At New Court Gallery
and Gallery No.1, Repton, Derbyshire
Curated by Ruth
Solomons
Kim Baker
Louisa Chambers
Lisa McKendrick
Ben Walker
29th January-21st February 2013
The four artists
presented here are all working with ideas of impossibility. Symbology, gesture,
emotion and playfulness push each of their subject sources through the eye of a
needle into works of vast connotation and visual richness.
Kim Baker's starting premise is that the magical beauty
of an imagined garden is best interpreted instinctually. Organic forms act like
a basic primal motive for the very human gestural processes which she employs.
The original subject matter undergoes a kind of material and sensual
transformation that transcends mere representation. Her approach is one of
stopping to smell the roses, through purposeful and considered mark making
intertwined with painterly accident.
Louisa Chambers paints impossible
constructions of architectural and scientific authority imbued with dreamlike
symbols and organic elements. She takes technology through the looking glass
and transforms it into machines of our imagination. Louisa Chambers' paintings
seem to offer ways through which to cope with a contemporary sense of conflict
between our inner dream world and the daily imposition of robotic control on
our lives.
Lisa McKendrick's paintings derive from a personal
sense of psyche – intuitive symbology from an internal world of dreams and
influenced by childhood memories of her Mexican heritage. Objects emptied of
function crowd her paintings, unanchored against surreal luminous landscapes.
Their clashing perspectives present opposing worlds existing at once: reality
and illusion, the present and the past, the living and the dead.
Text by Ruth Solomons
Needle’s Eye is a touring exhibition
previously shown at Transition Gallery, London and BayArt, Cardiff in 2012
