Exhibition
Quiddity - Josephine Cottrell
16 May 2019 – 2 Jun 2019
Event times
Thursday - Sunday
12.00-6.00pm
Address
- 269 Portobello Road
- London
- W11 1LR
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Buses: 52, 23, 7, 70
- Nearest Tube Stations: Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill Gate
About
The Muse Gallery proudly presents
Quiddity
Josephine Cottrell
16th May - 2nd June
Opening Night 16th May, 6.30-9.00pm
quiddity
/ˈkwɪdɪti/noun
1.PHILOSOPHY
the inherent nature or essence of someone or something.
2.a distinctive feature; a peculiarity.
Drawing from elements of abstraction and romanticism, Josephine’s current practice experiments with how much information needs to exist in a piece for it to be perceived and accepted as art; raising the question of why a viewer instinctively objectifies and tries to ‘makes sense’ of abstraction, composing naturalistic images from unintended shapes and forms.
An ongoing aim of her work is to try and provoke a viewer’s most personal response. Creating imagery that is often devoid of a prevailing narrative, Josephine’s work is not just open to, but encourages individual interpretation. Using traditional Japanese Aesthetics as a guiding principle, subtlety and detail are critical; the smallest of details can mark an image as either too literal, or as an image lacking in content.
Grounded in printmaking’s process and materials, her work is heavily experimental; using traditional techniques and materials in a non-traditional way, the creative process is as instrumental to the work as the initial concept or desired aesthetic.
Whilst retaining the key elements of abstraction in its process, much of this most recent selection of work has been created with more specific narrative ideas in mind. The work explores and abstracts specific details of moments or objects from the artist’s life, further experimenting with provoking a personal response.
We each process information in our own way, choosing which ideas, thoughts and concepts are most important; what to keep, and what to throw away. Our memory exaggerates certain features and feeds off the details that catch our attention at a particular time, even if only subconsciously.
Continuing to experiment with the amount of information that she allows into each piece, Josephine selects and highlights the key features of distinctive memories: the movement of a koi through water; the lights of fishing boats on the horizon at night; the metallic-looking grime on the windows of a Soviet factory. The collection aims to highlight the unique and selective way we each define the essence of something.
