11 March 2022 – 15 June 2022
“Who am I? A tremor of nothingness, living in a permanent earthquake. Yet for a moment of profound happiness, the spasmodic Earth comes to unite herself with my shaky body. Who am I, now, for several seconds? Earth herself. Both communing, in love she and I, doubly in distress, throbbing together, joined in a single aura”.
Michel Serres, Natural Contract, 1995
Nature according to the French philosopher, theorist and writer Michel Serres is conceived etymologically as relating to the Latin Natura, to that ‘which is born, is born and will be born’ (Serres, 2020) and considers a subject or object that is ever evolving, changing, responding to and of itself. For him, the genesis of everything involves communication from molecular code to the genetic coding of living things, to pixels of information with a recording medium made up of forms of noise and interference that can never be excluded completely from systems of information exchange.
The agency of nature is seen as the ongoing enactment of the world with its interrelations of both artificial and natural elements, acting and responding. It is not the mute, passive ground of human action but instead is a vibrant energetic space to which all things human and non – human communicate, constantly in motion, vibrating, oscillating, resonating at varying frequencies.
Tuning in to the hum of nature and its dynamic agential forces, Frequencies (for healing) invites eight artists to contemplate nature through drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, ceramics and sound.
Hayley Lock, March 2022
Serres, M. (2020) Branches A Philosophy of time, event and advent. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Ryan Barrett
Ryan Barrett’s ceramics for Frequencies (for healing) are digitally coiled and mixed with coloured oxides layered 1mm at a time. Through the natural drying process of porcelain, shrinkage occurs and further abstract forms are created through this movement. Being naturally drawn to surfaces and textures, he experiments with natural glazes and minerals to create tonal mixes and cascading effects. An ever-evolving process, much of his work is developed in series and explores variations of forms with soaring organic surface textures. This agency of material is important to him and his work is sometimes seen to be close to collapse. Seeing himself as the orchestrator of controlled chaos at the intersection between cutting-edge technology and clay, this kinship with natural materials perhaps triggers an innate biophilia. Framed in a meditative immersive practice, Barrett connects positively with technological development and nature.
Ruth Calland
Ruth Calland has a specialist interest both clinically and creatively in the dissociability of the psyche, and the potential for healing contained within its complementary trait – the associative tendency. She has recently been making images using stills from horror films from the 1920’s, combined with her own landscape research and found photographs. For this exhibition, Calland considers the idea that a film or a painting can synthesise the human and the ‘natural’, so that they no longer appear to be opposites but are intimately connected in the construction of narrative.
Michele Fletcher
Michele Fletcher’s work for this exhibition can be considered as abstracted ruminations on the cyclical changes in a garden. Informed by the natural world but relying on visual memory, the paintings tip at a point where the abstract touches the familiar. The making of a garden or a painting involves an intervention with material- pulling, pushing, manipulating and composing. Working intuitively and meditatively whilst holding in head and heart a feeling or sensation of inherent surroundings day and season, the paintings become a reimagining of our relationship with the natural world.
Serena Korda
Serena Korda makes sculpture, sound and performance considering how communion, ritual and tradition shape our lives. She plays with ideas of entanglement in a posthuman world, a near future place where we have morphed into our non-human counterparts, celebrating animism whilst challenging an anthropomorphic view of the world. Her sculptures predominantly adopt the awkward and notoriously unforgiving process of ceramics. Embracing the ancient Zen Buddhist philosophy of Wabi-Sabi in her approach to making, she celebrates the cracks, splits, explosions and imperfections that this process, thick with transformation, allows. Bodily parts turn into flowers, long reaching fingers probe orifices like Japanese Garden eels popping out of the sea bed.
Her work is an uncanny vision that delves into witchcraft, spell making and magic whilst taping into imagery and visions of the collective unconscious.
Robyn Litchfield
Robyn Litchfield’s paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, she aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. Litchfield developed heavily stencilled works using early postcard photographs of forest which had been cropped and edited to reveal the ‘punctum’ of the image. The primitive and mysterious red forms are symbols of loss and longing; for past life, of primaeval forest, the biodiversity that it supported and represent a lament for this loss. Litchfield is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity.
Mimei Thompson
Mimei Thompson’s paintings are both process based and representational. Paint marks function descriptively, but their physicality, as pure paint and as trace of gesture, also remains dominant. The world in the paintings has a sense of fluidity, where everything is made of the same substance. There is a feeling that matter is temporarily taking on certain forms, but these are transient and mutable. She has an interest in the unconscious mind, the hallucinatory imagination and the symbolic, surreal landscape of dreams. In her work, the everyday is elevated into the sublime or fantastic. ‘Nature’, a broadly interpreted theme in the work, stands in for a site of authenticity, searched for but remaining elusive. There is a drive to connect to a place of origin, coupled with a knowingness of the impossibility of fully satisfying this desire. We are in the realm of the synthetic, playing with the idea of nature.
Linda Wallis
Recent work for Linda Wallis has developed around the theme of the unconscious. In 2017 she began a series of small drawings influenced by automatism. Her rediscovery of coloured pencils as a material enabled a more playful and immediate approach to her process. To define her work is a challenge as the unconscious is, by its very nature, intangible. Although themes are constantly changing, many pieces reference unconscious and conscious preoccupations such as entrapment, exposure and expulsion.
Sue Williams A‘Court
Sue Williams A‘Court sees landscape not as a topographical record but as a medium to visually describe a state of mind. She references and appropriates historical landscapes to present them in a new and contemporary context. For Frequencies (for healing) Williams A’Court presents anthropomorphic landscapes taking reference from art historical works. In the removal of all human or cultural content, all attention is turned again to the often borrowed backgrounds of historical paintings, inverting the hierarchy of human subject and setting by elevating nature. She is interested in these shifts in perspective and ways of being in her paintings. The tension between the figuration of the illusory landscape forms and the tactile more painterly background alludes to our unique human ability to hold contrasting mental states in the same psychological space, the relationship between the mind and the body and the possibility of transcendence.