Looking at Landscape
The first of a series of 3 exhibitions by Ionarts 'Looking at Landscape'
ionarts is a group of five artists who work together on subjects of common interest and show research material with contemporary art work:Barbara Greene, Pat Harvey, Peter Harvey, Des Pattison and Ann Rutherford.The name derives from ion, 'an excited particle'. With the exception of Peter, all the group are former MA Printmaking graduates. Looking at Landscape is a series of 3 exhibitions.The first, Landscape,in the Yorkshire Craft Centre Café Bar, takes a new look at the genre of landscape art, with painting, digital photography, printmaking and sculpture. The second exhibition, Field Day will take the form of an exhibition within the landscape, in a field in Grassington in June 2009, and the third will be held in early 2010.
Two of the artists offered a flavour of their work:
Barbara Greene explained “My work is all about the development of life in the Aire Valley over 400 years. Blue and White Landscape has pictures of the Swire family and contains a collection of pottery fragments all dug up in my garden in Cononley village, from where the Swire family travelled to the Far East and became bankers. Willow pattern, which is still well loved after 400 years, is landscape in art, but one with a Chinese influence, and I love the connection of finding it buried in a North Yorkshire Farmyard. River Winding is about the River Aire. I expanded my picture from Skipton Castle down to outside Keighley. It traces the development of farming, the wool mills, then the buildings falling down and the buttercups coming back. Skipton Castle underwent a 3 year siege and the lady who lived in my house, Mary Bradley, fed Cromwellian soldiers billeted there. Document is based on one of the documents relating to this that I found in the attic, but rewritten to make it illegible, fragile and symbolic of traces of the past. I have also made a cross section of our sitting room in steel.
This land is shaped by sheep, in their wool and seen in the landscape. Field Study is a series of images of fields that used to belong to our farmhouse. I did not want to show them as ordinary, but worked, ploughed and essential for the survival of people who lived in the seventeenth century. Map is taken from just near our house and features the outline of Gargrave Sharp. It is made in rusted steel, evoking the river and metal taken from the earth. A tributary of the Aire goes past former lead mines and the dragonfly in Specimen is symbolic of the flowers and plants which still cannot live because the water is poisoned. Once Upon a Time is a fairytale book. It shows Skipton Castle reflecting the importance of castles in fantasy and mythology. It is 'for Joseph' as it is influenced by Joseph Cornell, an important artist in the early 1900s, who made boxes for his friends which were very surreal.”
Ann Rutherford is passionate about the countryside. “I love the lansdcape. I spend a lot of time outside, off road cycling and walking. I have always lived in villages and from my windows I look out on moors and farmland. For years I have done photography and printmaking, though previously it has been far more abstract and conceptual work, but this time I wanted to take my love of the countryside and enjoy it in my art. I wanted to evoke these feelings in my collograph prints. I tried to bring to these pictures the loveliness of the countryside but also the vastness of the huge moors. They are taken from the viewpoint of the side, so in the dark ones it is like when you are driving at night and the car headlights sweep along. You only see a little but you sense the vastness beyond.
I also explored the twilight and sunlight. The landscape is constantly changing and differs from minute to minute. So light, changes and feelings are all in my prints. For the photographs I used a big old lens, that I believe came out of a theatre light to reflect an area and enjoy it like a jewel.”
You can see exhibition highlights here
Looking at Landscape runs concurrently with the Multi Box Project and Blink exhibitions in the Gallery , from 20th April to 15th May 2009.
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