Peter Hide & Walter Early

About

The Piper Gallery is excited to present Peter Hide and Walter Early side by side for the first time. A dynamic synergy exists between their practices, with common ground in some of their formal approaches — both artists play with energy and the potential for movement — pushing and pulling within compact spaces. These are two artists separated by a generation who have found interest in each other's practice. The power of Hide's sculptures derives in a large part from his willingness to express feeling with subtle references to emotional states. Hide seeks to create an object that stands against time. As Ben Street notes in his accompanying catalogue essay, ‘Mutability of form meets the permanence of matter; somewhere between the two is a moral truth about the demise of the body and the desire to sustain it.' His works are abstract, although allude to mood and other aspects of human experience and occasionally reference the body to imply movement and tension. Since his residency at MOSS, Early has experimented with colour — looking at powder coating application as a preservative measure. Early applies glossy, inorganic colours to buckled and twisted sections of leftover steel plate. He is interested in the history of the offcuts. The bright coating transforms their steel surface and plays with perceptions of mass, weight and volume, individualising the pieces and preventing them from turning back into scraps. As in Hide 's work, the artistic act is a protest against time.