Press Release
Artists’ Open House 2017
Picture This…
13th - 14th May 2017
An exhibition of works on paper by artists who identify as being dyslexic.
The origin of the word ‘dyslexia’ comes from the German dys- ‘difficult’ and the Greek word lexis ‘speech’. Although this difficulty with words that affects reading, spelling and writing, defines the dyslexic learning process, dyslexia is really about information processing. People with dyslexia have a different way of thinking, often thinking in pictures rather words. As a result they frequently have strong visual and creative skills.
Both Lucy Soni and Alice Irwin throw off the constraints of the structured world drawing on children’s play and everyday chance in their work. In contrast, Valeriya N-Georg turns to quantum physics to investigate the boundaries between the human body and the inner self.
Lucy Bainbridge, Jane Higginbottom and Sophie Eade are all creating their own realities through their study of the environment they live in. Lucy Bainbridge tries to pause time with her softened city prints whilst Sophie Eade eradicates urbanity and words from the magazine pages that purport to extol rural life. Jane Higginbottom studies the environment and measures time through nature.
Bell House will also host an artist in residence in a doll’s house, The Sophie Croxton Doll House Gallery. The project is conceived and curated by Sophie Eade and Lucy Soni who have awarded the Picture This… residency and solo show to painter Clare Price.
This collection of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, interventions and installations illustrate how a different way of thinking can enrich our lives.
Curated by Kim Thornton
Scroll down for the Participating Artists
Aye 3, Alice Irwin
From Kent, Lucy Soni
Sophie Croxton Doll House Gallery, Clare Price
Hungerford Bridge, Lucy Bainbridge
The Battle, Valeriya N-Georg
Swamp Cedar Bell House, Jane Higginbottom
Word Web, Lucy Soni
Country Life Erasure, Sophie Eade
Participating Artists
Lucy Bainbridge
www.lucybainbridge.com
bainbridge.lucy@gmail.com
Lucy Bainbridge’s recent work attempts to soften a city constantly undergoing change and renovation, bringing it briefly to a pause. Using only the limited light and relative calm of the capital shortly before dawn, she invites the viewer to reflect upon their individual interaction with the city and its architecture. The images combine photography, multi-layered screen-print, graphite dust and drawing and are regularly exhibited both in the UK and abroad. Lucy Bainbridge has set up and now manages BAINBRIDGE PRINT STUDIOS. The studio consists of two sites in south London. It provides artists’ studio spaces along with open access screen-printing and intaglio facilities. The studio also runs vibrant educational programmes for all levels of artists working within the print medium.
Since 2009 Lucy runs a biannual Open Submission Print Exhibition, THE BAINBRIDGE OPEN.
Jane Higginbottom
www.janehigginbottom.co.uk
jane.higginbottom1@ntlworld.com
Jane Higginbottom’s work is about change in the environment and examining this through the process of making art. She is also interested in place and time, specifically making work in relation to a particular site. She is currently fascinated by trees and the time span of their lives in relation to our human history and is also investigating the heritage of gardening in South London, the plant collectors and gardeners that lived here.
The drawings ‘Circular drawing 1’ and ‘Circular drawing 2’ are abstract explorations of time.
Valeriya N-Georg
www.valeriya-n-georg.com
valeriya1@btinternet.com
Valeriya N-Georg is a London based artist working with a range of media: drawing, printmaking, sculpture, installations, digital and mixed media. The subject matter of her work is the ultimate mystery of the relationship between the physical human body and the inner self (or the human spirit). Within her practice, she is investigating the representation of the invisible through fragments of the physical body. She is interested in exploring the boundaries between the inner and outer body; between the physical and metaphysical; tangible and intangible, by exploring the tactile and the optical image.
The Sophie Croxton Doll House Gallery
Artist in Residence: Clare Price
www.clareprice.com
mail@clareprice.com
The ultimate intention for the work is to probe the idea that “Art comes through the body” whilst seeking to maintain a conversation with the history of painting.
Exploring ideas around the bodily materiality of paint, voluptuous gestural elements are set against translucent geometric planes. These shapes, drawn from modernist forms and digital tools, “pin” spilled wet vistas creating ambiguous spaces.
Referring both to the body and to Abstract Expressionism, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler in particular, the paintings investigate the sensuousness of making where traces and residues of moments are captured like photographic exposures. Titles are encrypted autobiographical references that allude to the body, containment and the moments in which the works were made. An obsession with paint and painting and matter drives the work, dealing with “stuff “ that exists in both the stars and the earth and our bodies.
Sophie Eade
www.sophieeade.com
sophieeade@yahoo.com
'Country Life' is a response to the idea of being able to manage and own nature.
There seems an innate human need to be in control.
Sophie Eade has created her own rules about what to erase and what to allow to remain. Reducing the words to dust, leaving only images that illustrate the potential of nature to take back from the constructed idea of 'ownership'. Destroying the formality of the magazine, a throwaway publication, and then reordering it, maybe elevating it.
Ephemeral.
Entropy.
Alice Irwin
www.alicekathleenirwin.com
alicekathleenirwin@hotmail.com
Alice Irwin likes to play with the idea that, as we grow older we no longer have the free thought of a child. As we become consumed within education and technology, and the experiences of life our freedom is reduced. We are ever striving harder to assert our identity, forgetting the freedom of thought we had as children. As the world becomes more populated, many of us feel the need for reassurance, as we feel lost and disconnected as individuals. There are multiple ways of depicting the face, but we all have the same repeating phases. Children start with scribbles, which then become more sophisticated as their understanding becomes more intellectual andmature. In a child's playground different children play with each other and grow. The playground is a place where children grow as people and in life.
Lucy Soni
www.artspace.com/lucy-soni
lucyhugo@gmail.com
Lucy Soni’s paintings, drawings and collages originate from the ephemera of daily life. Her intuitive gestures vacillate between the humble aspect of found marks - a child’s scribble, graffiti, a paint splat on the floor, and the controlled, colour-field graphic designs into which they are formalised. Interested in the offhand, the accidental, and the compulsive, Soni’s processes play out, equally meticulous, repetitive and oriented toward a fast, flat impeccable surface.
Lucy graduated in 1997 with a BA in Painting from Chelsea College of Art London. Her work can be found in public and private collections in the UK and abroad and she is represented by Voltzclarke in NYC. Soni works extensively with Turner Prize nominee, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and curates shows in her home and as a member of South London Women Artists.