Needle's Eye, Wentworth, UK

The Needle’s Eye, Listed Grade II, Wentworth, South Yorkshire

"Around 1746, the Needle’s Eye, a slender pyramid about 45ft high was built with a tall ogee arch and a flamboyant urn on top. The most memorable factor behind this folly, one of the finest in Britain, is the legend of how it came to be built. The story runs that, one night, the inebriated Earl Fitzwilliam accepted a wager that he could not “drive a carriage through the eye of a needle”. The following morning, sober, he realised the difficulty of completing the challenge so, in an expensive solution, he constructed a narrow arch just wide enough to allow a coach through and called it “The Needle’s Eye”. It is not known if the legend is true. There is evidence of that suggests the building was used for execution by firing squad or target practice, as one side bears several distinct musket-ball marks."

The original inspiration of the exhibition Needle’s Eye was taken from the folly in Wentworth, South Yorkshire.

The forth-coming posts will be a combination of recently finished paintings and found images from the internet which I am sourcing for ideas for future artwork and projects.

Needle's Eye

Below are images from the touring exhibition Needle’s Eye which is currently being shown at the New Court Gallery and Gallery No.1 in Repton, Derbyshire. Ruth Solomons who is the curator of Needle’s Eye, selected some of my new paintings for the exhibition and they are being shown alongside works by Kim Baker, Lisa McKendrick and Ben Walker. You can see more photographs of the exhibition on my Flickr page

(Left to Right) Garden 8 by Kim Baker, Perspective of the Regular Solids Version 1 by Louisa Chambers, Alleyway by Lisa McKendrick and The Perfume of Strangers by Ben Walker

(Left to Right) A Boy and his Toys by Ben Walker, Sound Reflector by Louisa Chambers 

and Rose Painting 2 by Kim Baker

Over the Hills and Far Away, 2013, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm 

Tent, 2013, Acrylic, spray paint and oil on canvas, 22 x 30 cm

Needle's Eye, New Court Gallery, Repton, Derbyshire

At New Court Gallery and Gallery No.1, Repton, Derbyshire

Curated by Ruth Solomons

Kim Baker

Louisa Chambers

Lisa McKendrick

Ben Walker

http://www.scoop.it/t/needle-s-eye

http://www.repton.org.uk/needles-eye

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.

Ben Walker's source material of the Holocaust and Nazism confounds an easy literal understanding due to its historical scale, weight, and overwhelming horror. Ben Walker's paintings strive to tell a bleak and emotional truth through the sparingly described surfaces of his coarse grained linen canvases. Abused bodies hollowed and shadowed from severe privations, and androgynous children barely discernible amid traces of abandoned landscapes, convey small details of the stark histories implied. It is through what is left out that the true meaning is understood.

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

Collage Experiments

Non Stop Radio, 2013, mixed media, 16 x 16 cm

These small collage experiments are a way to gather shape ideas which can be used for the background of my paintings. I am using collage to break down the formal concerns in painting and to be playful with juxtaposing different shapes. 

Structure, 2013, mixed media, 12 x 18 cm

Frame, 2013, mixed media, 18 x 14 cm

Mask, 2013, mixed media, 14 x 20 cm

Mute, 2013, mixed media, 15 x 17 cm

Eye, 2013, mixed media, 13 x 13 cm

Figure 1, 2013, mixed media, 10 x 13 cm

Flatland

Blivet, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm

Mobile Transmitter, 2012, acrylic on oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm

The paintings here were shown in Flatland an exhibition I curated at the Blyth Gallery, Imperial College in London. These are a new series of works where I have been exploring how we perceive three dimensional forms in a two dimensional space. The shapes in the paintings are taken from doodles in my sketch book, optical illusions and etchings of geometric forms which originate from the 17th Century.

Perspective of the Regular Solids Version 1, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 40 cm

In my previous paintings, more often than not, the structure or object is placed in a block colour background to propose a void and also to concentrate on the form itself. A horizontal line sits beneath the structure and grounds it in a space.

Zig-Zag, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm

Sound Reflector, 2012, acrylic and oil on canvas, 60 x 70 cm

In Zig-Zag and Sound Reflector, I experimented with lines and shape to suggest other spaces behind the object. Playing with the idea of the flipping between the object and ground, I wanted the object to float just above the ground. 

Necker Cube

Necker Cube, 2012, colour pencil on paper, 30 x 21 cm

There are well-known figures which flip between a few possibilities. These are known as ‘ambiguous figures’. They are extremely important for showing the dynamics of perception, the searching for hypotheses of objects that might or might not be in the external world. Here the answer- the perception- is never decided. There are different kinds of flipping ambiguities- between shapes, depths, and different objects. The best known is the Necker Cube.

Here there is no evidence to indicate which of the large faces is the front or the black. Vision entertains alternative, roughly equally likely hypotheses. So here we see it flip between two equally likely cubes as different depth hypotheses are entertained. What is not clear, is why it is only these depth hypotheses that are entertained and seen.

(Gregory, Richard L, Eye and Brain The Psychology of Seeing, Fifth Ed. 1998)

Flatland, Blyth Gallery, London

Louisa Chambers
Geoff Diego Litherland
Daisy Richardson

‘I am not a plane Figure, but a Solid. You call me a Circle; but in reality I am not a Circle, but an infinite number of Circles, of size varying from a Point to a Circle of thirteen inches in diameter, one placed on the top of the other.’

(Edwin A. Abbot Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions)

The title of the exhibition derives from the narrative Flatland which was written by the English Clergyman, educator and Shakespearean scholar, Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland follows a journey of a square, a resident of two-dimensional Flatland who travels and intersects with other geometric shapes from different spatial planes. The character begins to reflect on how they perceive these unfamiliar forms through the eyes of a two-dimensional shape, a Flatlander.
 
The three artists in this exhibition situate objects in imaginary spaces that suggest they have arrived from any number of dimensions. Geological fragments and landscapes are suspended in alternative realities, as if frozen in time, allowing the figures to be seen from a multiplicity of viewpoints. Similarly, the flipping between ambiguous forms in both two and three dimensions allows a visual tension between the physical and psychological. This is heightened further when the surface of an object in three dimensions, is reduced to a one dimensional plane concentrating on just the line or brush mark.
 
Louisa Chambers examines ideas surrounding machines, devices, and inventions, and how they could assist humans living in temporary or placeless worlds. Multiple dimensions and perspectives are explored through the materiality of paint and the repetition of geometric motifs which are floating ambiguously in space. Impossible architectural constructions or forms are situated in alternative universes and dreamworlds suggesting an escape from the technological daily burden of robotic control on our lives.
 
Geoff Diego Litherland explores the tension between the natural world and its grasping appropriation by human influence. It draws from traditional genres of painting together with the rusty surrealism of science fiction and the phantasia of abstraction to create a parallel world that seeks to not only question our perception of nature, but paintings’ historical and current role in that. Lush Romantic landscapes appear to be contained within inscrutable technological structures, yet at the same time seen to recede into planes that suggest infinite space. They are radiant and disturbing with the fascination of the familiar made deeply strange.

Daisy Richardson is interested in alternative realities, layers of space and time and things that could be there. Some works use illusion to disguise themselves and others show normal objects acting in a bizarre way, looking towards the schism in the everyday. The interiors are very ordinary and faceless with extra-normal events occurring within them. The events also refer to human interaction; how spaces are shaped by what has happened within their confines and on the sites where they stand. How we can live somewhere so old that seems so new - modern technology co-existing with ancient fossils.

Blyth Gallery, Level 5, Sherfield Building, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2AZ
28th November 2012 until 3rd January 2013
Private View: 27th November 2012, 6-9pm
Contact Email: gallery@imperial.ac.uk
Website: http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/arts/visualart/blythgallery