About
Richard Stone
Tank is proud to present the solo exhibition, idir eathara, by multi- disciplinary artist Richard Stone.
idir eathara - an ancient Celtic term describes a boundary as neither one place nor another, but the space between the two, a temporal or transformative space that the artist envisages the self or body passing through.
Working with sharp contrasts of light and dark and oscillations of scale, Stone presents a series of bold and dynamic new installation based works across both floors of Tank Gallery that explores this.
On the ground floor, a small, delicate monochrome painting of a ditch is symbolically intertwined and echoed in shape and configuration by an expansive mound of salt across the floor, both a preservative and corrosive loaded with physical, historical and mythological meaning.
Through his interpretive scope, Stone conjures somewhere placeless like a heath or the sea, symbiotically tracing an absence of self or physical body, a weightlessness or placelessness within the gallery space and beyond its walls.
Upstairs, Stone evokes a different transience, creating an amplified twilight by obscuring the windows on opposite sides of the gallery with sheets of black glass. The once daylight infused space becomes imbued with the reflections and shadows of the viewer doubling.
A small sculptural work emphasises this duality with two small identical porcelain birds placed on the floor facing each other, their heads cloaked in amorphous halos of black wax, caught somewhere between twilight and daybreak, imprisonment and freedom.
In a final seductive reworking of the skeletal form of the loft beams, Stone works with fragments of gold leaf, embellishing the beams as imagined rays of disappearing or emerging golden light, into night or revealing a day anew.
Based in London, Stone's object, installation and site-specific based works have been shown at Schwartz Gallery, Beaconsfield and the University of the Arts as well as at further galleries and sites in the UK and abroad.
Tank Gallery, 80 Ladywell Road, London, SE13 7EH | Train: approximately 10 minutes from Charing Cross, London Bridge and Waterloo East | Overland: New Cross/New Cross Gate then 136 bus to Ladywell Road. Tank Gallery is part of the South London Art Map
More about the artist:
Stone's work materialises in many forms from objects and installation through to site-specific works. These have been shown at Schwartz Gallery and Beaconsfield in London as well as at further galleries and sites in the UK and abroad. He has recently been selected for the Threadneedle Prize 2011.