Lisa Watts and Lucy May at Exeter Spacex - Skittish (final week)

This is the final week of Skittish at Spacex (ending on Saturday 23rd November). The exhibition combines sculptures by Lucy May with performance by Lisa Watts.

Lucy has made some very visceral sculptures out of wax for the exhibition. The pieces are substantial but retain a fluidity which is achieved by her personally blending the wax that she uses. In addition to the wax pieces there is a large work which combines coloured foam with artificial flowers and other material on a wedding cake-like dais, and three gilded bronze sculptures mounted on individual plinths.

Lucy's influence is the baroque but she interprets this using modern materials and in a uniquely personal way. The wax sculptures produce conflicting responses because they are both beautiful and yet rather gruesome at the same time.

Lisa Watts will be performing from Wednesday afternoon until Saturday. Her previous work has included pieces with a strong feminist agenda but she says that this project is deliberately playful. She works with all kinds of materials including tin foil, light sticks, extending rules, plastic bags etc and after a month of her performances, the gallery is littered with the stuff she has used.

While the intent may be playful, she is entirely serious when she is performing, using earplugs to maintain her concentration; and she performs regardless of whether there is anyone in the gallery. She also teaches on degree level art courses and is both approachable and fascinating to talk with, when not performing.

In the other gallery space a 7 minute film made by Lisa is showing in a loop. This is also a playful piece but has a soundtrack which is reminiscent of a science fiction movie, which gives it a slightly menacing feel.

Skittish finishes on Saturday at Spacex but goes on to two other venues - Newcastle and Leeds - where Lucy will be working with different artists. In the meantime, get along to see it at Spacex, if you can.

Old Folkies + Bruce Kirkby Sculpture at Totnes

It's been almost a month since I last posted - partly because life has been busy, partly because of blog weariness ... Anyway, I thought I'd give blogging another go but refocus a bit, so that it isn't so time-consuming. That means fewer hyperlinks and less uploads to YouTube. Who has the time to do that when you have to use the dismal service provided by Talktalk?

In the past few weeks I've seen John Renbourn & Robin Williamson playing the Phoenix and Joan Baez at the Plymouth Pavilions. Both were ok, but for me both performances were a bit disappointing - perhaps it's just that we are all getting older and it's depressing! Anyway I'll post some photos etc from these gigs in a while.

Renbourn and Williamson

 Bruce Kirkby at Totnes

However, for now I'll kick off this blog restart with photos of some great wood and stone sculptures that were on show at the Birdwood Gallery in Totnes a couple of weeks ago. They are by Bruce Kirkby, who worked as a geologist before training at Weymouth College of Stonemasonry and becoming a stonecarver.

Bruce's website explains that his panels are based upon folded quartz veins seen in exposed rocks, on the coast of Devon and Cornwall or further afield in Nepal. Although they are based on a small scale geological feature, they mimic large scale features such as rivers seen in satellite imagery.

The wooden sculptures containing pebbles are inspired by the forces of coastal processes. The sculptures involving aligned slate are inspired by sorting and alignment of particles by either water or ice.

Bruce Kirby provides masonry, carving, sculpture, restoration, lettercutting, and stone work for Acanthus and their website showcases the full range of his skills.

George Meyrick - Simple Matters at Penzance Exchange

Several weeks ago I visited the Exchange Gallery in Penzance, where they are showing George Meyrick's Simple Matters installation until the 14th April.

Meyrick describes the work as 'Geometric wall paintings and sculptural interventions'.

The Exchange says that 'Meyrick revisits and reworks the simple triangle; sculptural versions intersect corners or emerge from the surface of walls, while others are combined with flat wall paintings'.

Two dimensional photos can't really do justice to showing the way that the works 'evolve' over the positive corners of the gallery.

 
Moderately interesting ... but it didn't immediately seem particularly new or original to me (at first I couldn't stop thinking of oversized origami).

However, Meyrick cites the constructivists and the minimalists as influences - and this piece by Fiona Robinson does a better job of putting his work into context than the notes provided by the Exchange. It makes the work seem more intriguing.

Some of the most interesting pieces are those which include spaces that are drawn with coloured cord, as below.

Why not go along and judge for yourself? (free until April 14th)

Also showing in February (but now finished) was this exhibition of artist-designed skateboards. They'd run out of information sheets - so that's all I know. Pretty cool boards though.

Barbara Hepworth's Studio and Sculpture Garden

Anyone who visits St Ives often will be familiar with Barbara Hepworth's studio and garden, which is hidden away behind the busy high street. Tate St Ives runs the studio/garden and a small museum there.

Hepworth lived and worked in Trewyn studio from 1949 until her death in 1975. The Tate St Ives web site describes how she was drawn there and used the garden for her work:

'Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic', wrote Barbara Hepworth; 'here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space'. When she first arrived at Trewyn Studio, Hepworth was still largely preoccupied with stone and wood carving, but during the 1950s she increasingly made sculpture in bronze as well. This led her to create works on a more monumental scale, for which she used the garden as a viewing area.

The bronzes now in the garden are seen in the environment for which they were created, and most are in the positions in which the artist herself placed them.

Hepworth could be a hard taskmaster and my favourite Terry Frost story relates to the time he was working as Barbara Hepworth's assistant - Here told by his son Anthony in Tate Etc - The Real St Ives Story:

The other story is about Barbara Hepworth. At the time Denis [Mitchell] and dad were her assistants. When journalists or photographers came round, she didn't want them to see that she had these people working away on her sculptures. So she would shut the workers in the greenhouse, where they had their morning breaks. Then Barbara would start polishing the sculpture, as if she'd been at it all day.

One time my father was bursting for a pee, but she wouldn't let them out, and the only thing he could find was a pot with a geranium with very dry earth in it - but the pee went straight through and trickled across the greenhouse floor, and out under the door, between the legs of the visitors. Barbara banned him from having biscuits for the rest of the week.

Terry Frost in the 1960s

Which brings me back to what started me on this post - A great set of photos of details from Barbara Hepworth's studio on the indigoalison blog. By way of contrast you can see some more conventional views of the studio in Alice's Quaint Living blog. In fact the garden and studio must be one of the most photographed and blogged sites in the whole of Cornwall. Take a look at Mondoblogo for an excellent collection of old photographs of Barbara, her work and Trewyn Studio.

Hepworth outside St Ives studio 1964 (Paul Schutzer)

Barbara Hepworth had a number of assistants who were later to go on and make their own artistic marks. Another of these was Breon O'Casey who died earlier this year (and who, incidentally, spent his early and middle years in Totnes and Torquay, Devon).

Peter Davies describes Breon's relationship with Hepworth in his obituary in the Independent:

Through the popular sculptor Denis Mitchell, O'Casey met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, in whose studio he worked for two days a week between 1959 and 1963. What he described as "a tough apprenticeship" in Hepworth's workshop proved to be his real artistic education.

Hepworth could be challenging and a joke circulated about her assistants forming a workers’ fraternity whose club tie would be pierced by a hole. During O'Casey's time her old assistants moved on and she replaced them with new younger ones with fewer creative aspirations. O'Casey himself moved on and had to support his family with part-time work as a telephonist. However, he demonstrated his versatility by producing his best work in a diverse range of media: Jewellery, weaving, etching, prints, engraving, painting and, latterly, sculpture. He also retained the respect of Hepworth, who acquired one of his paintings and commissioned him to make a gold cross for her. 

The Hepworth studio/museum

You can explore Barbara's garden and its sculptures further by using the Tate Kids' online tool - or you can read more in this short review by Rachel Wilson-Couch. If you are visiting St Ives you can often find work by Breon O'Casey and Terry Frost at Westcotts Gallery (now closed unfortuantely - see my previous post about the gallery).