Elemental

Carolyn Black

Lucy Carolan

Alison Goodall

Gill Hackett

This exhibition brings together four artists whose working processes involve ideas and materials drawn from their immediate landscape and further afield.  

Carolyn Black’s starting point is her relationship with the River Severn, to which she has lived close by for over thirty years. Through a process of making and re-making she explores the local area’s past and present, and its uncertain future due to the threat of flooding. Lucy Carolan’s lemon and pomegranate shaped objects are inspired by pebbles, flints, bone and flesh, and have a timeless quality. They are decorated with slips she made using metal oxides and local clays. Alison Goodall is inspired by the textures and colours of trees, rocks and lichens that she encounters while out walking, and all her ceramic work is made by hand rather than on a wheel. Gill Hackett is a maker of papier mâché vessels whose inspiration comes from the natural world, including lichens, mosses, seed heads and rock textures, found in English gardens and wilder places such as the western isles of the Outer Hebrides.

 The exhibition asks how thinking through the elements might generate new ways of understanding our relationship to land and landscape, both in response to the current environmental crisis and in reflecting upon earlier historical moments. The omnipresence of the elements – earth, air, fire and water - allows for innovative forms of art-making that transcend geographical and historical boundaries.