- Venue
- Kingsgate Workshops Trust and Gallery
- Location
- London
This show is the culmination of a years’ residency with the Kingsgate Workshop Trust. The three young artists whose work makes up this exhibition are Ella Bryant, Eva Masterman and Benjamin Senior, who were all chosen from a large pool of competing artists to participate in the Emerging Artists 2011 residency. Speaking to the Kingsgate Workshop Trust mentors, it is clear that this show displays a great deal of progression and development for each of the artists involved, and certainly demonstrates the value of opportunities such as the Emerging Artists residency.
Counterpoise devotes equal time and space to each artist. Ella Bryant’s work is based around the medium of photography; Eva Masterman is a sculptor working mostly in ceramic; Benjamin Senior is a painter practicing in egg tempera. Out of all of the works on display, I was immediately captivated by Senior’s paintings. They seem to portray a hyper-real reality located in the everyday. There is a lightness, even playfulness about his figures and scenes, at the same time as a tension which comes from the almost flat quality of the light. The paintings and the people who populate them inhabit a space between figurative and symbolic – reminiscent of religious painting in the way that the body is made less like a body, and more like a form; a representation of something. Lines and linear patterns are everywhere; as unassuming as it is visually stunning.
Eva Masterman’s sculptures are minimalist and abstract – depicting something that falls between a void and a shape. One is reminded of organic forms; gyres perhaps. On reading the titles of each work, we become aware of an emotional significance; ‘keeping distance’ – ‘location of desire’ – ‘a kind of ache’. With this in mind, we can begin to see an abstraction of the body in her work – or perhaps an embodiment of emotional states. It is interesting work, some of it on a dramatic scale, that works well in the Kingsgate Gallery space and provides a counterbalance to Ella Bryant’s work, which is as chaotic and confrontational as Masterman’s is understated and intense. Bryant is primarily a photographer, but her work here also includes sculpture, and it is clear she is happiest when straying outside the narrow confines of what is expected from certain materials. The photographic work is also collage, using found materials and employing chemical reactions. The textured surfaces and subversion of objects or materials in Bryant’s work seem indicative of a strong dedication to practice; experimentation and exploration.
There is a certain amount of danger in trying to tie an overarching theme to an exhibition featuring three such different artists, but given the name of the show – Counterpoise – it is perhaps safe to say that this tricky balancing act was not approached lightly or without consideration. Counterpoise is first and foremost an exhibition that focuses on practice. One can almost feel the three artists creeping out of their shells here. There is simultaneously a focus on, and gaze
away from, the body. Senior’s bodies, painstakingly rendered in egg tempera become something other than bodies; Masterman’s fluted sculptures hint at an abstraction of the body, or the dualism of body/mind; Bryant’s visceral photographic work suggestively and sometimes overtly presents ‘bodies’ in various stages of crisis.
Counterpoise is a well put together collection – a showcase of achievement for three very different and talented emerging artists. Long may organisations like the Kingsgate Workshop Trust prosper, and
enable young creative people to reach their full potential.
