GroundWork artists give message of hope at King's Lynn exhibition
A new exhibition celebrating the third anniversary of the GroundWork Gallery at Lynn gives hope for the renewal of nature.
‘Fragile Nature - from control to freedom’ opens to the public today (Saturday) and runs until September 15 at the 17 Purfleet Street gallery.
It features four women artists of different generations, all of whom are attempting the expression of original inter-relationships with nature.
We have had so much news about the damage we are causing, the losses of species, the over-use of natural resources, the squandering of fossil fuels – but the featured artists are deep thinkers, finding ways to represent the resourcefulness and power that challenges our views of nature’s fragility.
The message from all of them is that out of destruction comes new life and renewal.
French artist Paca Sanchez makes direct use of plants to create poetic new order. This is her first exhibition in the UK.
In France she is very well known, having had more than 40 exhibitions and residencies.
Her exact contemporary (both women are 80) Elspeth Owen is a radical, entirely original, ceramic artist, working from her Granchester studio.
She has a long association with environmental protest movements and feminism and is showing pots made for a pregnancy ritual, as well as rattles and nature-inspired pairs of spoons which look like small mating creatures.
Lotte Scott, an emerging artist who trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, engages in risky experimentation with free forms from unpredictable watery suspensions of peat, and sculpture from burnt basketry.
The youngest of the four, Emma Howell, graduated in Fine Art in Gloucestershire in 2015.
New life from destruction has become quite literally an essential element of her work, in her recovery from grief following her father’s sudden death.
She dedicates her art to her father, and her bright, life-affirming images, full of symbolism, have made her something of a social media star.
The exhibition is open from 11am-4pm, Tuesday-Saturday. For further information visit www.groundworkgallery.com
