This exhibition brings together four artists who use images of trees to explore the visual languages of landscape, botanical illustration, narrative and abstraction.

Oona Culley creates delicate illusory constructions that combine found objects with projections and painting in order to play with visual perception and memory. Flowers are restored in vases, or dry pebbles appear half covered by a tide;
a marker pen traces onto walls and floor the outlines of objects once present, or a painted canvas fixes the shadows of the now absent last leaves on a twig. What was previously lost or forgotten gains visibility or takes on an imaginary life in these poetic and ghostly installations and sculptural paintings.

Alex Gough makes almost monochrome paintings of trees silhouetted against twilight. He explores his relationship with his Finnish origins through a very specific kind of Lapland winter light at the same time as testing out an artistic heritage of single colour abstraction (Barnett Newman, Rothko, Yves Klein). There are no frills or flourishes in the brushwork and no concessions to surface or texture. These uncannily blank and still paintings suggest absence and melancholy, but also flirt with notions of the sublime previously pursued by abstractionists and landscape painters alike.

Jane Gregory collects and records botanical specimens using a flatbed scanner and Photoshop. In a hi-tech process that echoes Victorian activities such as flower pressing and botanical illustration she creates images of flowers, buds, whole plants and - in this case - whole bonsai trees that are apparently precise trompe l'oeil renderings of nature.
The resultant prints suggest a degree of enhancement:
the specimens, suspended on their black grounds possess unnaturally vivid colour schemes and a strange constructed air. There is a suggestion they may be part of a larger catalogue of artificially improved flora being assembled with a healthy disregard for botanical accuracy

Chisato Tamabayashi creates hand-made books whose pages contain intricately chiselled and layered tree motifs. Through a painstaking process of cutting, folding and forming paper a narrative develops around the passage of time, the seasons and the life-cycle of a tree. The resultant artifact is at times graphic and economic in its style whilst in places becoming decoratively overloaded and sumptuous. Layering, concealment, surprise and playfulness are manifest in the accumulated pages as the ‘reader’ is inculcated in a subtle and covert exploration of cultural identity.

TEXT: Martyn Simpson

Curator
Joe Madeira

Co-curators
Piola Massarotto
Martyn Simpson

Artists
Oona Culley
Alex Gough
Jane Gregory
Chisato Tamabayashi

Private View
Thursday 1 March 2007
6.00 - 9.00pm

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