Exhibition

Pamela Rawnsley shape-shifting

4 Apr 2009 – 16 May 2009

Event times

open daily 11am - 5pm

Cost of entry

admission free

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Mission Gallery

Swansea, United Kingdom

Event map

Pamela Rawnsley shape-shifting

About

Mission Gallery is very pleased to host this Ruthin Craft Centre Touring Exhibition by the renowned silversmith and jeweler, Pamela Rawnsley.

This is Pamela's first solo exhibition of works and was first presented at Ruthin last autumn. An exhibition of such a scale is a rare opportunity for a contemporary silversmith and the work on display is a major new body of work resulting from a grant from the Arts Council of Wales. The objects in this exhibition are a collection of vessels and jewellery inspired by the Brecon Beacons, the raw and rugged landscape where Pamela lives. Rawnsley is not replicating her surroundings, rather she uses the palette her landscape as her touchstone ' for inspiration and her own interpretation.

Born in Devon, Pamela Rawnsley studied in London and then at Leicester before taking a post-graduate course in Hereford on the Welsh Marches. Drawn by the wild environment, Welsh culture and remote setting, she moved west to the Brecon Beacons, where she now has her home and studio on the edge of an Iron Age hill fort. It is an area she describes as 'not a peaceable pastoral scene but one of great drama', a place where slashes of russet-coloured ore cut across cropped ridges, of hidden valleys and mountain lakes, sunlight on flowing water and colours and contours shifting as clouds pass. A place often beautiful, sometimes intimidating, but always enthralling.

In this exhibition visitors can study and contemplate the fine craftsmanship and detail of Rawnsley's very unique work. Elegant silver vessels with a warm gold interior shimmer as the light on their surface changes. Other works are sequences, with the purity of a glimmering silver vase juxtaposed by siblings in various shades of oxide or differentiated by gilding. Rawnsley manages to capture the power and strength of the landscape in fine pure forms which like the landscape will survive beyond the time of us mere mortals. This exhibition will fascinate everyone from devotees of contemporary applied art to anyone who wants to see stunning silverwork encapsulating the reaction of one of Britain's leading makers to one of Wales' most complex landscapes.

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