Metamorphose

Metamorphose
2nd - 23rd November 2007
Curated by Eleanor Pearce
Artist: Alex Ball, Ben Blackhouse, Katherine Hucker, Christpoher May, Hiromi Owen, Laura Stocker

Metamorphose brings together the talents of six contemporary artists with differing approaches to Painting and Photography.
 
In Alex Ball’s intriguing paintings, hives, furs and the male subject coexist upon ‘fertile grounds’ of sproutings and detritus in carefully chosen arrangements. Allegories in the style of the shorter works of Kafka, his works are devised of haunting image associations too unstable to be limited by definite readings.
 
Ben Backhouse’s evocative photographs explore the urban nocturnal world and its place in our psyche. Artificially lit landscapes, bereft of their daytime crowds, demonstrate their beauty from their proximity to the unknown.
 
Katherine Hucker’s abstractions look at the relationships between space, objects and context in the structural and architectural world. She seeks to make sense of the world through visual representation, using different perspectives and a process of drawing, re-drawing, painting and collage.
 
Christopher May’s paintings depict abandoned spaces reconfigured by time and memory. Themes of disintegration and the abstract familiar, inevitably and inexorably linked, underpin this collection. The work’s fundamental discourse concerns how we view spaces, respond to them and relate to them in the time we have with them.
 
Hiromi Owen’s projects constitute a process of testing and establishing identity. Taking documentation to a necessary extreme, she photographs every meal, every drink and every toilet she uses for a year, mapping the pattern of her life in an objective, tangible sense.
 
Laura Stocker’s arresting pieces, constructed entirely from matchsticks, reference Op Art, crafts, pattern making and Geometric Abstraction. The structural qualities of the matchstick, denying the edge of the canvas, mean the pieces are on the verge of being sculptural.
 
This Exhibition was made possible with kind support from the Fenton Arts Trust.