Reassembled, presents a group exhibition featuring new works by JFK Turner, Laura Jane Scott and Derek Wilson. The exhibition brings together three artists that all work with a restricted colour palette, allowing them to emphasise the form and structure. Bridging the gap between disciplines, they each create work that share characteristics of sculpture. Despite working in different mediums, they all share a common approach of collecting elements before reassembling them into final compositions.
Laura Jane Scott’s desire for formal simplicity through geometric form and striking use of colour, has enabled her to produce work where painting explores a model of architectural form and where the colour embodies a physical structure. The resulting work is a hybrid of painting and sculpture, a refined visual vocabulary of form and colour.
The sleek, even coloured surfaces that characterise Scott’s work are achieved through a delicate process that produces a richly coloured, matt surface, free of gestural brush strokes. When displayed, the fields of saturated clean-edged colour appear to float on the surface of the wall.
JFK Turner’s work is concerned with two key elements, images and objects. Fascinated by what an image is, how we respond to them and how we construct and make them. He believes all images have abstract values and all abstract images are steeped in reality. Objects hold power over us, we covet them, we associate memories with them, consume and discard them. Found objects from other eras fill our museums and we piece together our understanding of these societies by their lost and reclaimed objects.
Turner converts three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional images through a variety of approaches, reconstructing them from unconventional artistic materials. Working on wood allows the surface to be manipulated, revealing how these works were constructed. These paintings share the characteristics of sculptures, as a reaction occurs between the materials. The final object is not just an image, but a physical thing.
Questioning functionality, Derek Wilson uses the vessel as a means of artistic expression by exploring free and geometric abstraction. Habitually, the importance of object placement is foremost with his work and a further dimensionality lies within how it is viewed. Inviting movement in the observer, the work asks them to contemplate the significance of subtle tonalities in surface quality and the distribution of light and shadow. The process of dis-assembling elements associated with archetypal vessels that are reconstructed into complex abstract structures is at the core of Wilson’s practice.
Wilson’s current body of work is a natural progression and enquiry into new variations, with leaning and balanced elements that further abstract the vessel. The exploration of the ceramic surface has also evolved: distorting sections by applying darker or lighter areas of engobe. Glazed elements have also been added to the exterior creating a dialogue between the interior and exterior spaces. A considered and intuitive approach allows Wilson to create objects that have a sculptural and metaphorical resonance, using this process allows him to question the concept of the vessel.
