Curious Nature
26 April – 18 June 2008
Leonora Chan, Helena Goldwater, Andy Harper, Nadège Mériau, Melanie Stidolph and John Timberlake. Curated by Day +Gluckman
Left to right on back wall, 'The Hare', 2004, 'The Green Man', 2007
Photo credit: Steve Tanner
An exhibition of paintings, photographs and drawings, Curious Nature presents work by six artists who look at the beautiful, bizarre and unexpected in the natural world.
Helena
Goldwater creates her own botanical hybrids, exquisitely rendered in
watercolour paint. Each depicted sample is familiar yet altered, hinting at some
kind of strange science. Whilst referencing 18th and 19th Century studies these
images are extremely contemporary, suggestive of our ability to radically alter
the nature of our environment.
Nadège Mériau has taken a similar viewpoint with her Roots series; in
some cases isolating individual plants and their plant system, in others
exposing the surreal nature of plants simply though the direction of her lens.
Other works in the exhibition juxtapose nature and domesticity to suggest new
contexts and narratives.
Both Leonora Chan and Melanie Stidolph use photography to give us
a new angle on the familiar landscape. Leonora Chan’s landscapes are highlighted
with an eerie, effervescent light that makes an ordinary hedgerow or shoreline
appear magically staged. In fact these are all lit ‘naturally’ by light
pollution. This unsettling fact brings in to question the human and urban impact
on nature. Where Chan uses long exposures to capture the artificial light
Melanie Stidolph shoots off reels of film to capture that moment when life
itself seems a little off key. The photograph in the upper gallery of
undergrowth reveals a hare sitting, just off centre. The viewer comes across the
unexpected detail and invariably discovers more on each viewing.
Andy Harper constructs complex visual fodder through paint. This can be
seen in his large triptych, where paint is used to build up dense foliage.
Through an exact and repetitive technique he builds up leaves, fruits and twigs
into a disturbing image of barely controlled wilderness. Based in London and
Cornwall, Andy Harper co-runs Assembly in St Just – an artists’ residency space
in a converted chapel.
John Timberlake paints disturbing scenes that illuminate narratives
within landscapes. For Curious Nature Timberlake presents a series of works
depicting moonscapes and landscapes in the style of astronomical illustrations
from the 1950s and early 1960s; fictitious, yet evocative of a bygone era.
Alongside these constructed fantasies are manipulated works, part photograph,
part drawing, of natural topographies that lie beneath the urban surface.
Day+Gluckman are Lucy Day and Eliza Gluckman, a curatorial partnership who have been working together since 2006. Initially trained as artists and latterly working as curators they have worked for many years across independent, public, artist-led and commercial galleries . They are currently programming a series of exhibitions for the Collyer Bristow Gallery in London, the first of which was Curious Nature, which opened in February this year.
This exhibition has been supported by Collyer Bristow LLP.