Insight Art Exhibit Group show as a part of the Contemporary MarkMakers
Birdwood House Gallery, 48 High Street, Totnes, UK
26 May to 1 June 10 – 4.45
by Contemporary Markmakers
20 artists, 20 year anniversary
About Katheryn’s work in the exhibition:
detail from Wabi-sabi Triptych - Acrylic and multi-media on board
Wabi-sabi*...
Revealing the concealed, layer after layer. Delicate, translucent.
A life lived.
A loss grieved.
An experience integrated.
Marking, drawing, painting, and then sanding back.
Painting, drawing and mark-making again,
adding detritus and discarded but beautiful patterns and shapes. Layering paintings like the palimpsests of our lives.
Art full of Wabi-sabi wisdom, the perfection of imperfection and occasional broken-open places is marked with time, scars, incisions and alterations... just like our own bodies.
These are paintings as reflections of getting INTO and UNDER our skin – weathered, worn, wonderful and wise. Touched, held, loved and altered by human exchanges.
They are like writing on skin in the fashion of monks of olden times, repeatedly writing and erasing whilst leaving traces...
recording our loves, losses, laughter, lives.
This body of work is made up of inside-out images that comprise a presence practice, revealing hidden treasures.
* Wabi-sabi is an ancient Japanese aesthetic that honours all things worn imperfect and impermanent and it seeks to find beauty and perfection in the imperfections.
Contemporary Markmakers ‘InSight’ Exhibition
Birdwood House Gallery, High street, Totnes, Devon TQ9 5SQ UK
25th May - 1st June 2024
In sight: visible, near at hand, close to being achieved or realised.
Insight: the ability to gain a clear, deep, and sometimes sudden, understanding of someone or something, perhaps a complicated problem or situation.
For the past eighteen months Contemporary Markmakers have been enquiring into the ‘The Art Spirit’ by Robert Henri (1923) who suggests to ‘find out what is really important to you. Then sing your song. You will have something to sing about and your whole heart will be in the singing.’
The topics we have explored include qualities of being, affect, forces of nature, universality, Buddha-nature, memory and time. We have responded to meditation, poetry, music, spoken word, place, memories and dreams. And we have used insight practices; drawing analogs and transcriptions with process led practices to explore what artist John Skinner calls ‘the silent languages of paint’ while including such as drawing, print and textiles.
Now we are delighted to offer our ‘InSight’ exhibition. Our long research into what we mean, feel and express with our marks by this gem of a word has been intriguing. We have ventured out and enquired within, exploring how what we have ‘tripped over’ resonates with who we are and what is of interest to us now. As Jung said, about art:
“The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all,
consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image,
and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work.
By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the
present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back
to the deepest springs of life.”
You may also like to consider the exhibition as one artwork in itself for as artist and academic John Danvers (2016) suggests ‘The whole seems to have a coherence which is not apparent in it’s many parts’ and furthermore that ‘Each of us presents a distinctive world view in so far as we are located at different points within the wider field. Yet we offer shared perspectives in so far as our fields of being conjoin, interflow and eddy around each other as currents do in a stream or river’. That of course includes you the viewer as we welcome you to join us in gaining InSight.
Birdwood House Gallery, High street, Totnes, Devon TQ9 5SQ
25th May - 1st June 2024
Instagram: #contemporarymarkmakers
Website: https://markmakers.avenda.uk