Common Ground, Private Space - Painting and Film by Christine Percy and Liz Harrison

About

Landscape contains multi-layered contexts relating to both the urban the rural and the bits in between, which have become, in recent years, a focus for the language of contemporary art and literature. It is difficult to view, as it existed in the past, as a sublime image. No longer offering the prospect of pastoral innocence, the industrial/technological landscape leaves its mark everywhere as scattered detritus, not only as physical leftovers but also changing the order and behaviour of the natural world. These paradoxical spaces, neither here nor there, offer intimate suggestions of human presence, where attempts have been made to use a space, but left abandoned. Bleak amalgamations of fragments of architectural structures expose and intensify the barrenness of an increasingly peripheral landscape.

Christine Percy’s paintings seek to find a correspondence between the materiality of paint and an emotional response to a sense of place. She is attracted to degraded and fractured landscapes, both urban and rural - the quiet stillness of flooded land, the impenetrable darkness of dense vegetation and the loneliness of unpopulated underpasses and abandoned interiors.

Christine Percy studied at Manchester College of Art and Chelsea School of Art. She was a prize winner at the Northern Young Contemporaries and exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery London. She has work in the Arts Council England collection. For many years she was involved as a lecturer in art and design education, latterly as Dean of Faculty at the University of the Creative Arts at Epsom. Christine Percy has now returned to her practice full time. www.christinepercy.com 

Liz Harrison's practice is interdisciplinary and focuses on sculptural and lens-based installation. Themes of landscape, architecture and text are recurrent, evolving from experiences of spaces that embrace a history, both personal and generic. The issue of space connects directly to architecture both urban and rural, how we inhabit it, sense it, feel it.

Liz Harrison has shown extensively in London, including the ICA, Serpentine, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, and across the UK and Europe. She was Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts from 1987–2008, and lives and works in London. Selected projects include Cold Storage, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, Lost Fathers / PerdutePadre, Museum of Modern Art Ugo Cara, Muggia, Italy, When I get home I hope, South London Gallery, and most recently a commissioned large scale installation for Southwark Cathedral. www.lizharrison.co.uk