A Forest

About

The exhibition follows a similar logic – with an idea that these works spoke to each other, and to me, and with an excitement to put them all together and let them develop and inflect each other – to see one through another, myriad view points.

Achaintre’s woollen tufted work, tree like, looks perhaps as if it grew from the ground. Camoni steals the spirits of her garden in the remote Tuscan Hills, by wrapping flowers and plants in silk where they leave their marks, appearing unpredictably and identifying with the seasons. Franck’s cataloging of large stones inherited from a family collection and transposed onto printed carpets, draws together a history of movement and migration. Anne Hardy likens her “VHS curtains” to rain, no doubt both visually and audibly as both of these formal qualities are ever present in her larger scale immersive installations. All these things I have in mind whilst looking at Chilvers new paintings in her studio, as I began to interpret her systematic drawings and paintings as maps or diagrams to navigate dense forest like environments. The gallery is filled with the sound of Barham’s video Sick Ardour. Structured around the familiar mating call of a cicada – an insect more often heard than seen – the work explores the permeability of a body to sound image and space. Whilst the isolated sound track is a continuous presence and back drop to the exhibition, the video will be screened in full on 20th May at LUX as part of ‘Orgasmic Streaming, Organic Gardening, Electroculture’ curated by Karen Di Franco and Irene Revell.