, she has deliberately restricted her palette to just 5 colours, including white; all the forms, all the luminosity, dusk, dawn, the trees, headlights, street lamps rendered with extraordinary dexterity from 5 key pigments.
Richard John Seymour (UK). Richard John Seymour is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. His work in both mediums is concerned with documenting “the anomalous architectures, curious urbanism and altered landscapes of our rapidly changing world”. For his latest body of work, Landsat Works, five years in its gestation, Seymour re-examined the streams of imagery beamed down from the satellite Landsat 8, which, since its launch in 2013, has proved a vital tool enabling mineral prospectors, amongst others, to interpret the Earth’s surface in unprecedented detail, specifically its data in the non-visible bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. The raw images are B&W and Seymour has rigorously applied RGB to these non-visible frequencies, co-opting conventional false-colour imaging techniques to transform this public domain data into glorious large-scale tapestries that aim to highlight the invisible, remind us of omnipresent control of the ‘technological gaze’ above us and reiterate the breath-taking beauty and variety of the planet’s landscape.
