Fixing the shadows / Notes on nature - alternative processes in photography/printmaking

About

‘Fixing the Shadows’ and ‘Notes on Nature’ are the titles of two separate collections of work from local artists - Photographer Rick Moye and Printmaker Agata Read. The exhibition highlights how the use of alternative processes reflects the desires in the artists to make us see things in a different light.

Rick Moye is a St. Leonards based photographer who takes inspiration from the landscape and the life that lives upon it. To present such a subject he has revived processes of photography dating back to the early 1800s. Using these early processes such as the collodian or the platinum-palladium print process he manages to capture the slow way photographs were taken before our modern digital cameras. Looking at these images, such as the one of Scotney Castle, one instantly can recognise the time, effort and skill needed to create them. It’s this tangible light held on the paper, which breaths a depth into his images and adds a layer of melancholy that we have since lost in this digital age.

Agata Read, a St. Leonards based Polish printmaker working with traditional screens alongside digital techniques. Unusual for her process is the idea that the work need to travel and they are often imbued with deep psychological meaning and memory over time. Often images are created from her walks in the Sussex countryside and then they are developed and processed with layers of screen prints back in her ancestral home of Gdansk. Her work balances the expression of handmade marks, with the control of her print making techniques to convey a sensitivity in her subject. Layers of brush stokes upon silkscreen print, present a mountain with the fragility of a still life and her use of bold, contrasting colour can bestow a flower the might of the land it lives in. ‘Broken Dreams with Roses’ draws upon the trajectory of family life, based upon drawings her father, also an artist, made of a house he had hoped to build in Poland prior to his untimely death. These plans are superimposed over blossoming flowers from Sussex, where Agata’s current home is based, invoking a desire to continue the family work in more ways than one.

By showcasing these bodies of work together, the exhibition asks the audience to see through the artists’ eyes’, their interpretation, not only of subject, but their chosen mediums and highlights their creativity not only of the aesthetic but of their chosen mediums as well. It is this use of alternative processes with traditional art forms that makes this new exhibition from Murmurations Gallery, so innovative and engaging for all.

The exhibition is on from 25 March – 9 April. 

Open 10.30-4.30. Tuesdays-Sundays. 17a Parkhurst Rd, Bexhill. TN40 1DE www.murmurationsgallery.co.uk