Trees
March 1 - April 19, 2007
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.
Shadow Memory by Oona Culley
Oil on canvas, twig and plinth
Illan Sini by Alex Gough
Oil, acrylic and ink on canvas
Red Yew by Jane Gregory
Digital C type print
Seasons - Autumn by Chisato Tamabayashi
Paper cut and acrylic
