A group Exhibition by Bessie Kirkham, Oscar Butcher, Ivor Butcher and Mel Perkins
OPEN: 17th - 22nd December
OPEN VIEW: 19th December, 18:00-20:00
MEET THE ARTIST: 22nd December, 13:00-15:00
Main Gallery
In this exhibition, four Artists, working in different mediums, explore the barriers and connections we encounter in our material existence. The works invite personal interpretations rather than presenting an image of what is or was intended by the artist.
Bessie Kirkham:
Graduate of Goldsmiths Fine Art Degree 2023 – Painter of the Year.
One of the Young Contemporaries for 2023
Participant in Sky Arts’ ‘Portrait Artist of the Year 2024
Bessie Kirkham works at the intersection between the feeling of disassociation and of connection, often in the romantic. Predominantly working with blue, she sees this as the only colour able to hold such intangible emotions, its connotations contained in and of itself.
Painting mundane scenes, blue allows for a softer fall into its own reality; normality but with the distance that blue provides. In some way, that is the feeling disassociation, the feeling of watching rather than being within.
Oscar Butcher:
Graduate of Goldsmiths Fine Art Degree 2023
Previous exhibition ‘OUCH!’ at Anteros in August 2021
Oscar’s new body of work explores relationships between imagined objects and beings. The shapes in his images lean, poke and overlap each other as if engaged in communication. Some are old friends – others have so little in common it’s frankly a bit awkward.
These aren’t always
comfortable pieces to engage with; the viewer is deliberately challenged to apply their own interpretation of what each piece evokes.
Ivor Butcher:
Artist and picture framer at Old Jet, Bentwaters Parks, Rendlesham
Woodbridge
Previous exhibition ‘OUCH!’ at Anteros in August 2021
A self taught practitioner, Ivor began making art during the COVID lockdown of 2020. His earliest works combined a love of geometric form and colour with construction, inspired by the apparent simplicity of works by Mondrian and the multi-faceted work of American contemporary artist William LaChance.
Since then, Ivor continues to explore the juxtaposition of heightened 2D and 3D forms with tonal balance, at times embracing Jencks’ Adhocism
through the conjunction but not combination of more commonly seen
heterogeneous forms of expression. Common to all of Ivor’s work is a love
of working with the physical materials.
Mel Perkins:
Artist at Old Jet, Bentwaters Parks, Rendlesham, Woodbridge
Mel Perkins graduated with a Fine Arts Degree from Derby University in
2019, and is now developing her multidisciplinary practice, focusing
mainly on photography, painting and sculpture.
Describing making art as ‘a bodily and intrinsic process’, Mel works instinctively. Materiality is as fundamental to her practice as theme and subject matter, and she
explores each in depth.
When the work becomes too ‘ordered’, she intentionally seeks chaos again. This playful, experimental approach runs through Mel’s work, as she combines hard and soft, and different scales and modes of presentation. There is a questioning of two and three dimensions and the potential between them. Sometimes she also adds handwritten notes and musings, in order to bring an aspect of humanity back into her images. Her work is mainly monochromatic, inspired by the richly contrasting photography of Horst P Horst, the
abstract expressionism of early black-and-white Jackson Pollock and the multidisciplinary practice of Robert Rauschenberg.