June 6, 2024by Rebecca NewnhamExhibitions News Uncategorized

Artists talk transcript- Brook, Marsh, Moss

A solo show at The Vanner Gallery

3.5.24 – 8.6.24

Artists talk transcript

Brook Marsh Moss at the Vanner Gallery, 23^rd May 2024

Thanks to David Christie for the lovely introduction. Thank you especially for sharing the photo of your daughter with my sculpture, Launch, nearby in the Close, at Salisbury Cathedral, in 2016. It is captivating that 8 years later he is a director of the Vanner Gallery, and is hosting my solo exhibition.

I consider myself a sculptor with a special interest in glass.

My work has always celebrated the natural world. My sculpture has explored botanical form, proportion, seeds, pollen, and seed dispersal, and looked at photosynthesis, considered growth, and how matter moves. Over the last 7 years, I have enjoyed getting absorbed with the wall panels which are a way of capturing an experience of a place.

Brook, Marsh, Moss considers where water meets land, and 3 places in particular: the riverbank behind my studio in Tisbury, Stanpit Marsh and Tremenheere Pond.

The Riverscape Series are about the river bank of Oddford Brook, which flows past my chapel studio and joins the Nadder, and I appreciate this opportunity to show the works further downriver.

I researched a little about the history of the brook, and how lifestyles have changed around the brook. For example, my studio chapel is at Tuckingmill, named after a practice where garments were processed to fill the material. This would have been by hand until a mill was built in the farmyard opposite, powered by the flow of water. Dwellings were built along the brook but away from roads, and were later abandoned; one even has a stone bridge that survives. Springs fed the brook, and whilst it can be gentle, I have observed how effective it is at directing torrential runoff from the surrounding hills away during rain storms.

On last midsummer’s day, I stepped into the brook and walked upstream with an idea to find its source. In response, I created a series of colour sketches, in glass enamel fired onto glass, that record aspects of the walk. The experience and the sketches that I created, as a result, informed the Riverscape Series that you see in Brook, Marsh, Moss, and a wider consideration of riparian areas.

In Upstream, I observed dappled light and shade, filtering through the lush June foliage, and cooling the water. The river bed bears testament to the previous dwellings that existed along the book, crumbled stone and brick carpet the floor in places. Trees, such as willow, and alder, and plants such as nettle, comfrey, wild geranium, wild mint, campion, cow parsley, and hogweed, all exist in equilibrium. There is perfect balance, and a gentle, self-sustaining ecosystem.

Three works in the front gallery are called, Riverscape Series, Tuckingmill Lichen. Lichen grows on the trees behind my studio and I learned that lichen is not a plant but a symbiosis of fungi and algae. These elements are mutually beneficial and sustain each other so they exist in a harmonious relationship where organisms support each other. Lichen represents a micro-ecosystem in harmony.

Lichen covers 8% of the surface of the world. I understand that there are three main types of lichen; crustose lichen often grows on stone or brick, foliose lichen refers to leaf-like forms and fruticose lichen has branch-like limbs. All of these types thrive behind the chapel. I used fruticose lichen as a brush to move paint around the surface. In these works, I embraced the idea of symbiosis and rotated pairs of tiles through 90 degrees.

The largest work in the front gallery reflects the bay window and is called Riverscape Series, Snail Trail 1. It is mainly a blue colour, about cyan bacteria which is found in the algae element of lichen and it gives lichen the bluish-green colour that we associate with the life form. There are plenty of snails living behind the studio on the banks of Oddford Brook and if you leave glass outside they will leave their trails on the surface. I captured these silvery trails by brushing them with dry glass enamel and firing them in the kiln. You can observe faint trails as one of the layers of this work. Each of the wall panels is cut differently; the subject of the individual works influences the cutting. The wavy flow lines are echoed in the Soar sculptures that are placed in the middle of the space. The Soar sculptures follow on from a sculpture first shown in Salisbury Cathedral, in 2010, called Fledge Increments of Flight, part of an inaugural exhibition curated by Jacquiline Creswell, called Liminality. These sculptures were placed around the font and represented stages in the flight of a bird. Launch was mentioned earlier, in the photo that David shared in the introduction, taken with his daughter. Launch is about the incredible amount of latent energy required for a bird to take off from a stationary position. Soar follows on, from Fledge Increments of Flight and Launch, and is specifically about a bird taking off from water, and its symmetrical reflection. All of these works were created after observing birds at a salt marsh.

The Soar sculptures are cast in Jesmonite and have crushed glass aggregate in place of sand or gravel. I implode waste glass in the studio and incorporate it into cast works, and they sparkle slightly.

There’s a wall panel in this show called Salt Marsh Series, Oakmoss. Stanpit Marsh is a salt marsh and is found where the Stour and the Avon rivers converge with the sea and there is a confluence of river water and seawater in a tidal lagoon. This region is protected because it’s critically important for the sustenance of particular life forms, especially migrating birds and many increasingly rare salt marsh plants, such as glasswort for example. Glasswort, or Marsh Samphire, was used in the manufacture of glass, historically, the soda ash acted as a flux; it helped to allow the glass to melt at a lower temperature. The way I’ve cut the glass in the salt marsh series reflects the crystalline structure of the salt.

Riverscape Series, Crown Shyness are about the space between tree canopies. Individual tree canopies are separated by a gap and from below you can see a blue sky. This gap has many functions and I learnt that one of them serves to prevent insect larvae from one tree travelling directly to the next.

Last summer behind the chapel, the alder trees were affected by the alder beetle, which is a distinctive, bluish-black little beetle that devoured the alder leaves and left them skeletal and very lacy.

When observing the Crown Shyness works, there’s a gap apparent between two clusters of foliage. There are imprints from where I pressed individual leaves into the glass enamel. Whilst the wet enamel was drying, tannin from the leaves seeped out, so I emphasised this process with the addition of bronze and gold mica.

A series of lichen-encrusted branches have been cast in bronze, iron and aluminium, by a local foundry that employs recycled oil as a fuel to smelt. The series is called, Hope, and references a quote from Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit;

‘the branches are hope and the roots are memory’.

As an artist creating work about the natural world and aware of the environmental crisis, I felt it important to emphasise that there is hope. We can observe that lichen is showing us where the natural world is in balance, where a mini ecosystem exists, working in symbiosis, in a mutually beneficial relationship. It reminds us to look out for those places where lichen thrives because this is where the local ecosystem is in balance and it sometimes looks wild and scrubby.

The Tremenheere Pond Series are about a pocket of life in Tremenheere sculpture Gardens, which is near Penzance in Cornwall.

Last summer, participating members of the Royal Society of Sculptors held an exhibition called Wander_Land. Tremenheere is situated on the St Michael’s Pilgrimage route. I created work inspired by sacred wells, stopping places, found along the way. I collected sample water from each of the wells that I found along the way and I used them later, to mix with enamels to paint recollections of my experience of each place. The Sacred Water Series were mostly white. The water samples from each well had a slightly different mineral content so this will influence the outcome of the firing because glass enamels are essentially a glass flux with minerals. The influence was visible, although subtle and I emphasised with other coloured enamels. I also collected sand from Saint Michael’s Mount Bay and incorporated the sand into the gaps between the tiles. I often collect material from the locations to combine into the gaps

Tremenheere Pond Series follow on from the Sacred Water Series and the pond can be found just off the St Michaels Way, within the sculpture park. These works are about the peaceful yet energetic, harmonious balance found here. Dicksonia emphasises tree ferns, Lemna is another name for duckweed, Nymphae focuses on the water lilies, and Phormium captures a spike that has dropped across the pond’s surface and is reflected in the water.

Riverscape Series, The Sound of Oddford Brook, describes the noise of the water flowing, sometimes obstructed by rocks or branches, and the audible differences, where water cascades into a deep hollow or tumbles across shallows. I often paint outside by the brook, and have become familiar with how the brook’s sounds tell you quite a lot about what’s happening; whether there’s been a lot of rain, if animals are drinking or bathing. The whole riverbank outside the studio behaves as a filter for the run-off from surrounding agricultural land. Wild plants grow extremely tall because they absorb nitrogen from fertiliser, wash downhill, process it and take it out of the system. The filtration takes out any impurities so that when the runoff water enters the brook, it’s a lot cleaner. These spaces play an important role.

In the Riverscape Series, plants that grow behind the studio are often impressed into the enamel, creating a record of what can be discovered there at any one moment. Species include plants like comfrey, nettle, wild mint, wild geranium, campion, dock, plantain, clover, dandelion, and Herb Robert. Having pressed them into the glass enamel, I remove them and fire them in the kiln. I suspect that in future years, some of these plants won’t still be there. Many are edible and in previous generations we would’ve known which of these plants to incorporate into our meals and which we should avoid. Some have medicinal properties, and others can be used as a dye. Nowadays, we generally buy food from supermarkets, but it is possible to go out and gather a meal from the wild spaces if we learn about them, and allow them to thrive.

Books that have influenced the works:

Entangled life by Merlin Sheldrake

How to Read Water by Tristan Lee

Flow by Amy Jane Beer

I have a favourite bookshop; Folde, located on Gold Hill, Shaftesbury.