- Venue
- Beverley Knowles Fine Art
- Location
Turning off Golborne Road into Bevington Road, your eye is caught by a splash of pink: Beverley Knowles' gallery. In the window hangs Marguerite Horner's Large seascape, Faith Pours from Your Walls II, its contemplative greys impervious to its vivid framing. The vista of tumbling clouds meeting the sea's horizon, holds a brightness from the primed canvas which takes the place of colour. It is as if Horner does not want to be distracted by colour. While probing into what lies beyond the material, she explores the tension that exists through using this very materiality of paint.
Positioning Speed of Time and To be where you really are opposite one another is intentional. The image of the house in each signals a sense of the uncanny, (literally 'unhomely'), and this in turn is accentuated by this mirroring. In To be where you really are, Horner's meticulous use of paint allowing colour to seep into this one piece, forces the viewer to be present in the painting. Deep in the bracken we are where it is earthy, tactile and voyeuristic. Speed of Time in contrast, plays with bleached out colours and the blurring of movement.
A similar jolt of the unfamiliar within the familiar is found in the subtle and arresting work of Miranda Argyle. Linen squares are stitched with repetitive phrases, reminiscent of girls' schoolroom samplers centuries ago. But the wording shocks: How Does My Heart Keep Beating is both the title and the image. The march of words mirrors the action of sewing and the beat of the heart, which manages to suggest both an incantation to keep the grim reaper at bay and a recognition of the inevitability of death.
The pieces' sculptural quality is emphasised by the daylight picking out the shadow of the stitched letters. The unseen underside shows through and makes an erratic counterpoint to the measured and 'perfect' 'right' side. Threads behind Two and A Half Billion Heartbeats are like veins beneath a skin; the satin applique image of curtains is a play on words while the number is that of an average heart at fifty. Hearbeat is made up of these letters set out with equal spacing making their sense morph into other words such as 'The', 'art', 'she', 'he'. The letters, white on white, shimmer between our reading them as text and responding to it as image.
Claire Fahys' complex cityscapes are painted and drawn from fragments of memories of the European cities she has viisted. She calls the process 'cutting' which recalls the Lacanian symbolic as 'a cut in the real'. Fahys uses only the elements of buildings that have seared her memory. She 'deomposes' them, only to 'recompose' them in gouache, acrylic, pen and ink, reflecting the nature of constant change in cities themselves. In Ville de Nuit I and II there is a speed and vitality in the process. Like a parcourt free runner Fahys has leapt through alleys, climbed towers and padded the streets.
Practising artist, teacher, writer
