Exhibitions

CURRENT EXHIBITION

CIRCLE Summer

Showing until 29 September 2020 | Floor 1

CIRCLE Summer is a group exhibition featuring a variety of latest works by our core group while also including guest artists. This exhibition is showing across two floors, focusing on painting, textile, sculpture and limited edition prints.

CIRCLE has an eclectic approach to sourcing and presenting artists from the UK, Europe and further afield. Strong personal style and excellent craftsmanship are prerequisite as well as showing artists whose work stems directly from the living landscape.

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Amy Wright

08 Sep – 06 Oct 2020 | Floor 2

Amy Wright’s paintings are packed full of botanical tang. As a painter of ample and overgrown gardens, it is unsurprising that for Amy everything begins and ends with flowers. The marriage of close observation and well honed graphic skills, needed for botanical illustration, with looser observational drawing focussing on texture, colour and collage inform her decorative approach to painting.

In wright’s paintings the viewers eye is constantly moving about the picture plain – moving from one succulent patch of foliage to another, hovering, unable to find a resting place – in ‘The sun through a glow across the garden’ The glow space is a yellow green ochre neither projecting or receding – we are left in suspension. Her colour palette is predominately warm, bringing to mind the flushed putty colours of the Bloomsbury Group painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Pattern as form epitomises Wright’s paintings (see ‘Mountain of Mysticism’) They are resemblant of the post impressionist paintings of Edouard Vuillard, who was influenced by Hokusai and the flat pictorial space of Japanese woodblock printing. With Amy’s love of fractured textile surfaces her paintings are jig-saws – baroque landscapes of earthly delights.

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September Feature:

New Works by

Joni Sternbach

Floor 1 + Online

Over the last decade, Joni Sternbach has created large-format portraits in tintype of contemporary surfers that put the world of surfing in a new light. Stunning in their detail, these unique images evoke the romance of surfing and the strong individualism of the men and women who live to ride the waves.

Six years ago today Joni Sternbach started her first day photographing surfers on the beaches of Cornwall as part of her SURFLAND series. CIRCLE will be featuring a new selection of archival pigment prints and original wet plates on the first floor throughout September.

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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith works from his studio in Plymouth, predominantly painting, drawing and constructing objects. He is known for his versatile process led by a hand drawn style within graphic compositions.

His work is drawn from conspiracy theory, bit-rot, black holes, psycho-geographic post-traumatic landscapes. His work has presented his work internationally including; MU – Holland, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art -UK and the Nam June Paik Centre – South Korea.

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Spencer Shakespeare

Spencer Shakespeare is an internationally exhibiting artist previously based on the Gold Coast, Australia and now the UK, Cornwall. His colourful and painterly works play on the edge of abstraction and explore grand themes of mythology, manifestation and primal connection, all paying homage to his greatest muse and inspiration, mother nature.

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Tony Plant

Environmental artist Tony Plant is renowned for creating vast swirling sand drawings on beaches throughout Cornwall – armed with just a standard garden rake. Inevitably, they are washed away by the tide but he later transposes each of these pieces into partner paintings made in his studio.

Tony Plants 2D wall sculptures are constructed of lines and pattern, layers of paint, assembled canvas and reclaimed wood. Each piece is a place, a walk he repeats night and day, sometimes for days, mapping the trail in his head. Plant captures the sense of place and sometimes bringing back reclaimed items found on the way. His work is a wonderful celebration of the ever-changing coastal environment and a reminder that impermanence can be treasured.

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