The Three Branches

About

ARTISTS:  EMMA DUGGAN - AMANDA LEBUS – ILONA PIMBERT 

Three artists who are gardeners and gardeners who make art will exhibit paintings and prints at Islington Arts Factory for a week from Friday, September 22nd.

After this summer of fires and floods, worldwide heatwaves and sullen British damp, a pause for pleasure in the twin investments of studio and allotment. Gardeners work with soil and season; artists craft from conditions of the body, harvesting feeling into work and working through feeling to make art.

Not all seeds that are sown flourish.  Not all sketches set fruit as finished works.  For both garden and artwork, a regular practice of focus and attention matters.  The notion of control is an illusion – we work with what we find, and find ourselves collaborators with nature. These three women artists find expression, nourishment and beauty in their gardens that spills into their art.

Interdisciplinary artist Emma Duggan embroiders and paints, as well as training as a horticulturalist and healer.  Springing from both imagination and observation, she fuses her different practices through journals and sketchbooks, being inspired by nature, healing, folklore and dream.  Working in Birmingham, Duggan keeps an allotment. 

Amanda Lebus works across art forms, in paint, print, puppetry and performance.  She has drawn at a large scale with natural materials out of doors, in work whose permanence is weather-guided. Lebus was twice artist-in-residence for the harvest in a Tuscan olive grove, and has tended her allotment for 27 years.

Ilona Pimbert, a painter and printmaker, focused first on video art when at Chelsea and St Martins.  More recently she has painted in watercolours and printed often at Brixton’s Artichoke Print Workshop. Pimbert explores themes of nature, people in nature, energy, colour and mark-making.