Bladderwrack

About

Bladderwrack is an exhibition of works by three emerging artists – Coral Brookes, Sarah Karen and Rachel Stanley. Working across mediums of painting, drawing and textiles, including a collaborative work, the artists explore abstracted, sensory connections to their encounters with nature. Through varied mark-making, lucid forms and textural tactility, the exhibition articulates a process of zooming in and out of the contemporary landscape. 

Rachel Stanley (b.1996, Epsom) is a painter living and working in Edinburgh. Her practice is concerned with ideas of safety and sanctuary, and with nature as a powerful tool for healing. For Rachel, the act of painting is a method in which to understand feelings of anxiety and sensory overload, and to explore questions without a need for answers. Her paintings play with the possibilities between abstraction and figuration, and the blurriness of such binaries. They also explore states of surface through their mark-making, oscillating between flatness and three-dimensionality. As a result, the works are ambiguous, transient and untraceable - in the process of slowly forming something else. In her practice, the impermanence and imperfection of nature offers continual inspiration, as well as the body itself which is explored through studies of wombs, veins and cells.

Coral Brookes (b.1995, Shropshire) is an artist and educator based in Glasgow. Her work uses 2D and 3D modes to playfully visualise physical and emotional relationships between real and imagined landscapes. The work aims to be slippery, alluding to solitude, connection and confusion through forms which seem fleeting, fluid and in flux: from half-formed insects, wonky infrastructure to abstracted bodies situated in spaces.

Sarah Karen (b.1993, Stourbridge) is an artist and educator, currently based in Margate. Her practice explores personal memories, articulating stories through varied mediums of textiles, drawing and print.

NB on Tuesday 12th the gallery is open for visits by appointment only; to book please visit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScnlKcrgMi-hztoF5XnCDhQZN6I0aKrXIWzXRZ6jqL1obb44g/viewform.