The Alchemist’s Garden
An exhibition that celebrates storytelling and the imagination
Group Exhibition at The Graham Hunter Gallery - March 2020
Presenting four artists who, like the ancient alchemists transforming metals into gold through a magical process, weave their narratives into visual tales. Inspired from the realm of the imagination and a rich inner world, each artist creates an alternative reality that moves elusively between dream and reality.
Curated by Angela Smith
Abigail Lipski is interested in landscape, memory and magical realism. Childhood reveries blur with music, myth and fairy tale creating portals into mysterious lands of curiosity and wonderment. Through her painting, she transports the viewer into a Narnia like place of beguiling people, strange plants and the odd llama. The journey is unknown yet familiar and possibly an echo of a place like home.
Angela Smith is a figurative artist interested in the possibilities of narrative and exploring the space between fact and fiction. ‘Untold Stories’ is a series of work depicting the backs of women, which provokes the viewer to use imaginative reflection to complete the story. Her paintings reference the use of photography in composition and style whilst her use of paint and colour invokes atmosphere and emotion.
Antonia Jackson invites the viewer into a strange poetic world that is half-remembered, half-imagined. Interested in memory and the cinematic, her paintings are based upon childhood photos and carefully selected stills from her father’s Super 8 home movies about his business travels and family life. Antonia redefines these images with her use of vibrant colour and fluid brushstrokes, using thin layers of oil paint and glazes that resemble the quality of a film negative and reflects the fragility and transience of memory.
Val Wolstenholme Clay’s paintings originate from sketches and watercolours created whilst living in Rome. The quality of light and imagery, often from the Villa Borghese and surrounding hills, inspired her compositions, whilst adding a figure or suggestion of architecture gives the paintings a sense of place, mood and story. Val’s background and interests in film, is a rich source of references and inspiration, such as Angela Carter’s ‘Nights at the Circus’ and it’s cast of characters, yet she makes the images her own in a merging of experience and the imagination.