Exhibition
June Raby: Material, Memory, Metaphor
27 Feb 2015 – 13 Mar 2015
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 16:00
- Monday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:00
Address
- University for the Creative Arts
- Falkner Road
- Farnham
- GU9 7DS
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Farnham Railway Station is a ten minute walk from the venue. Trains arrive and depart every 30 minutes.
About
This exhibition gathers together reflections on clay - that most pervasive and basic of substances - investigating through making and through academic research the vital place the ceramic vessel holds in our psyche. Its holding function carries through time an obscured but powerful symbolic resonance.
The themes of separation, transition and integration are explored in the works in this exhibition. The pieces in Memory Holders carry and obscure memory from public scrutiny yet invite speculation. Votive attests to the yearning inherent in a sense of loss, the creative drive which seeks to replace the lost object and explores the symbolic significance of the vessel.
Through the Suspended Landscape pieces I consider the tenuousness of grounding, the sense of safety and comfort that some take for granted and some do not. The pieces reflect on experiences of war, dispossession and emigration, the discovery of new spaces and new encounters. Faultlines, while also about exploration and coming to terms with lost things, refers to the difficulties inherent in finding a place in the world - a physical as well as metaphoric sense of belonging. It is a search for and celebration of material culture in its deepest sense.
This search for meaning and for creative expression comes directly from these experiences - there is joy inherent in making and extensive learning is activated while doing so. In giving ourselves time for contemplation and reflection, we are concurrently learning about ourselves and discovering greater awareness of the connectedness of things, of people and place.
The work is made from the land and refers back to it. In my desire to find my own space of belonging, I revisited my childhood seashore and rediscovered that sense of place in it. This finding brought the realisation that the search for roots inevitably comes back to the physical environment, the material and human connectedness and grounding of it.