UNDER NEW MADE CLOUDS

Ruth Sargeant : Jess Woodrow : Sian Jones :

responding to the landscape around them in new and innovative ways

Landscape, Painting, Installation, Video, Audio

September 2nd - October 9th 10am to 4pm , Tuesday to Saturday

Each artist has her unique response in their visual work, from audio and digital installations to ceramics, drawings and paintings.

Created over Lockdown , the works give fresh insight into our experience within the landscape of Wales.   This show allows the spectator to see it through the artist’s eyes.

We can share some of their landscape discoveries in recorded walks to listen to in the Gallery or on podcasts to download from the website.   An inter-active map will show the areas of interest along with other audio walks created by our members, inviting you to share the artists` journey.

Ruth Sargeant

The unprecedented events of Spring 2020 and the significant heat spell gave me the opportunity to spend an unusually long time walking the fields and scorched earth adjacent to my home.

I was also in the throws of an MA module in Art and Archaeology and was exploring the altered landscape and the artefacts within. My primary attention was on the laburnum hedging grown from ballast from 18th century ships, which I enlisted in a series of drawing collaborations in pen on permatrace, the material used by archaeologists to record their finds.

I later concentrated on a series of farmers buckets situated under the hedging, abandoned since the tack sheep had moved on. The scant rainwater and with detritus within provided a rich source of inspiration in observing through film, the movement, the reflections of the trees, and the forms and colours in these watery microcosms.

The work on show reflects those observations and are in part a collaboration with Ash, Willow, Laburnum and the wind.

Jess Woodrow

My paintings act as notes to myself. They correspond to wherever my development as a human is at any one time. Always moving on, sometimes glancing back to collect something that wants to be collected. It is a kind of timeline, spiraling through time and land, excavating, projecting, rearranging.

Its a way of seeing the landscape in a more singular way, of rejecting dualism, of finding something you know is there and allowing it to exist. Painting isn’t for abstracting the landscape for me, its for landscaping the abstract, in the moment before our grammar kicks in and we fixate on the identity of things.

So my compulsion to paint stems from a lifelong fascination with the way you can create an object and put it in more than one place at a time and give it multiple identities, in a similar way that we as humans become who we are.

Sian Jones

The view from the studio window goes down the garden to the estuary beyond. It changes as the light moves from east to west, shadows lengthening and shortening -confusing the brain as it tries to distinguish one shape from another. Blurring the boundaries as the eye relaxes and new shapes emerge. Details come into focus and fade as the light changes, sharpening and then softening. Out of this familiarity comes a deeper understanding and emotional attachment engendering the feelings and responses that inspire me to paint.

Working with mixed media the process is a combination of adding and subtracting layers of paint. Like thinking aloud, the mark making leaves a trace of what has gone before.

Often what seems like an obstacle becomes a new idea. The challenge for me is trying to maintain just the right amount of control without losing spontaneity.