11th April 2022 between 18.00 and 21.00
St Michael on the Mount Without (at the bottom of St Michaels Hill), Bristol.
After the last two years of enforced social distancing, cancelled exhibitions, virtual gallery submissions, loads of actual gallery submissions with limited success, extreme mood swings and lethargy, I felt that I ought to take a risk and booked St Michael on the Mount Without, in Bristol to hold a solo show for work completed during this period.
Fortunately, with restrictions no longer enforced, visits to other recent art in Bristol shows that the mood is there to get out again and so the show is on.
I hope you can make it.
The show ranges from paintings, to ink on paper sketches, to found object assemblies, a book of tree photographs and a carpet made of one of my paintings.
Created during a period of shared social distancing, the work explores the sense of displacement and detachment formed by the inevitable isolation and while the isolation of a studio is a comfort, when enforced it diminishes one’s sense of being to the point that what remains may be unrecognisable.
After the silence develops, unstructured memories supported by photographs and music too painful to hear indicate a future unfettered by a past. Through detachment the opportunity of reinvention becomes real; a canvas to paint over.
Old marks support an invented narrative, modified through reiteration, calcified by use. The act of remembering becomes unwanted, and is replaced by a stillness that merely shouts of the possibility of better things.
The silence is too loud so you repeat, and in repetition, you find your place, you’ve found the light.
I know that art can civilise unpromising spaces but my concern with this space was that it is the complete opposite of the white box that most at galleries are and the paintings are going to have to work really hard to just be noticed.