Collected Women is part of a partnership between artist-curator Linda Ingham and 20-21 Contemporary Arts Centre Scunthorpe. This exhibition displays work by 12 female artists based in North and North East Lincolnshire who have been invited to respond to Louise Bourgeois' prints and Drypoints which make up the Hayward Gallery Touring show of her work. The exhibition also features a quilt created by Nicky Dillerstone through working with women from diverse backgrounds, contributed to also with elements by textile artists based in the region.
As well as Dillerstone's work I was particularly taken by Sally Yarrington's Caravan and Gill Hobson's two series: Rituals of Careless Conservance and Hope May Be (A Thing With Feathers).
Sally Yarrington is a painter based in North Lincolnshire. She mainly works with oils on canvas as this piece from 2016/2017. Her work is concerned with an attempt to access the unseen contained within the everyday and familiar, found in both industrial and natural landscapes. She has exhibited widely and is a member of the East Coast 7 Contemporary Art Group. I particularly enjoy the way she represents trees, especially silver birch and she has a special way with water. I am reminded of her seashore paintings where stones were beautifully painted under a superbly crafted transparent sea and her raindrops on a car window as she drives across the Humber Bridge. Yet again in this painting she has cleverly represented the water in a flooded field containing an old family caravan, the reflection of the van in the water is excellent. The old much-loved caravan now has a layer of dirt and algae on its surface.
Gill Hobson has two series of photographs in the exhibition: Rituals of Careless Conservance and the diptych Hope May Be (A Thing With Feathers). Hobson has a Masters and a Doctorate in Fine Art for her investigation of the dynamic relation of person and place through artmaking. Presenting and exhibting internationally, her work has featured in the British Glass Biennale and The Lumen Prize and is held in public collections.
Rituals of Careless Conservance draws attention to the ways objects may 'speak' and take on a new meaning beyond their form. Featuring images of a variety of containers sourced from her mother's home, they are a meditation of significance, value and the impossibility of full knowledge. She says that the images are deliberately soft, viewed as if through a clouded lens alluding to the elusive nature of their meaning. They remind me a lot of OCA student and one of my peer group colleagues Stephanie D'Hubert's work on family memory, especially her series What Remains which was exhibited in Sheffield Cathedral. (link here) I was fascinated by the post processing/lighting/soft focus that has been used. I enjoyed the backgrounds and wondered if the colours were in negative.
Hope May Be (A Thing With Feathers) explores ideas of symbolism and metaphor. The feathers depicted also come from Hobson's mother and she describes them as barely there and tells us that they reference Emily Dickensons' poem where she writes that hope is like a bird forever in side us. I found the images seductive and again wondered if they were negatives or perhaps photograms.
In both of these series I was interested in their display as I am beginning to consider how my work will eventually be published. The frames were box frames and the images 'floating' within them having been mounted first on foam board. I have seen images displayed in this way on several occasions, but not then framed. Interesting. I am currently making a choice of paper on which to print my BOW for Assignment 5. These will be seen unmounted or framed and so the surface matters, however, if I exhibit framed prints behind glass in an exhibition this no longer becomes such a concern as they automatically take on a gloss look.
Nicky Dillerston Quilt.
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