Bells From The Deep: Exhibition of the audience’s favourite artists

About

Hundred Years Gallery’s ‘Bells From The Deep’ Open Call for Artists working on Drawing or/and Hand Made Printing in July 2015 resulted in a magnificent exhibition featuring the works of over sixty artists of all ages and backgrounds. We asked the audience to vote for their favourite artists and from 688 visitors we counted a total of 382 votes. This is the exhibition that we granted to the artists with the most votes, including   Thomas Moore  Gianluca Bonomo  Pippa Tideman  Neville Sattentau   Helen Bermingham   Sisetta Zappone    Anna Jung Seo   Max Middelton

Neville Sattentau: As a former miniaturist painter, Neville’s practice still remains faithful to the egg tempera technique used until the mid 15th century which imprint his pieces with a particular luminosity. His very first customer was Sir Charles Clore. Art critic David Sylvester organized two of his exhibitions at Chelsea Rare Books in early 1975, both of which sold out. This led to commissions with J.P Getty: Kubla Khan by Coleridge, 16 pages on vellum, Pardoner’s Tale by Chaucer, 7 pages on vellum, and others, all now in Getty’s library in Oxfordshire. A long run of commissions followed from Naim Attallah (Sinbad the Sailor, 10 illuminations, Ecclesiastes, 67 pages, pages from Dante, from Genesis and many book frontispieces and covers for Quartet publishers). During this period, 1977 -1996 he made illustrations and illuminations for various publishers including Heineman, Bloodaxeand Phoebe Phillips.

In 1996 the last vellum factory in the UK closed down because of lack of custom. AsSattentau ran out of this basic material he took to painting on heavy hot press paper, making much bigger pictures. Since then he has exhibited in London, Edinburgh, Boston, Miami, France and Italy.

 Gianluca Bonomo: The works  presented at the exhibition ‘Bells From The Deep’ are part of a multidisciplinary project titled CCTVYLLE (The city of CCTV cameras). The main characters created by Gianluca are unusual and original hybrid animals, such as birds, featuring CCTV cameras as heads. These creatures, patrolling cities,  seem to be designed to effectively control people’s life to an extent never seen before. In a post-drone era where the advance of groundbreaking bio-cybernetic science and new technologies become available, the thin line between the use and misuse of such powerful resources is re-drawn by a new global oligarchic power capable of controlling people’s minds on both conscious and subconscious levels. (Works by Gianluca with members of the CCTVYLLE collective Chanon Treenet and Stefania Cordone)

Helen Bermingham ’s drawing practice explores ideas of memory, interruption and displacement. Using imagery from old family photographs, figures are lifted from their original setting and isolated from their original context. The figures in her work are recreated; concealed, covered, fading in and out of memory. Through drawing, new narratives are created or suggested with a sense of the uncanny; familiar yet strange at the same time. 

Thomas Moore : His work explores the conflict between civilisation (order, safety, security, materialism, hypocrisy) and savagery (conflict, struggle, hardship, poverty, sensuality and joy). As an etcher and painter, Thomas employs an array of styles and symbols to illustrate these states and their confused boundaries. Hoods, masks, crowns, food, waves, soldiers, uniforms… as an allegoric representation of our civilisation, its order and hedonism, its power, joy and savagery, freedom and slavery, a great paradox which Moore sees as the essential tension underlying all of our values.

Anna Jung Seo : The works exhibited in ‘Bells From The Deep’  are based upon the memories of a visit of the artist’s mother, an elderly Korean woman, and numerous observational drawings which were produced during her stay. Intrigued by her mother’s daily walking exercises, the artist explores the meaning of repetition and accumulation in pictorial sphere through her mother’s life. Repetitive circling exercises seem to be a metaphor of her mother’s disciplined life and character. The drawings reflect recollection and relationships within her family from the daughter’s point of view.

Pippa Tideman : These drawings are part of an ongoing investigation into the notion of escape and the relationship between expectation, aspiration and reality. The work touches on escapes from self, from boredom and reality as well as authentic bids for survival, focusing on the uncomfortable juxtapositions which surface as a result. References range from historical research to holiday brochures, current affairs to personal observation.

Max Middelton has been printmaking, drawing, painting, exhibiting and teaching for decades. His drawing practice searches for an imagery that goes parallel with his feelings and some of these drawings naturally develop into prints. His fascination for the printmaking process comes from the organic way in which a simple line develops through the effects of chemicals and metal reactions, all contributing to and revealing the birth of the final image.

Sisetta Zappone. Sisetta’s practice is focused in the universal language of Mythology as a means to decode contemporary human culture. In her latest project, of which the works exhibited in ‘Bells From The Deep’ are part, she investigates the subject of Cosmos and Stars and uses Iron for her etchings, a metal more strongly connected to planets and their chemistry. Responding to the Universe’s Geometry, the shape of the plates are arched, mirroring the elliptical orbits of the planets and are carved with the visible path that the constellations draw in the sky.

Opening on 4th of February 2016 from 7 to 9.30 as part of the White Chapel First Thursdays.