King’s Lynn gallery has bird-themed exhibition

As part of King’s Lynn Heritage Open Day, GroundWork, Norfolk’s premier gallery for art and the environment, hosts a closing exhibition of six artists who portray the fragility of endangered birds on the Red List.

“Bird after Bird” is important in that the number of endangered British birds has risen by 20, to a total of 70 birds.

The gallery, nominated for the Eastern Daily Press People’s Choice Arts Awards for best small arts organisation, includes a mixed media show of photography, sculpture, film, prints, prints, ceramics and textiles.

Jayne Ivimey is a Norfolk artist who explores destruction of bird species through white bisque-fired dead effigies of birds supported by observation research from the archives of the Rothschild museum in Tring, and Norwich Castle Museum. Her abstract ceramic work shows “limp, bodies, heads and hanging loose teeth, wings folded without purpose”.

Milo Newman of Bristol Spike Island uses photography to examine the arcs of movement of birds who migrate each winter to the Norfolk coastline.

Patrick Haines of Spike Island artists studios uses sculpture to represent the alliance between the natural and man-made world.

The continuum of Suki Best’s blue and white 2010 commissioned artiscam film is thrown as a backdrop to the gallery wall.

Martin Brandsma, who works from the the Schaopedobbe nature reserve in Denmark, presents 152 morphological drawings of the Great Grey Shrikee.

Nessie Stonebridge’s bucolic studio work explores the dynamics of Wet Woods. Her current painterly series of swan paintings are symptomatic with fight or flight behaviour of all birds.

GroundWork, formerly known as the “Winlove” building, was developed from a derelict carpenter’s workshop built in the 1930’s. It was developed by the new co-owners by Veronica Sekules, former deputy director of the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and Sandy Heslop.

Situated next to the 17th century Custom House in the Vancouver quarter of the town it has future plans for a second phase exciting gallery development by The Norfolk Building Company.

The gallery opened one year ago with a major show by the Turner Prize British Landscape artists, (now showing as “Earth Sky”: Richard London at Houghton Hall, until October 26). GroundWork is just one of the many heritage highlights to be seen in Lynn at the Heritage Day Open Weekend.