David Manley

Two degrees of Separation…

Posted on December 22, 2022 by David Manley

It’s taken me a while to get my head round Partition Parables at Derby’s Artcore venues. My usual practice is to get in, take a good look around and respond by either writing immediately or not at all (taking the view nowadays that if I don’t enjoy then best say nowt). One reason was simple embarrassment, somehow though only ten miles away it was my first visit to this excellent addition to the stock of venues within my remit for this blog. The gallery in particular is a beautiful space and the programme, not only exhibitions but a range of workshops and other events most enterprising. I’d urge everyone to get along there and take in the offer (that includes a good cafe too).

But back to the work in the show. Inspired by the 75th anniversary of partition (Pakistan & India initially, Pakistan & Bangladesh later) the two artists Tarla Patel and Rachel Magdeburg (recipients of residencies set up by the organisation) have made bodies of new work that ostensibly ‘respond’ to the idea of partition as a more generic topic (the introduction ties in both the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Brexit to this thesis?!). It also refers to the “relationship between humans and plants”. No doubt all these things might crowd in on the artist’s (and audience’s) minds as they explored the residency/exhibition opportunity but there is a point at which the specificity of what is produced meets the generalities of these wildly diverse themes. This is all the more acute when the artists (from Coventry & Wolverhampton) responses to the organisation, its locations and personalities and the wider Derby publics are pulled into the mix.

It all makes for textual narratives that confuse and obfuscate as much as they explain. But does that matter? After all, the work on show is what it is and whilst some elements of the handouts are replicated in the spaces themselves it should, and it does, stand on its own. Tarla Patel’s Seeds To Home is the easier of the two to grasp. Though the introduction of the generic AI platform DALL-E (now more widely shared as Craiyon) throws a somewhat confusing spanner into the works (not entirely explained away by suggestion that these apps correspond to memory loss in advancing years!).

I’d recently come from a viewing of Sutapa Biswas’s marvellous Lumen and so was attuned to a narrative of our dubious and complex colonial past. The video element of Patel’s installation held up pretty well against such stiff competition, not least in its more personal reflections on how culinary traditions can be both displaced and nourished through migrations. The use of the photographic elements against the sound components was particularly well thought through and utilised the semi-rotunda space to create both a general low-level hubbub and the use of bluetooth mini speakers to allow one to dip in and out of the visual and aural experiences. All this added up to an enjoyable and rewarding mix.

If the texts to Patel’s work were unnecessary then they might entirely disorientate in the context of Rachel Magdeburg’s paintings. Given that the paintings are dubbed ‘Cryptic’ in the title of the work Under The Walnut Tree: Cryptic Painting perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, maybe there’s a humour here gently taking a rise out of those of us who take the trouble to read the texts. A particularly amusing fragment suggests the artist has “taken an explorative intuitive and snowballing approach” to ideas that take a “cue from the partition in capitalist consumerist society between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ which is arguably culpable for the exploitation of the natural world as it is deemed separate from humans”. This is mixed into a postulated symbiosis twixt “illusionistic painting” and “zoological taxonomies of camouflage, aposematism and mimicry”. Again this potential Pseuds Corner entry wouldn’t matter if the paintings, actually rather intriguing and elegant, didn’t stand in direct contradiction to this (my guess is doctoral thesis) claptrap. They employ a fetching battery of methods and processes that bleed out the ‘facture’ and give the simple formal characteristics a kind of illustrative ambience – almost a Ladybird children book look. Magdeburg is clearly an interesting and arresting artist and a writer too, her milvus milvus: the reCAPTCHA script is a wonderful surreal piece that my old friends at Little Toller books wisely invited into their The Clearing blog. Her riffing on the re-introduction of the Red Kite (oft seen in our neck of the woods nowadays) is terrific. Here’s hoping that the PhD behind her, the poetry (in both her paintings and writings) come to the fore…she will be all the more compelling if it does.

Leaves in Notts…

Posted on December 5, 2022 by David Manley

(left) **Folded Blanket**, 2022 Cobnet tree leaves gilded on one side in copper leaf; (right) **Between hands and the leaves of trees**, 2022 Cobnet, cherry, apple, plum and birch leaves

The pressing issue of our time is, of course, Climate Change. Cynics like me suggest that had we taken action back in the 1970’s we might have made a difference but that it’s now way past the point of no-return. Be that as it may (and I’m no reliable witness) it dominates a fair amount of art practice today. A recent visit to two very different regional venues gives a chance to see what some artists are doing with the topic.

At Beam there’s a small exhibition to celebrate the latest publication from them, their third (I think?) with the artist John Newling. In recent decades John has often (nearly always perhaps) seen a publication as an integral part of his practice by both way of partial explication and component part of the work as a whole. So it’s wholly appropriate here. The show comprises a group of smaller paintings at its centre – from an artist who is perhaps best known as a sculptor. Whilst the 3D components are two groups of small handmade, and to an extent, provisional pieces that utilise modest found natural material (leaves). Again something of a departure over recent decades from the solid steel pieces of the 70’s and 80’s. To complete the presentation there are a small group of very early career drawings that are based in precise mathematical models. Newling’s direction of travel over the past thirty years or so has been steadily accumulating references to our engagements with nature through a divergent and often poetic personal perspective but seem to me to have arrived at a declamatory point since before the pandemic (and perhaps in part amplified by it). This is a tricky place in which to operate as there is a danger in much art practice that jettisons the poetic in favour of the clarity of political message. In the 36 painted panels of ‘A Library of Ecological Conversations – Leaves and Me’ the poetic is expressed in the main by making the work quite beautiful to look at and one imagines the artist intends that to point directly at our ambiguous relationship to the globe as we fly about it polluting the very places we go to admire. and so on. For me more potent are the sculptural works where the models of ‘Playing A Sentence’ and the scrunched up balls of leaves of ‘Hands and the Leaves Of Trees’ play off the natural material against acculturated practices of children and adults to enable both core message and fresh interpretations to occur to the viewer.

**A Library of Ecological Conversations – Leaves and Me**, 2018 – 2020 Leaves, paint, gold, silver and copper leaf on paper

This thought leads me naturally to The Wireworks In Ambergate where I felt an affinity with the Newling scrunchies was in evidence in – especially – the installation by Anthony Shepherd. Not least as Shepherd’s work made use of leaves too and also exhibited a gentle playfulness. There were many connotations to be found in what seem at first to be deceptively simple pieces – I found myself thinking of the festive season as the natural light faded for example. The core element to each of the hanging pieces is (as is often the case with both Shepherd and his co-conspirator Ivan Smith) scavenged material from their locale . If this continues the Ambergate community (not least in the wonderful Shining Cliff woods) will have these two inveterate collectors of refuse to thank for cleaning up that environment. Ivan’s piece filled the huge hanger space in a far more declamatory manner whilst also using reclaimed materials. In his work much attention is put into the architectural and spacial integrity of the work and the message is direct and yet slyly amusing. We fell to talking over an old project that Ivan undertook with the Fine Rats group ‘Under Spaghetti Junction’ and it was hard for me not to see a connection to the tangled tubes from which the tree was fashioned once that had entered my head. Both installations reward careful consideration and particularly underline the importance of experiencing them at first hand (as do Newling’s) so get along to both venues whilst you can. John’s show has a way to run and is open through Thurs to Sat. each week until spring. But Wireworks is only open the next two Saturdays…off to Ambergate quickly then!

The Joy Of Painting…

Posted on November 16, 2022 by David Manley

The newly refurbed Nottingham Society of Artists gallery with Laine Tomkinson‘s pop up solo show.

For a variety of reasons I haven’t seen as much work as I’d hoped over recent months – a fact I was reminded of when bumping into Nev Smith at the Nottingham Society of Artists gallery in Nottingham today. I was there to catch Laine Tomkinson’s excellent solo show (be quick it runs to Sunday 20th Nov). Neville told me of his outing at the Angear Centre at Lakeside that sadly I missed but you can see some of his work here. Laine is one of the region’s best colourists and her show looked especially good in the new bright white space that the NSA has recently had renovated. It was good fortune too that another of the best painters handling colour in the East Midlands Carole Hawthorn was in the gallery – great to catch up with all three artists.

Laine mostly showed new work, made over the past year, but with a sprinkling of older pieces that together gave a top class selection of her practice. Using a technique derived from her printmaking career most of the works are one-offs, with collage and hand mark-making obscuring and augmenting the printed parts. The older works saw gestural arabeques played off against geometries of sorts but I thought I detected a wider repertoire of forms, marks and lyrical passages than previously – suggesting a greater freedom than hitherto and adding a lot to the mix. I was much taken with a number of works where a group of upright forms created figure/ground relationships and made for startling and original compositions (Calypso is a good example). In a number of pictures good creative use is made of the informal grid by massing together near squares of colour – a group of five of these were especially lively. Her colour sense is unerringly precise, her greatest strength as an artist and her inventiveness in her compositions gets better and better. Although I struggled to get a decent photo of it I wanted to show one of my favourites – Under the Sea – that fair crackled with chromatic intensity. Its a great show and amongst its many strengths it is packed full of joy, for the practice of painting and life itself – if you can get along and see it before mid afternoon Sunday.

**Under The Sea**, Laine Tomkinson, with the least reflections I could get!

Up, down and out…

Posted on October 11, 2022 by David Manley

In times this turbulent there’s a lot to be said for a platonic art practice , a sensitive, ordered and uplifting kind of painting. Step forward Marek Tobolewski with his show Line (on at Beameditions till 22nd October. The accompanying blurb tells us that the work cannot be appreciated photographically – how much more so on the black mirror that passes for art appreciation most of the time nowadays. In particular the large graphite on plywood work that dominates the main space has to be examined up close and personal, its physicality and materiality so vital to its presence as a work. But much the same might be said for every work here, whether paint on linen or board or paper, though perhaps the drawings suffer a little less from secondhand observation (that said they also look so much better as physical objects).

Whilst the focus in the exhibition, indeed its title, speaks to the Line it is as much the negative spaces that define these, the pigments and the handling of them being crucial to their formation. The occasional telltale pencil marks and measurements that can only be observed at close quarters whisper the hand of the artist and celebrate the primacy of it. Without these there is the danger that the artwork might topple into mechanical or digital design. As it is they maintain an equilibrium where craft and design meets genuine artistry and produces works of beauty imbued with a stillness and, to this eye at least, an ineffable presence that speaks to a world of calm democratic decency.

So having been up, leaving Beam, through corridors and through the Primary building past the playground and down into what, I’m told, was the caretaker’s home. Stepping into Forth you are immediately arrested by the sight of a cabal of young women around a sickly looking campfire. The work is titled Beauty, Chaos, Romance, Pride and it’s hard not to imagine these might be either the names of the four kneeling figures or perhaps (for the signifiers are clear) the names of their horses. Part of the magic of this work is the way in which the white and pastel colours of the sparse room play off against the tableau but the hint is already there with the ribbons in the hair – even if you missed the title of the show – Four Horsegirls of the Apocalypse.

What Ella Fleck has conjured up is a whole world out of our understanding and beyond our reason. Unless of course you’ve had some kind of encounter with the world of pony eventing, a very small slice of the contemporary art audience I suspect (though I’m now thinking of Russian Oligarch’s etc.). Nonetheless for most of us something we might think of as fairly genteel is here transformed into a sinister and confrontational world of highly competitive and antagonistic bitching. In room two we cannot view these four as individuals (the backs of their heads are all we see) but we hear the exchanges and are confronted by the jump gate on which they are hoisted (or as rosettes are present successfully negotiated). Glancing back by the doorway there’s the poignant reminder of earlier times, a hobby horse, a child’s toy , yet even this hints at future conflict – Her Pony Was The Best (Hobby Horse).

There’s a really playful and inventive narrative at work here that induces both shivers and laughs in an installation that is both sophisticated and finely judged.

Oh What a World…

Posted on April 9, 2022 by David Manley

we live in, so the song goes… It went through my head as I read this caption upon entering Paul Matosic’s exhibition of The Ruins Of The Ancient City Of Phibonak. Paul, Nottingham-based, has been working solidly for over thirty years in the city but I’m fairly sure this must be one of the biggest outings he’s had..or at least that I know of. If so it’s good to see him given the space to stretch out and put together a show that properly demonstrates his creativity. I’ve known his assemblages but had little idea of the wider range of works on paper, print and sculpture. Nor had I any inkling of the witty conceptual framework behind this show. Whilst there’s inevitably a nod towards Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, this show has none of the overblown pomposity of the former but rather exhibits a lighter touch, and makes valuable points, both politically and socially, rather than being a showroom full of expensive knick knacks for the Oligarch’s (sadly I think they’ll be back soon enough). In the widest context that phrase at top of this post accompanying the four works alongside it (shown below) is very prescient of our current times

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_4092.jpg — Bunkers – installation Angear Visitors Centre, Nottingham Lakeside Arts

What Matosic has done is marry together fairly humble materials with some strong visual works wrapped up in the conceit he has created. In doing so he points up much of the most vulgar aspects of contemporary Fine Art culture and in the nicest way sticks two fingers up at them.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_4090.jpg

There’s also a sly nod in the direction of the archaeological community with its obsessive annotations, assumptions and assessments of the objects it unearths and pronounces upon. But none of these things is done cruelly, rather more with a wink and a grin, that ought to bring a smile to both the diggers and daubers.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is img_4091.jpg — The King Tutmost Frieze – Installation as before

The idea allows Paul to riff off of a variety of stylistic variations, I loved the contrasts between the Frieze above and the cold grey of The Bunkers and I found myself really enjoying the free standing sculptural works. Overall as a whole the way in which the show stood up as a contemporary work and as a humorous and thoughtful caprice is a tribute to an artist who has doggedly pursued his career over several decades. Get to see it before it closes on May 1st. And full marks to the curatorial team at Lakeside (superbly led by Neil Walker) for bringing this exhibition in to accompany the equally impressive Ancient Iraq show next door.

Precision…

Posted on October 9, 2021 by David Manley

The presentation of the Arts Council touring show – Breaking The Mould – at Lakeside is pretty exemplary – in the online guide (made at YSP’s Longside)it looks a tad haphazard and the long run of windows doesn’t help. In the Djanology it runs smoothly through, initially chronologically and then thematically as it gathers pace. THe long barrel shaped room focusses the works in there and the controlled lighting picks out the work beautifully, especially the wall mounted pieces. It might well be a function of my age but to my eye some of the best work comes from the generations nearer to me. I particularly love the Untitled pieces by the late Shelagh Cluett and that of Alison Wilding, whilst both works are open to interpretation, each has a precision in material choice and execution that make them especially satisfying. Neither of these artists have gained quite the kind of reputation they deserve but one suspects that such purity of visual thinking sits somewhat at odds with the current zeitgeist. That is amply represented in the selection, Helen Marten, Phyllida Barlow and Holly Hendry (a new name to me) all throw a lot at the viewer and again its probably just my taste but I find it too much. Of the works from the past decade I was drawn to the works of Rana Begum and Alice Channer that share something of the same clarity as Wilding and Cluett. Of course most of the bigger names are here, but the nature of the collection focused on smaller more portable works doesn’t always show them off to best effect, Cornelia Parker and Rachel Whiteread, in particular, work much better in environments they are able to exclusively control.

One of the precepts of the exhibition that didn’t come across to me perhaps as strongly as was intended by the curation was that of the ‘challenging of male-dominated narratives’. I recognise that sculpture in the UK in the post war period well into the 70’s was ‘male-dominated’, almost exclusively so (take away Hepworth and Frink and it looked dire, although the early part of this display shows there were quite a few others battling away against this tide). But what some of the particular ‘narratives’ were is harder to clarify…take for example the work of Katherine Gili, that to my mind is as powerful as her male contemporaries and colleagues but how far it is possible to drive a clearly alternative reading of her work from, say, that of Anthony Smart, a colleague at Stockwell Depot in the 70’s, is harder to see. The same might be said of Emma Park, Shirazeh Houshiary and Wendy Taylor’s pieces. That said there are of course several artists included who make very explicitly alternative and polemicised readings, Mary Kelly, Helen Chadwick and Sarah Lucas very much so. But overall it’s hard to know what, or indeed why, much of the work (particularly by many of the younger artists) needs to challenge any narratives other than the viewer’s own preconceptions. Certainly by the time we come into the work made in the 21st c. binary narratives seem rather quaint – one reading of that selection might suggest that the gender of those chosen is immaterial – they just happen to be sculptors who are women. That carping aside (and from someone who identifies as male) a super selection. I was especially taken with the piece by Alice Channer that seems to have a specificity in thinking and a generosity of expression that encompasses both a gender particularity with a strong sense of embodied absence.

*Plaza*, Louisa Chambers, acrylic on linen, 2021

Out in the Angear space Louisa Chambers seems an apposite choice for a solo outing in her show entitled Criss Cross. Much of the work draws on folded constructed sources she invents herself. Yes it is painting, often morphing into a devised 2d space that might or might not be recognised from its source, but is often fairly clearly declaring its origins. This is especially so where a surface on which the forms sit is evidently presented. There is a strong painterly presence at work here, indeed a precision, not entirely remote from that of say, Cluett & Wilding, although a nearer comparator (generationally and aesthetically) might be Begum. What the paintings do suggest is that a very sophisticated colour intelligence is at work allied to a deft and elegant reading of space and questioning of the way in which it is depicted.

Louisa Chambers – Works on paper, Angear Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham

If one wanted to mildly critique the work on show it might be something of a lack of risk taking…Louisa amply demonstrates that she can master these pictures and can build complexity into them as they are scaled up. Plaza, the largest canvas here, is a good example. However the clutch of works on paper show that a more questioning aesthetic may be on the horizon where a greater sense of freedom and originality of approach shows through. Chambers has also played with pattern making in the space in which work is displayed in other locations…a show with colleagues at The Harley Gallery comes to mind…and does so again on the Angear back wall – but here too there’s a certain tentativeness. Given the oddity of this wall with its peculiar recessed circle it is perhaps an opportunity missed to go for broke. Nonetheless this show is very compelling and offers a strong and satisfying unity with glimpses of new directions also being forged.

Louisa Chambers, installation, Angear Gallery, Lakeside Arts

Back In The Saddle…

Posted on September 13, 2021 by David Manley

Anthony Shepherd – Survival Of The Fittest

It’s been quite a break! but now its back and – hopefully – more regular postings will see more interest in the site? So I’m starting with this – a very recent visit…

Ever since western art moved out of the Salon in the latter half of the 19c. artists have – increasingly – been doing it for themselves. The trend seems to have accelerated over the past few decades and shows no sign of slowing up. Indeed the pandemic may well further accentuate this as public galleries show fiscal strains as a result and private initiatives struggle too.

If you want work to be seen, and especially on your own terms, then this is certainly one way to go. Which brings me to The Wireworks, situated just north of Ambergate on the A6, through the Industrial estate, across the Derwent and left towards The White Peak Distillery (who are their next door neighbours).

Ivan Smith and Anthony Shepherd have worked hard (very hard as some photos on display testify) over the past two years converting a group of buildings that back onto Shining Cliff Woods to create both working and exhibition space. Now they have launched with an exhibition of their own work. Anthony has installed a small ‘crop’ in the open covered space alongside the main gallery that he titled Survival Of The Fittest. It serves as a fitting introduction to several underlying themes that emerge from both artists thinking. There is a powerful sense of the works virtually ‘growing’ out of the spaces they inhabit. By virtue of the repurposing of much of the materials used, their origins as discarded detritus (in Shepherd’s installation plastic protection sheaths for saplings have found new life having been dumped on the woodland floor) and the rough industrial context in which the work is being displayed this interplay between culture and nature is pointed up beautifully.

Ivan has, as often with his work, used the adjacent gallery to create a more theatrical display of a group of sculptures (titled collectively Islands) that ask pointed questions about who we are and what values we espouse. But both artists have adopted a means in which symbolism and metaphor are used to pose these enquiries and there is both an element of the surreal and the provisional in the way in which they have constructed both the pieces themselves and the context in which they have placed them. There is too, a satisfying relationship between the two spaces with the darkened gallery encouraging a sense of deep foreboding that the outside work gently suggests, if not entirely a relief from the intensity, at the least, a glimmer of greater optimism.

Something that this bold and exciting project points up in sharp relief is the importance of experiencing work in situ rather than mediated through the lens. Whilst film and – to a lesser degree – photography can act as reportage all art is only of course properly experienced directly. This show, in this context, serves as a vital and affirming example par excellence of this. There is still time to visit – Saturday 18th or 25th September 2021 from 12noon to 4pm.

Summer/Autumn Roundup

Posted on December 4, 2018 by David Manley

Claire Morris-Wright in the Wallner Gallery at Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham

The back half of this year has been somewhat chaotic so I’ve had little time to reflect. Along the way I made brief notes so here, for anyone following this!, is a brief round up of some of what’s been seen. One or two shows have also been mentioned in my personal blog Plainly Painting so cut along there if you haven’t already.

See Here at the old Neale’s Auction House, in Nottingham way back in late June was a very welcome event. Not least as it was good to see old friends still working away and a host of other artists not previously known to me. Bill Ming and Nadia Nagual are amongst the best that the region has to offer. Bill showed his sculpture in the context of installation and alongside collage, an interesting and exciting development. Nadia has always shown great sensitivity in her work and this was very much on display here. There were solid outings from artists I’ve admired over the years, Carole Hawthorne and Roy Pickering, the guiding hand behind the show. Not known to me was Mwini Mutuku, but whose work showed both sensitivity and energy nor Jim Jack, whose cultural pieces I’d like to see more of.

Whispers Of Commercial Greed & Nature Balance by Sardul Gill, See Here, Neale’s Auction House, Nottingham

Also good to see artists willing to experiment in public…Roy himself in collaboration with Sardul Gill, Richard Perry with his daughter Josie, and several artists working outside their comfort zone, experimenting with the available spaces. Roy and everyone associated with this show are to be applauded.

In the Henderson Gallery buried in the bowels of the Malt Cross in Nottingham, one of our best kept secrets here in the Midlands, Pamela Clarkson was showing her Mariam and Waleria & other prints. One of, if not the, premier printmaker in the region…she exhibits a range of techniques, not in itself especially important, but put to really great effect in a very satisfying show.

Miriam & Waleria, by Pamela Clarkson, Henderson Gallery, Nottingham

Early autumn saw a trip into the city to Lakeside. Ostensibly to see Rena Begum’s Space Light Colour, highly recommended by some this was something of a disappointment to me. These were too slick, and seemed gewgaws for the rich (Dubai seemed to be, naturally enough, home for many of them), had little to say to me beyond retreading old modernist tropes – I felt it was faux Art as sophisticated interior design drawing on such hard working talent such as Yaacov Agam who has thoroughly mined this territory starting nearly half a century back (and still going at 90!)…still everyone to their own I’ve seen quite a few rave reviews of it.

Luckily the Angear provided a little more meat with a selection of Steffie Richards recent paintings. I’ve written about these before (though there were interesting new developments) so suffice to say one of the new works on the back wall was an absolute cracker. Over in the Wallner Gallery Claire Morris-Wright showed her Hedge project – as its past now I’m not going to write extensively about this but I think its the best, most rewarding and meaningful encounter with quality I’ve seen over the late summer/autumn. Luckily delay in posting this round up means I’m able to recommend the unabridged version of this show – on at Kettering’s Alfred East until 5th Jan. 2019.

Trix & Robert Haussman are architects, but are more often found in the design magazines on the continent where their playful ‘interventions’ have, particularly in the past twenty years or so, struck a chord with fellow professionals and public alike. The show at Nottingham Contemporary was rather a delight bringing together a wide range of their work from conceptual art documentation through adaptations of modernist classics and onto shop fittings. In the other two galleries an artist previously unknown to me Pia Camil presented a stylish and original installation that brought together textiles, ceramics and performance, through effective video presentation. Her interests reflect aspects of mass consumerism, interactions between workers as producers and the audience as consumers, references to prior artworks and epochs and trans gender issues. It might sound a bit scattergun but the artist had woven the elements together with some elan. Both shows were full of interest and humour – and one imagines they reflect the new management at the venue…in which case things are looking up.

Coming into autumn proper it was up to the Walker, Liverpool to view the latest John Moores. Actually this was rather refreshing with many painters I’d not seen before (and hardly any big names). I struggled to find much of merit in the first prize-winner but overall there were plenty of things that spoke of painting’s persistence in the face of institutional indifference. I especially enjoyed Black Star by Virginia Verran, from those I knew of and Kos Town Paradise Hotel Front Terrace by Gary Lawrence from those I didn’t.

And talking of really good painting a short while back we ventured into the New Art Gallery, Walsall to see the real tour de force that Elizabeth Magill has assembled of mainly recent, larger canvases but also encompassing a selection of her sublime small canvases over the past decade. Magill is a quite exceptional painter, no doubt about it. And her productivity over these past few years is impressive. If I have a criticism of sorts it might be that the scaling up of the pictures could become formulaic, but it hasn’t yet and, given her pedigree, I doubt she’ll let it.

Elizabeth Magill at the New Art Gallery, Walsall

A necessary trip up north, saw me visiting the gallery in the Creative Arts faculty at the University of Central Lancashire where Nottingham based Laine Tomkinson is showing prints and other works on paper in a solo show – Wiggle Whoogie til Dec. 6th. These new works suggest the artist is pushing forward with both structure and, significantly, the sophisticated use of colour. Where earlier work I’ve seen was vibrant and exuberant the palette seems to be cooling a little encouraging more ambiguous shifts in the register and reading of the imagery. This aspect of the work intrigues the viewer, where seemingly form is often inverted by use of elements that are by products of the making process. The extensive use of layering of colour and form adds to their elusive qualities. A most satisfying show from an artist who is maturing into a very distinctive voice.

White Lines & Mr. Soft, by Laine Tomkinson, PR1 Gallery, Preston

And finally, back to a regular haunt over the years…Harrington Mill in Long Eaton. Here Sheila Ravnkilde is showing the results of a three month residency Poured Lengths. As always there is directness to the work, the titles that rarely brook any ambiguity being especially appropriate to the nine (as I recall) lengths of – what? – three by three timbers that have been subjected to repeated pourings of pure pigmented paint of a single colour each. Where previous works rarely betrayed the hand of the artist recent offerings have made a feature of it, albeit in the form of process rather than signature. A key, perhaps the key, aspect of the work is the interaction between the space and the interventions in it and as always this had been meticulously considered, especially with regard to the colour relationships. This kind of minimalist work has to be well executed as it was here. A fitting finale to shows at the Mill that is regrettably closing this December, a loss in an area where exhibiting opportunities (not to mention highly affordable studios) are at a premium.

Poured Lengths, Sheila Ravnkilde, Harrington Mill

On the sublime…

Posted on May 2, 2018 by David Manley

It’s a simple enough trope…superimposition of one scale upon another…though I suspect quite a bit harder to pull off than one might imagine. In Richard T. Walker’s video piece its used to quite powerful effect – regular readers will know I’m quite a lot harder own video – but the poetic narrative at work here is pretty mesmerising. It lives up to the promise of the exhibitions title. Sadly much else here doesn’t. Mariella Neidecker’s piece here buries her characteristic vignette into a clumsy mis en scene that proves to be a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. The other work in the space crowded out by this bombast. Elsewhere nothing much lives up to the billing.

Luckily outside the main galleries in the Angear space there is something of exceptional and exquisite quality. The Nottinghamshire based artist Robert Hart has been given the opportunity to display some the exceptional work he has been engaged in over the past few years. It is an astonishing display – perhaps a little overcrowded – of the drawings, prints and paintings he has produced over recent times.

He has focussed a deal of his creative ambition on the Suffolk coastline – specifically the wastelands of Orfordness and, whilst many artists have chosen this unique landscape since it was released from the Ministry of Defence a few decades back, fewer still have done so to such exceptional effect. Anyone who has visited this location (and if you haven’t I strongly advise you do) will testify to its unique character – an ambience that Rob has captured to perfection. His forensic visual intelligence is coupled with a poetic imagination and has resulted in a wealth of material. His show is a triumph – catch it in the few days you have left – it ends on May 6th.

Mining the seams…

Posted on March 12, 2018 by David Manley

Strata:1 is a show that takes its name from the ‘collective’ of five Loughborough art school graduates – two from back in 2012 and three from the class of 2015.

How to be a painter in the second decade of this century should vex everyone who picks up a brush but loads of us keep doing it so what gives? Obviously we kick against the digital pricks and still get that visceral kick from something so obdurately analogue. These guys are definitely getting that idea in spades and well done for that. The seams maybe running thin but here are five younger artists determined to mine whatever ores are still running.

Joshua Browitt

Joshua Browitt is digging in the far reaches of colourfield abstraction, out beyond the mid 80’s grunge of Larry Poons and the 90’s onwards of Jules Olitski. Though his canvasses are relatively small in size, making some of natural mushing of paint effects a tad uncomfortable and forced, they have the same gutsy feeling as their forbears and a curious muted colour palette that holds back some of the more lurid colour clashes of those antecedents.

Martin Clarkson

Martin Clarkson has plumped for a more strait-forward delivery in some wristy brushwork but has found imagery that laps up the jungle and envelops it in a weird and wonderful colour cast as if the painter was working with a particularly odd photo filter. I could live without the glossy sheen over them that I’m imagining the artist sees as a way of giving them a further homogeneity but is very much not to my taste.

Philip Clarke is staying very much within a tradition of wee sized photo realism with scenes in oil on aluminium sheet. His lonely stretches of some of the loveliest parts of the highlands are powerful and affecting images and his handling is pretty decent too. Its quite a well worn route he’s taken but he does it well.

left – Saku, Oil on canvas, 50 x 50 cm. 2018 Sarah Cunningham right – Elgol, Oil on aluminium, 20 x 15 cm. 2018 Philip Clarke

Sarah Cunningham can paint, in fact her handling is some of the most confident on show, but as yet some of the subjects and compositions are less than convincing. Steering clear of figuration might help and working into the image as it ‘lives’ on the canvas works better for her. Saku and Borneo struck me as a rather lovely pictures where what was pushed around its surface took precedence over the image portrayed.

Perhaps the whackiest and certainly most arresting work comes from Adam Waghorne, for whom it is the image that takes centre stage. These are played out on an array of differing supports and techniques and have about them a whiff of Wyndham Lewis’s self portrait of 1921 or Stanley Spencer mixed into psychedelica…in fact the parade of them across a glass support is one of the oddest and unusual works I’ve seen on a wall anywhere so far this year.

Given that these are still younger artists, and forgiving the rather overblown claims for the show in the blurb, this was one that entertained and intrigued, if not wholly excited, anyone who cares about the future of the medium. The biggest hurdles they face today is the indifference of the curatorial elites, their non-metropolitan location and a buying public, the absence of which makes the UK for the most part an inhospitable place for serious painting now.

Sadly the show ended Saturday past…but there’s always something worth checking out at the Surface Gallery space at the bottom of Southwell Road in Nottingham.

cloughieseyes

Musings On Contemporary Art around the A52 Corridor (and away games occasionally)

Author: David Manley