| Dates: | 10 March 2017 to 21 March 2017 |
| Times: | N/A |
| Email: | N/A |
10am to 5pm Tuesday to Sunday (closed Monday)
ARTIST TALK AND PREVIEW: 10th March – 5pm-6.30pm (Talks) 6.30pm – 8pm (Preview)
book your tickets for the Artist Talk here
For more information about this exhibition please contact Sally Childs, Artist/Curator Tel: 07786 674661 Email: sallychilds@gmail.com
An exhibition of 5 female artists whose practice involves the use of unusual materials in interesting ways. The exhibition is planned as part of the POW! Thanet Festival 8th – 12th March 2017, which aims to celebrate International Women’s Day on the 8th March. The exhibition will include 2 and 3 D works made from plastic, cloth, glass, metal, resin, dust, tumble dryer lint and hair.
Prior to the Preview on the 10th March, four of the participating artists will talk about their practice, starting from their early years as an emerging artist to the present day, at which point they will introduce their works on display. The talks aim to give some insights into the kind of barriers and practical solutions they have encountered as female artists, highlighting their experience with exhibiting, fund raising, artist residencies, artist studio schemes, and D.I.Y. marketing and publicity.
Sally Childs – ( www.sallychilds.weebly.com & www.curatorattransientart.weebly.com )
‘Body language – how body posture and it’s placement in space can communicate thoughts, intentions and feelings without the use of words.’
Sally is an artist and curator who worked in arts management for 11 years. Since the beginning of 2016 she began working on a new body of work, venturing into 3 dimensional form through an exploration of soft sculptured figures in cloth. She has also been working on a series of large scale acrylic paintings
“Having trained as a counsellor I have always had a fascination with the human psyche and its relationship to the body. I have recently been exploring the body as signifier of trauma, of elation, and all things in between.”
Shirley Eccles – (http://www.shirleyecclesglassartist.co.uk)
Shirley Eccles is a glass artist whose work makes use of both the fragility and strength of her medium. Her training in glass has developed out of a conceptual use of mixed media. The concepts and forms of her work draw on her exploration of history and memory.
She makes use of found objects and by translating these into glass emphasises their fragility. Where she makes use of blown glass forms – hung from meat hooks and yokes – they speak of both beauty and pain. In ‘Roads We Walk’ the pieces are composed of voids, just as our memories fill the void left by absence, so the shoe-trees fill imagined spaces.The majority of her work is kiln formed or cast glass. These techniques give her the opportunity to push the boundaries of the medium; to stretch what can be imagined in glass. In each piece the symbiosis of the materials leads to a questioning of the material reality of objects as sites of memory.
As each viewer approaches the work they bring with them their own experiences and memories; these should be juxtaposed and used to extract meaning that is relevant to them.
Flora Gare – (http://www.axisweb.org/p/floragare/)
Inspired by the elements of light and water Flora creates constructed sculptures and installations for public spaces; redefining the experience of the space for the viewer through the scale and transformation of the materials used.
The work is often site specific and references the history of the people or building it’s sited in. But I have also explored my own family history, including the generations of women, by using photographs of past family members to explore time, memory and nostalgia in original and unexpected ways The public pieces have included large scale banners suspended in a river, a chandelier made from 6000 acrylic beads and an 8m long beam of light made from stretched elastic thread.
Surface and depth are important issues in both the processes, form and meaning of the work. Most recently through pouring liquid resin and letting it take its own forms. These are then combined with stretched and compressed photographic images and suspended to engage with the gallery space. The resulting layered patterns resemble a landscape of reflected light or frozen ice.
Sally Haynes – (http://cornexchangenew.com/about/studio8)
My sculptures and drawings attempt to encourage the audience to think about plastic usage and new ways of re-cycling. Much of the tonnage of waste products sent to landfill sites everyday in the UK could be reduced or re-formed and now we have micro beads of plastic found in the sea. The unframed works are an exploration into the use of plastic as media for drawing.
Sally knits, constructs and re-uses plastic material asking us to re-look at what we consume.
Julie Parker – (http://www.axisweb.org/p/julieparker/)
Julie is a resident artist at New Greenham Arts, Newbury with a first class (Hons) degree and an MA gained at Wimbledon School of Art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and at various UK galleries.
The spaces that we inhabit and the traces that we inevitably leave are at the forefront of my practice. I use dust, tumble dryer lint and hair in my work, which is led by the materials that I am attracted to and the meanings found within them. I explore and uncover these meanings primarily through drawing, sculpture and installation.
I like to play with found and collected materials, exploring their properties and their limitations. The working methods are often repetitive and traditionally feminine such as brushing, stacking, wrapping, stitching and cutting. They are reminiscent of past traditions, time consuming and meditative, allowing me to reflect on and respond to the qualities of the materials.
I am interested in the inherent psychology of the work and the slightly surreal aesthetic that emerges during the making process. The human body is always absent, but mental states often become evident in the finished objects.