- Venue
- Swindon College
- Location
This thematic show, hosted by the Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts at the University of Bath campus, is presented for the third year running by BA Fine Art graduates from Swindon College. Quietly located, Art Space 2 gallery offers a place to contemplate pensive lines of enquiry. Poignant imagery runs parallel to express engagement with environment, and mirror a search for meaning and conscience,
Naomi Doble’s two photographic prints, portraying the artist and her sister as children and later grown up, compel us to compare them. Little twin girls sitting closely together and illuminated in sunlight, pose primly and smiling as beckoned, in their Sunday best outfits. With long flaxen hair beneath white straw boaters, starched collared frocks patterned with cherries and red streaming ribbons, they capture past conventions of nostalgic formality. Slightly out of focus image evokes distance of carefree days.
A subsequent sharply focused portrait brings the viewer into the present. Gestures are re-enacted but with freckled faces gone in the bloom of womanhood. Aspects of femininity display low cut neck lines, clutch bags and jewellery; replenished overripe cherries hanging as earrings. Their togetherness echoed, as the biggest rivals?
In direct contrast to the privileged world of the previous women, Helen Pakeman presents a series of indigenous peoples affected by disasters. Drawings individually portrayed on plain white background, direct our attention to their careworn gazes. Black inky lines jostle with bright red contours, struggling to contain smudges of patchy brown washes; as grubby stains. Seeping to form dark orbital shadows, they describe anguish in the unsettling image of Young Woman. Wearing a bedraggled red scarf wrapped around her head, she stares vacantly ahead into space and her eyelids are drooped with sorrow. Introspective in her grief, her desolation persuades us to feel more connected with her world.
Presented opposite, Sue Douglas’s photographic print, Bar Shadow, challenges us to consider personal thoughts. Strong graphic line of an overhanging corroding metal bar reflects in the ripples below as an alarming shadow of primordial vertebrae beneath murky waters. Intersecting with a flotilla of more sabotaging junk, discarded and drifting with the river, it reveals new perspectives. Tension gives way to contrasting patterns of rhythmic mirrored delicate fronds bouncing in sunlight. This captivating imagery and illusion becomes a platform for personal reflection bringing its own narrative, as we ponder the watery depths and question what we think we can see.
Nearby, Suzie Miles black and white abstract landscapes bring notions of contemplation in wintertime. Allow time to follow enigmatic trails of Lane No 1 screen print, in which the artist has responded directly to topographic character of nature, encountered on walking through a forest. Imprints of bold striations are rendered to arc and lurch at the ready, sharp and wild, to poke and trip you up, as metaphorical boundaries. Hectic all around, scaffolding archways support clusters of more delicate traces of rushing, wispy undergrowth. Forging through turmoil, calm pathways lead towards light outside; a search setting to conclude this intriguing show.
Christine Durrant is a video/visual artist having graduated from Swindon School of Art & Design in 2004.
