Cure

Laura Bygrave / Brian Cheeswright / Alex Crocker / Grant Foster / Ed Hill / Marie Jacotey

24 October - 14 November

Private View Fri 23 October, 6-9pm

Gallery Open Fri & Sat 12-6pm, Sun by appointment

From fragmentary forms to off-kilter compositions, Cure focuses on a type of image making which actively embraces distortion and deconstructed motifs. The resulting images act like an oblique reflection through a refracted mirror onto a wider quixotic world of references.

Laura Bygrave works with imagery from the basis of amplification through simplification. Thinking of cartoons as being hyper real versions of our reality Bygrave takes the distillation and distortion inherent in cartooning and makes paintings investigating the psychological effect of pictorial space. Her paintings are drawn from her fascination with Cubism, theories of higher dimensions, folk stories, witchcraft, feminism, sexuality, death and birth.

Before becoming an Artist, Brian Cheeswright studied History and this interest in time and interpretation is a connecting thread through his diverse output. It manifests in a questioning of accepted narratives, the idea that an Artist can ever really know what they are doing in advance and how certain ways and signifiers are ridiculed or ignored if they don't fit certain rules within the architecture of a given moment. Brian Cheeswright is seeking to discover whether constructs like beauty, reverie and whimsy are really exhausted.

Alex Crocker is interested in the ideas of the ‘early’. Early in terms of the historical and early in terms of the beginnings of making a painting. Crocker questions ideas of the provisional and archetypal within painting whilst exploring the fundamental issues of painting; the relationship between figure and ground, line and form and the space between illusion and matter.

Grant Foster makes use of British Romantic Painting’s idealized depictions of pastoral settings to interrogate the role that images play in establishing and articulating our shared value systems, social norms and ideals. Subtle alterations to the subject matter disrupt our expectations of the genre and remind the viewer that tradition had a dark role as an instigator of cultural persuasion.

Ed Hill works in painting, drawing, ceramics and print. Although no one method is repeated, works are informed by personal memories, resonant experiences and narratives (blurring imagined and real), merged with a wide range of references. Among them, the natural world and phenomena, songs, medieval and primitive art, cultural artefacts, children’s art, comics and specific areas of art history are drawn upon in a celebratory spirit. Fundamentally Hill’s work explores and reflects on painterly and artistic traditions and conventions, his fascinations, personal world and psyche, the natural world and timeless human themes, observations and scenarios.