Fourseen Exhibition Starts
Artists: Ruth Duffy, Debbie Gould, Mike Allison, Lindsay Fellowes. The exhibition runs from Saturday 18 March to Saturday 29 April.
Ruth Duffy creates multi faced work based around textiles, embroidery and selected papers combined to make beautiful landscapes, seascapes, mountains and architectural reflections. Elements are stitched together by hand and and machine to created multi-layered works of storytelling though mixed media. Evocative and engaging, these lovely works reflect the richness of the places they portray as well as the artists relationship with those places.
Enjoy a workshop with Ruth on Monday 27th March at the Foxlowe.
Debbie Gould is an artist who considers the uncomfortable issues related to the human condition through individual and collaborative projects. Using paint, print, photography and mixed media assemblage, her projects explore the hidden taboos within society in a challenging, but somewhat playful way. Her work is autobiographical, ambiguous and often humorous look at everyday life.
Her most recent work, ‘Minotaurinretirement’, a homage to Picasso’s ‘La Minotauromachie’, is a mordacious look at the sentiment of retirement, the somewhat mundane, boring , and repetitive everyday routines that creep up on us all during the latter stages of life. Through the highly sexual mythological figure of the Minotaur, she creates a humorous expression of the uncanny.
Mike Allison is exhibiting work from two strands of printmaking that he has explored. The first set is a relief series of prints made using engraving and linocut processes. Inspired by the fin de siècle film making of Georges Méliès, these prints explore the dream like imagery and symbolism infused in many of these early films. The original films have been subsequently hand coloured and the bright, vaudevillian palette has informed Mike’s vibrant linocuts.
A second series of much subtler and more muted prints is also on display. In these prints Mike has used the original printmaking processes of drypoint and monotype to create work that explores the Midlands landscape, focussing upon light, the time of the day and a sense of place. Mike enjoys investigating ‘thickets’ of complex patterns within the landscape. The medium of monotype means each print is unique with the prints labelled ‘EV’, meaning edition varies. These prints are very close to drawing and painting, with each print worked on individually and evolving organically according to the vagaries and mishaps of the original printmaking process.
Workshop printing without a press with Mike on Monday 17th April.
Lindsay Fellowes is a mixed media artists who, influenced by the work of David Hockney, Matthew Harris, Amanda Clayton Debbie Lyndon among others, works intuitively using the inspiration she gets from the physical environment. Her pieces are mainly an abstract expression of her emotional responses using fabric, papers and painting alongside printing and sewn embellishments to create organic and inspirational pieces.
Lindsay’s workshop is on Tuesday 28th March at the Foxlowe.
Book workshops via mike.allison10@yahoo.co.uk. 07455286700
The Gallery will be open from Wednesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm each week, and the first Sunday in each month, 11am to 4pm.