Gathering

‘Gathering’ reflects a communal act of intimacy shared between people, site and materials. Local artists will reflect on this theme through their interdisciplinary practice to explore the act of gathering and its value in the aftermath of the pandemic.

My work is an assemblage of objects found while navigating the world. Individual things call out to me and I collect them: they have a resonance with my visual field, a conversation with my body. I think about the sun, how important it is to feeling good, to growing, how much we look forward to it coming back in the spring, all the more so after the year just passed. It’s a celebration of the sun, how it makes things grow, how full the world is of things and and light and how we as humans represent that light and see and feel the world of nature that is in us as we are in it, through it and with it.

“Narrative is not exempt from any part of this exhibition; no artwork relies entirely on non-objective attributes of line, form, colour, space and time. The wall-mounted works by Tom Sewell and Dan Howard Birt gather elements into assembled compositions in rebus fashion to unlock narratives of meaning to a visitor investing time to achieve an interpretation. Sewell’s ‘Sunrise ’21 (Deep Field)’ is the most cohesive. In a sense, it resembles a traveller’s record of place and experience triggered by tokens. The type of transit, however, is left sufficiently open within the work itself for an onlooker to fill gaps. (The free gallery guide offers the artist’s viewpoint although compliance is not mandatory.) This work picks up from Birt’s coracle situated next to it, since both call upon associations with folk art as the genre chosen by highly skilled people wishing to express their creative urges, for whatever reason, outside artistic conventions. The diaristic feel of Sewell’s collage of disparate finds in the landscape, from shoreline driftwood, rope, shells and stones to pewter objects and an onion, is pulled together with graphic clarity on a rectangle of meshed fencing placed over a sky-blue ground applied to the wall. The mesh is stretched between willow poles: the imitation of painting, the historic portal to illusion, might be coincidental, just as the suggestion of a page seems apt, for literary overtones exist here.”

— Martin Holman, from Art Cornwall.