Enclosures

11 July – 15 August 2015

Katherine Jones  prints
John Mitchell  sculpture / works on paper / prints
Sandra Porter  prints / paintings

This exhibition brings together a mixture of 2D and 3D artworks in connection to the idea of enclosures. Each of the three artists make reference to different forms of enclosures in their work, either relating to the physical structure and presence of a building or the concept of enclosed space, concealing, protecting or entrapping.  This show explores various interpretations of enclosures by looking at the interesting directions these three distinctive artists pursue in their chosen mediums.

Including original prints, works on paper, paintings and sculpture, with an accompanying collection of jewellery by Somerset-based designer Penny Price and new ceramics by Desa Philippi.

KATHERINE JONES
Katherine Jones is a fine art printmaker based in South London. She was brought up in Herefordshire and attended Herefordshire College of Art and Design before studying at Cambridge School of Art. She completed an MA in printmaking at Camberwell College of Art in 2003. Between 2007 and 2010, Jones held the position of research fellow in printmaking at City and Guilds of London Art School. She is currently one of three resident artists at the Art Academy Print Studio in Borough.

Jones is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the London Original Print Fair Prize at the 2014 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and a residency at Winchester College.

Her work has been featured in several group exhibitions and is held in public collections including the V&A, House of Lords and the Ashmolean Museum among others.

Jones’s work follows today’s sensitivity towards issues of protection and security using a recurring house shape, subverted structurally and contextually to simultaneously imply nurture, protection, security and suffocation. Her interest in the disparity between different versions of ancient stories, where repetition and imperfect reproduction has confused the original message also plays a primary role in the work’s conception.


JOHN MITCHELL 

John Mitchell (1942 – 2014) studied painting at Kingston College of Art in the 1950s. Since this time he continued to paint, but also began to make sculptures and prints, exploring sequence and experimenting with materials.  He exhibited nationally and internationally including shows at Camden Art Centre, London, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Leeds University Galleries and between 1972 – 84 he had six solo exhibitions at Galerie Swart, Amsterdam. Mitchell made both paintings and sculptures and his work was always a dialogue between two and three dimensions.

John Mitchell made sculptures, drawings, paintings and prints that are clear, pure, and apparently simple yet complex. He used structure generated by the Fibonacci sequence, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 … to decide on the direction of each piece. Minutely measured with an intuitive use of materials that simultaneously absorb, refract and reflect light they occupy far more space than they physically take up.

Derived Shape and House – Like Shapes are a departure in the sense that the objects apparently refer to something known in the real world. This is deceptive as with all of Mitchell’s work, each new series is a direct derivation of the last.

 It was his practice to make a number if not all of the possibilities presented by each phase of his work. They could operate as a series or as stand-alone pieces and could be displayed in groups or pairs. Latterly he had begun to make lead and iron house – like shapes together with pigment drawings and lino prints. Unusually, the bronze sculptures (Derived Shapes) can be seen either as a pair or as stand-alone pieces.
Sandra Porter, 2015

SANDRA PORTER 
Gaining a Masters in Painting from Chelsea School of Art in 1981, Sandra Porter later studied Printmaking with Master Printmaker Dorothea Wight in the 1990s. She has exhibited widely in a thirty year career latterly in New York and France as well as the UK and her work can be found in Private & Public Collections including Arthur Anderson, Deutsche Bank, the Government Art Collection, Hammersmith Council and in the Tate and V&A Libraries.

In June 2014 I visited the Isle of Skye for the first time and whilst struck by the beauty and wildness of the landscape, the images I took back to the studio with me were those of the corrugated iron Bothans that sit in the landscape telling a more recent story of the island. My work explores a fascination with the power of repetition and through playing with grids, stripes and recurrent schemes I create series of images that are similar but not the same.

As a contemporary painter and printmaker I have been deeply influenced by the art and architecture of the early Italian Renaissance as well as the traditions of Modernism, specifically Constructivism, Minimalism and Abstract expressionism. Yet, it is the simplicity and rawness of the Bothan dwellings that have profoundly affected the development of my recent prints and paintings.