03.01.11
The last Friday before Christmas was Meet the Artists night at the House Gallery, Camberwell. The event heralded the closing night of this successful and thought provoking show, a sideways look at landscape - curated by Sophie Eade and Laura Moreton-Griffiths.
Alexia Anastasiadis, Clare Stanhope, Dom Lawson, Flora Cook, Georgina Corrie, Jackie Parsons, Laura Moreton-Griffiths, Russell Eade, Sonia Stanyard, Sophie Eade, Sorcha Rooney, Terry Ryan and VJ Moreton presented their personal notions of landscape: dark truths, narrative themes, and aesthetic tangents.
Terry Ryan showed selected subverted admiralty charts, indentures and ‘You Are Here’ paintings. Sorcha Rooney’s paintings from memory evoke a continuous journey through the countryside and the curve of a hill against the skyline. Russell Eade’s painting ‘Spaceman’, tells of the lengths we will go to in the quest for space and his ‘Barbican’ with all structure removed highlights the density of the built and urban environment. V J Moreton’s strongly directed emotive and political sensibilities, exploits photomontage and collage techniques in a parody of Constable’s horses. Georgina Corrie’s exquisite wall based ceramics of pure pattern recall the interior of a Palladian house and the wealth of the landowning gentry. Clare Stanhope’s elevation and delight in the insignificant parts of her daily life, has her stitching tiny domestic landscapes, marks and cuts lifted from her kitchen work surface. Jackie Parsons’ hand crafted and cheekily irreverent monkeys made of recycled materials and posed to characterize Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews took a prominent place as did her tiny Mrs Andrews, at home, seated on a cardboard chair below a Georgina Corrie ceramic wallpaper piece. Flora Cooke washes and weaves the police tape she finds on her local streets in Peckham, to make new images that draw attention to everyday menace and civil liberties. Sonia Stanyard’s haunting shed in woods painting creates a mood of contemplation conceived through re-working and rotating the canvas until she can identify a landscape within. Alexia Anastasiadis’ hand carved minotaur ‘The Traveller’ stands tall in his miniaturized sand pit, an androgynous archetype of the mind in a mythological lizard filled landscape. Laura Moreton-Griffiths’ selected pastoral drawings imagine a lost rural idyll, and she uses photomontage to hint at the continuity of time and previous land usage, her plastic sheep inhabit the Sophie Croxton Gallery, full of symbolism and political metaphor. Dom Lawson’s ‘Tarmac road’ alludes to the leap into the void and ‘Relic’, a chunk of real tarmacadam complete with yellow lines embedded in canvas, reminds us of the tomb that lies beneath our feet. Sophie Eade’s photographs of her landscape interventions at ‘Brownsea Island, remind us of the beauty of nature and the real landscape, and what is already present. Her concentrated removal of all growing things from an issue of Country Life has an eerie painterly quality, each page a discrete image of absence.