Vitrine, circa 1900, has three glass shelves and the frame is oak. It stands in a corner of the living room in my new 1920s home and replaces a small makeshift 'museum' that used to house artefacts given to me by students and artist friends.
Vitrine is offered to any artists in my UK and global network to use as an experimental and temporary installation space with the intention that the artist can invite a selected audience to engage with the work.
Each installation will be documented photographically, to be compiled into an occasional, limited-edition publication.
Kernel
8th February
- 2nd March 2025
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
In response to Vitrine, I have chosen materials and forms that exploit translucency and notions of symmetry.
The combination of the glass shelves and lighting offer the opportunity to explore mirroring, reflection, density and simultaneous viewpoints using similar repeated fragments that are transitory and fragile.
Camouflage
11th January
- 1st February 2025
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
Camouflage is an installation
of painted postcards, featuring mask-like portraits of women writers and artists, their unidentifiable faces are split in two and float above a divided landscape. The tension between face and background suggests opposing forces, split personalities, connection/disconnection, inhabiting more than one way
of being.
It takes courage to reveal oneself and to stand out, camouflage is a position of self-defense. I select two postcards that have similar imagery, where natural forms or horizons are mirrored. I look for trees or mountains that might suggest hair, I want dark areas that will show through the spaces where the eyes and lips should be. There is an element of chance in the placing of the face, affecting what will be revealed.
The title Camouflage can be understood as a declaration on the possibilities available when being creative – chance, opportunity, status and history are all factors that come into play, affecting visibility and value.
The Notebook Drawings
23rd November
- 15th December 2024
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
The notebook drawings started just over a year ago. I’ve found that these small notebooks offer a liminal and quite private space, a space of intense looking where I can only concentrate on the small and specific.
What I have chosen to draw are natural forms, plants either taken from our garden or one of our local walks. One of the first subjects was a handful of grass.
I had already determined that I would do 10 drawings of each subject as a form of discipline and this first set of drawings was executed quite quickly, just a few minutes on each drawing but what I hadn’t quite anticipated as I peered at this grass is how intense my engagement and meticulous sense of it would become. Minutely observing a plant as it fades through lack of nourishment is exciting in itself but set against an experimentation with different materials and my own almost separate search to understand what drawing – drawing anything – might mean, is based in the practice of intense observation.
This work is about re-learning to draw, beginning to understand the complexity of it as I observe the minute and intricate details of plant forms, specifically as they fade.
This Glass is full of Looking
14th September
- 5th October 2024
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
My painting practice involves the use of water-based paint and salt as my raw ingredients, from which I develop pieces heuristically, in a variety of forms, often from re-worked materials.
Salt suits my purposes in many ways, as it is loaded with various histories and cultural powers. It disrupts my intentions: I can never completely predict the visual outcome of any piece and this working between chance and control is an area I have also explored in bookworks, and music/sound art (my indeterminate composition 'Songs of Garden Guitars' was passed around during the Vitrine evening, in painted paper cups, holding speakers).
The work displayed here is a partner to my previous show ‘The Leaves are full of Painting’ (Birdhouse, Pinces Park, Exeter 2023). This time, these Vitrine works acknowledge their housing within a domestic setting, with various narratives providing a comment upon their making.
Topographical Refrains
2nd - 6th September 2024
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
Our work for this iteration of Vitrine is based upon an artists’ residency we completed together with Sarah Bennett in Malaga, Spain in August 2022. Situated close to the Sierra de Mijas, the residency took place a few months after devastating wildfires swept the region.
The charred material we collected at the site and brought back to the UK became our starting point to further explore the materialities of this burnt landscape.
Each shelf is a refrain or return to the burnt landscape of Sierra de Mijas, exploring notions of topography, destruction, repair, and regeneration. As a whole composition, the work can be regarded as an internal echo of
the affect and materiality of wildfire.
We appreciate the opportunity to further reflect and extend the work we began with Sarah through the making of this work for Vitrine.
Tide Sweet Tide
27th July
- 15th August 2024
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
This work is influenced by the tide of waste and discarded material that litters our lives.
I have merged these materials with the skills in crochet I learned from my grandmother -and there is a strand of influence from the lace display at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum.
Dust Works
17th February
- 21st March 2024
Vitrine, Exeter
(viewing by appointment only)
Painters work with finely ground dust, mixed with a binder to make paint. For Vitrine I am exploring the possibilities of working with the dust itself. Instead of permanence, it means working with the moment... with a material that will shift with the lightest touch. While sacrificing stability, there is a gain in dynamism; it feels like reacting with the energies of nature.
The dust I work with is ground from stones that I find in the landscape. There are 38 samples of rock dust in this installation, that have come from all over the country. I consider my practice as composing with geography.
I have made 4 pieces of work for Vitrine, titled: Place, Journey, North-South, and Beginning and End.
Delicate Instruments (Vibrating Stillness)
25th November
- 21st December 2023
Vitrine, Exeter (viewing by appointment only)
Shifting between scientific and psychical thinking,Delicate Instruments suggests new ways to tune into hidden signals from the more-than-human.
Obscured by a veil, the vitrine initially withholds its contents. A closer look reveals them as objects held in unstable equilibrium and sensitive to the slightest stimuli: from trembling paper cases balanced on the points of nails, to indigo carbon paper primed to register subtle touch.
Some of these instruments are drawn from the realm of psychical experimentation, where they might have been placed in a sealed cabinet to isolate them from air currents and other physical influences.
Delicate Instruments was originally presented at the Devon & Exeter Institution as a part of a CAMP Research Residency. This latest iteration has been created specially for Vitrine.
