In appropriately apocalyptic weather, I ducked into GroundWork gallery. The pouring rain provided the perfect atmosphere in which to explore the exhibition ‘Water Rising’ (9th March-1st June 2019) at the UK’s first gallery dedicated to the environment and sustainability. Past exhibitions have included Dutch artist Jan Eric Visser who transforms inorganic household waste into sculpture, as well as specific shows focusing on environmental features such as wood, birdlife, fire and ice, and sunlight. GroundWork are leading the way with what a local gallery space can do – broadening Norfolk’s horizon’s to engage with global artists.
Tucked away by edge of the River Ouse in King’s Lynn (Norfolk) ‘Water Rising’ exhibited a series of artists to explore the nuances between calm and storm, plenty and drought, power and flow. Overall, the effect of a group show organised around a defining element served to bring together practitioners in photography, film, ceramics, glass and jewellery under one unifying theme.
Three pieces stood in for the ways they engaged psychically with the environment. Peter Matthews’s durational large-scale drawings explore the isolated power of the Sublime. He makes his pieces by walking along the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, stopping to draw directly in the water. With material lapping into the ocean, the resulting painting and drawing takes on a ritualistic repetition. Marks are made in time to the movement of the water, bringing together an experimental take on the relationship between an individual and their environment.
On a smaller scale, Annie Turner also works directly with a source of water, the River Deben, a tidal river in Sussex which washes up all manner of fossils, sharks teeth, feathers and more. Turner collects these to create memorialising sculptures. What looks like woven baskets on closer inspection are revealed to be delicately hand-made from stonewear. These archaeologically inspired ceramics, although modern, retain the look of something found and rusted. Turner creates a new brand of natural-industrial in works like ‘Tide Line’ and ‘Flotsam’.
Perhaps narrowing the scale even further, Helga Mogensen’s hand-made jewellery brings the environment to the skin working with silver, steel, copper, brass, driftwood and fishskin to create beautiful wearable objects. Drawing on lived experience, her work palpably draws on the Reykjavik environments she’s inspired by. Colour, shape and texture work in harmony to evoke beaches full of driftwood even as she contains her found materials in the form of necklaces and brooches. The spiny threads that hold each element together poke out haphazardly, defying neatness and convention.
R: The Red Thread, Names of Places 3. Driftwood, thread. 2015.
Their current exhibition ‘Fragile Nature’ (running until 15 September) is an intergenerational conversation between artists Elspeth Owen, Paca Sanchez, Lotte Scott, Emma Howell. Titled ‘Fragile Nature’, each artist explores a different medium. There’s Sanchez’s modernist explorations, which abstract natural forms such as seeds, flowers, stems and twigs into geometric patterns alongside Lotte Scott’s feminist geographies, which experiments with charcoal, lime, soil to explore place, time and material. Emma Howell taps into grief and loss in her work with colour, providing a robust counter to melancholia, whilst Elspeth Owen creates egg-shell thin ceramic vessels to explore fragility in a different way.
Words by Jade French
GroundWork’s current exhibition ‘Fragile Nature’ runs until 15 September.
