Chris Harrison Photography & Jane Wheeler Ceramics

About

We are delighted to be showcasing photographs by gallery owner and artist Christopher Harrison.

Chris has been out with his camera every Monday for a year, building a photographic study of the harbours, staithes, moorings and quays of the Norfolk and Suffolk coast and broads. He is instinctively led to record pictures of the wear and tear caused by everyday life and the unintended traces of activity left behind. Battered, beaten, scratched, marked and worn, repaired and abandoned surfaces tell stories of daily industry and endeavour, of effort often made in a battle against circumstances, the elements, time and tide.

Christopher’s work is produced digitally, and he uses digital enhancements to try to get nearer to the original moment of visual experience.

After a career teaching art, history of art and photography Chris went on to become a full-time painter and then from 1998 to run the Bircham Gallery in North Norfolk. Photography has been a constant personal interest.

To compliment Christopher’s photographs, we will be showing ceramics by local and established potter Jane Wheeler.

For Jane, the vessel is a space-containing hollow form that offers the richest language for working in clay. Its conceptual simplicity allows readings which allude to our most distant cultural pasts, and to the state of being human. Its limitations are those for which the potter's tools and equipment are designed; it is a familiar scenario within which to work.

‘I make pots which not only have no utilitarian purpose, but entirely lack the functional quality of containment, together with that perfection which pleases the hand and eye - clay cracks open, glazes crawl, glaze surfaces present a gritty resistance, are reticulated like tree bark, or flake off altogether. The material speaks of its own qualities, its resistance, its strength, of the geology of the land it comes from, and of the stone it is made into’