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Curious Nature

7 FEB – 9 APR 2008
COLLYER BRISTOW GALLERY, LONDON

26 APR – 18 JUN 2008
NEWLYN ART GALLERY, NEW ROAD, NEWLYN TR18 5PZ

Curated by Day+Gluckman

Artists: Leonora Chan, Helena Goldwater, Andy Harper, Nadège Mériau, Melanie Stidolph, John Timberlake

BANNER IMAGE: ANDY HARPER

An exhibition of drawings, paintings, photographs and sculpture by artists discovering the unexpected in landscape and nature.

The darker side of nature is explored by each of the artists in these selected works. Helena Goldwater creates her own botanical studies, exquisitely rendered in watercolour paint. Whilst referencing 18th and 19th Century studies these images are extremely contemporary, suggestive of our ability to radically alter the nature of our environment. Nadège Mériau has taken a similar viewpoint isolating individual plants and their plant system or exposing the surreal nature of plants simply though the direction of her lens.

Both Leonora Chan and Melanie Stidolph use photography to give us a new angle on the familiar landscape. Chan’s landscapes are highlighted with an eerie, effervescent light that makes an ordinary hedgerow or shoreline appear magically staged. In fact these are all lit ‘naturally’ by light pollution. This unsettling fact brings in to question the human and urban impact on nature. Where Chan uses long exposures to capture the artificial light Melanie Stidolph shoots off reels of film to capture that moment when life itself seems a little off key.

Andy Harper constructs similarly complex visual fodder through paint. He uses the paint to physically build the dense foliage. Through an exact and repetitive technique he builds up leaves, fruits and twigs into a disturbing image of barely controlled wilderness. John Timberlake paints similarly disturbing scenes that illuminate narratives within landscapes. For Curious Nature Timberlake presents a series of works depicting moonscapes and landscapes in the style of astronomical illustrations from the 1950s and early 1960s; fictitious, yet evocative of a bygone era. Alongside these constructed fantasies are manipulated works, part photograph, part drawing, of topographies that lie beneath the surface.

Curious Nature presents artists who look at the natural world from a unique perspective. Through shared ambitions they present the beautiful and the bizarre in diverse media.

Newlyn Gallery - Nadege Meriau