Galleries - September 2018

month is for three of the gallery's key artists – all members ofthe London Group – David Wiseman, Daniel Preece and Mark Dunford. They are showing together in an exhibition entitled 'Presence', the title coming from what painter and gallerist Judi Green sees as the sense each of these three different but equally gifted landscape artists share in their feeling for a particular place. Landscape is also the subject of two other engaging shows in West Cornwall this month, though again they represent very differing approaches to the theme. Thus at The Summerhouse Gallery in Marazion, the featured show consists of a series of paintings by young locally-based artist Imogen Bone which are based on an extended walk along the West Cornwall section of the South West Coastal Path. Bone studied the art and the environment course at the well regarded Falmouth School of Art and something of these concerns quickly becomes apparent in these paintings; tough and delicate at the same time, they eschew the easy, pretty and picturesque in favour of something altogether more thoughtful and truer to the place, the series of works like a visual diary of her daily experience of the landscape. The two women artists, Carolyn White and Jenny Ryrie, showing at the Yew Tree Gallery at Morvah in an exhibition nicely entitled 'Wild Shores, Calm Havens', both share an altogether more expressive, abstracting tendency towards the landscape. Carolyn White's work sadly has something of a retrospective character to it, this gifted Stroud-based painter dying in 2013 in her late 60s, but there is a marvellous exuberance in her rich, almost Nolde-like treatment of the West Cornwall coastline she always had such a passion for. They work beautifully with the swaithes of abstract, expressive colour that characterise Edinburgh- trained Jenny Ryrie's atmospheric take on this wild and woolly coastline – contemporary Cornish landscape has continued to rest in good hands here. It's an altogether more traditional figurative approach to be found in the work of the four artists that form the focus at St Mawes Gallery. A comparative newcomer to the scene, established by husband and wife team Faye and Harry Hills in the spring of last year, it has, with the work of Lawrence Murley, Jeremy Houghton, Gerry Hillman and Martyn Dempsey, the look of a bright future. Meanwhile there is a characteristically experimental exhibition showing at Kestle Barton this month. ‘I carry you in my eyes – Chant of the Whaleswan’ involves film maker and installation artist Rosalind Fowler working with the women's 'collective practice' Fourthland on a series of films originally made in collaboration with about 50 residents (from 11 cultures) of the Wenlock Barn Estate in Hackney exploring the social power of myth through a series of rituals and performances. Entitled collectively 'Breadrock', these films were brought to Cornwall in March to form the basis of a residency working with similar migrant groups and communities in the county through August. The resulting new work, entitled 'The Cloth of a Thousand,' is shown alongside these earlier films – it is work which really carries a powerful contemporary punch, mixing ethnography, ecology, craft and object making with film to extraordinarily powerful effect. The Atkinson Gallery, located within Millfield School at Street in Somerset, is another establishment that consistently stages outstanding exhibitions of contemporary art including many re-discoveries and re-evaluations of sometimes puzzlingly neglected artists, often with a connection to the region. I hope Anthony Currell won't mind my putting him in that category but since a dazzling debut in the early 1960s when he emerged out of Bideford School of Art to study at the Central and then Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris, and had his prints purchased by MoMA in New York and the V&A in London among others, his name has perhaps become more familiar to afficionados of print biennales and exhibitions rather than the wider art world. On the evidence of this retrospective show of both his prints and paintings, this is a rather shocking and largely inexplicable state of affairs. His taut, starkly dramatic etchings of industrial urban landscapes and working people, and powerful paintings are a revelation. NU More West on pages 24 & 26 14 GALLERIES SEPTEMBER 2018 from left T om Cross ‘In A Window – Still Life’ Belgrave St Ives Mark Dunford ‘Grace’ Tregony Gallery ‘carries a powerful contemporary punch . . .’