Tuesday 18 September 2012

Needle's Eye, BayArt Gallery, Cardiff


Curated by Ruth Solomons
Kim Baker, Louisa Chambers, Lisa McKendrick, Ben Walker
22.09.12-27.10.12
 Private View: Saturday 22nd September 2012

These four artists present four needles' eyes. Kim Baker distils a subject matter of classical and romantic connotations through her sensory interpretation of colour and lyrical form. Her paintings expand this beyond an initial formal approach to gestural expressive brushwork, into an intense grappled world of floral painterly complexity. Ben Walker similarly narrows his source material into an emotional response conveyed through painterly expression. But contrastingly Ben Walker's instinct is to erase all but the most profound and essential details. Louisa Chambers' paintings seem to present an alternative universe where authoritarian structures of technology/science fiction are hijacked by absurd anthropomorphic embellishment. Similarly Lisa McKendrick fills her paintings with quixotic imagery which wilfully resist the laws of physics and elude a readable narrative. For both Lisa McKendrick and Louisa Chambers the needle's eye makes allowable a child-like and intuitive playfulness, opening up a surreal psychological playground in which to set their imaginations free. The four artists presented here are all working with ideas of impossibility. Symbology, gesture, emotion and playfulness push each of their subject sources through the eye of a needle into works of vast connotation and visual richness.
Ruth Solomons 2012





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