Sumptuous

About

Often recalling heavily laden banquets of opulent food, the term sumptuous implies an elaborate abundance of plenty. While this focuses on exquisite material excess, KMA Gallery invites a shift to finding our wealth in the everyday pleasures life affords. Curator Kellie Miller has invited two of our roster of artists to consider their work along these lines, creating a bold exhibition that celebrates the tapestry of a vivid, contemporary experience.

A thoughtful artist with a lifelong fascination with the landscape, David Hayward’s thickly textured encaustic paintings invite a deeper reflection of the surface of each painting. His extensive mark-making creates colourful nooks and crannies, incising the composition as if conducting the erosion of the landscapes he represents. This deeply physical approach to painting goes beyond topography, ruminating on the elaborate sensations produced by something as deceptively simple as a ripple in the sea. For Sumptuous, David has found inspiration from his local Kentish environment all the way to Greece and the Philippines, uniting our shared experience on the earth.

Equally colourful and layered, Anna Barlow’s sculptures of confectionery treats rise, tumble and melt, atop plush pillows or magically appearing out of thick helpings of sugary icing. These uncanny sculptures encourage us to remain present, enjoying the richness of plenty when it appears before it disappears forever. In a saturated world where thousands of things pull at us each day, liquifying and crumbling sugar as representative of the swift passage of our precious time could not be more apt. Anna’s art has always played with these notions, but for this exhibition she wanted to invite the idea that Sumptuous is about the joy of living rather than the consumption of everything.