Exhibition

Needle's Eye

22 Sep 2012 – 19 Oct 2012

Cost of entry

free

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Bay Art

Cardiff, United Kingdom

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Travel Information

  • Cardiff Bay station
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Artist Collective from London

About

Artists: Kim Baker, Louisa Chambers, Lisa McKendrick, Ben Walker Curated by Ruth Solomons Needle's Eye The four artists presented here are all working with ideas of impossibility. Symbology, gesture, emotion and playfulness push each of their subject sources through the eye of a needle into works of vast connotation and visual richness. Kim Baker's starting premise is that the magical beauty of an imagined garden is best interpreted instinctually. Organic forms act like a basic primal motive for the very human gestural processes which she employs. The original subject matter undergoes a kind of material and sensual transformation that transcends mere representation. Her approach is one of stopping to smell the roses, through purposeful and considered markmaking intertwined with painterly accident. Ben Walker's source material of the Holocaust and Nazism confounds an easy literal understanding due to its historical scale, weight, and overwhelming horror. Ben's paintings strive to tell a bleak and emotional truth through the sparingly described surfaces of his coarse grained linen canvases. Abused bodies hollowed and shadowed from severe privations, and androgenous children barely discernible amid traces of abandoned landscapes, convey small details of the stark histories implied. It is through what is left out that the true meaning is understood. Louisa Chambers paints impossible constructions of architectural and scientific authority imbued with dreamlike symbols and organic elements. She takes technology through the looking glass and transforms it into machines of our imagination. Louisa's paintings seem to offer ways through which to cope with a contemporary sense of conflict between our inner dreamworld and the daily imposition of robotic control on our lives. Lisa McKendrick's paintings derive from a personal sense of psyche — intuitive symbology from an internal world of dreams and influenced by childhood memories of her Mexican heritage. Objects emptied of function crowd her paintings, unanchored against surreal luminous landscapes. Their clashing perspectives present opposing worlds existing at once: reality and illusion, the present and the past, the living and the dead. These four artists present four needles' eyes. Kim Baker distils a subject matter of classical and romantic connotations through her sensory interpretation of colour and lyrical form. Her paintings expand this beyond an initial formal approach to gestural expressive brushwork, into an intense grappled world of floral painterly complexity. Ben Walker similarly narrows his source material into an emotional response conveyed through painterly expression. But contrastingly Ben's instinct is to erase all but the most profound and essential details. Louisa Chambers' paintings seem to present an alternative universe where authoritarian structures of technology/science fiction are hijacked by absurd anthropomorphic embellishment. Similarly Lisa McKendrick fills her paintings with quixotic imagery which wilfully resists the laws of physics and fail to follow any readable narrative. For both Lisa and Louisa the needle's eye makes allowable a child-like and intuitive playfulness, opening up a surreal psychological playground in which to set their imaginations free.

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