This month we celebrate three outstanding female artists and their spectacular bodies of work...
📸 'Happy After Ever: North of the Equator’
Photography by LISA TOMASETTI
🏺 ’Bodies Made of Bodies’
Porcelain, scarva stoneware & raku by SAM GOLD
📃🖊 Works on paper by BARBARA CHALK
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LISA TOMASETTI - 'Happy After Ever: North of the Equator’
'With the advent of digitisation and the passing of ‘peak camera’, my intention with 'Happy After Ever' is to produce a series of photographs re-stating the lasting power of the photographic image. This series continues my interpretative response to the work of the Dutch Masters, but enlists landscape elements to further my investigation of notions of permanence and fixity within photography’s digital realm. By placing the figure in inhospitable, timeless environments, the work contemplates what constitutes lasting value in art making and whether or not photography’s contemporary digital expression risks it’s legacy as a lasting cultural artefact?' - Lisa Tomasetti. In the artist's second instalment of the 'Happy After Ever series', the raw, wild Icelandic environment takes centre stage. Although destructive, Icelandic forces of fire and ice possess an important, yet violent evolutionary function. In broken and re-made landscapes, we are forced to come to terms with what is lost and what is made new - in both the world and in ourselves. A shifting volcanic landscape powerfully represents photography’s tectonic shift from analogue to digital, forming new alloys and new ways seeing. Lisa Tomasetti, artist.
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SAM GOLD - 'Bodies Made of Bodies’
Sam Gold produces ceramic installations that explore the body’s faculty for Poiesis in order to embed meaning and its capacity to reconcile with material to achieve catharsis. This process oriented work is held together by the indexical trace of gesture; the repetitious mark making which is embedded within the clay. Gold's body is a tool, the clay becomes a site to document time and experiential narratives of what we birth, rise and resolve within. Gold speaks of the ‘storiness’ of our lived materiality; the artefacts we imbue with meaning - loves and losses, hopes and desperations, the conferring of emotion and tales of times lived into the material.
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BARBARA CHALK ‘Works on paper’
Nature and beauty is where I draw most of my inspiration. The work HornUcopia is a play on ‘Cornucopia’ - the horn of plenty - which depicts the abundance and beauty that nature proffers. Blue Beauty Borrowed represents my own quest to find inspiration in 2020 as many bleak situations brought about by COVID left me bereft of motivation. I found that trawling the internet for inspiration and ideas informed my own brief for this work. The bower birds shown either side of the pedestal are gatherers of blue items, which they use to decorate their complex architectural nest structures; gatherers of inspiration like myself. All artists ‘borrow’ consciously or unconsciously in order to attract interest and attention. The works The Quick Brown Fox and Lazy Dog are references to the qwerty keyboard that remains a common part of our texting and email lives. 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' contains every letter on the QWERTY keyboard and was commonly used for typists in training. My love of etchings as an art student has informed and directed my use of a ballpoint pen to capture detail and tone created by the use of fine lines. I enjoy the discipline of a medium that has no margin for error. Barbara Chalk, artist.
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© Filmed & edited by Daniela Pinna