A Place Called Space

Thursday, 16 November 2017

Boxes - Oxford Ceramics Gallery

The Ceramics Gallery, Oxford

The current exhibition at the gallery is of boxes, but there is a lot more besides.

This container has two lids so that one can swap and change. Unfortunately I did not record the name of the artist, but I remember it's someone from Japan. All the Japanese ceramics in this exhibition have their own wooden box for storage. This particular container has an added compartment for the storage of the spare lid.

Yoshokawa Masamichi (celadon glazed porcelain with cobalt)

Niisato Akio (window glazed porcelain)

Yoshikawa Masamichi (celadon glazed porcelain with cobalt)

Mo Jupp, Portrait of a Box (black earthenware)

Bodil Manz, (slip cast porcelain)

Bodil Manz

Chris Keenan, (porcelain)

Takeshi Yasuda

Akiko Hirai, Moon Jar

looking closer

Paul Scott, kitsugi (the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with gold) on willow pattern china.

and taking this a step further, how clever of Scott

John Ward

Lucie Rie

Mo Jupp

Chris Keenan

Akiko Hirai, Large Cube Flower Vase, (porcelain with celadon glaze)

Akiko Hirai, Large Cube Vase, (porcelain with ash glazes)

John Ward

Wednesday, 15 November 2017

Resting

Sunday, 12 November 2017

Carved, cast, constructed

Carved, Cast, Constructed - British Culture, 1951-1991 at Marlborough Fine Art, Mayfair, London.

We came upon this exhibition by chance. We had just left the John Martin gallery where we had gone to see the John Caple exhibition. The man on the ladder below caught my eye, so we went inside to have a look.

John Davies, Man on Wooden Ladder, (resin, fibreglass, stone dust, acrylic paint with wood and steel)

looking closer

John Davies, Little Egyptian Servant, 1991 (bronze)

John Davies, Gesticulating Figure, 1990 (painted bronze)

Lynn Chadwick, Winged Figures, Version 1, 1973, (bronze)

Kenneth Armitage, Pandarus (version 3), 1963, (brass)

Kenneth Armitage, Figure on its Back, 1965, (painted aluminium)

Henry Moore, Upright Motive No. 12, 1955, (bronze)

Henry Moore, Wall Relief, Three Forms, 1955, (bronze)

Anthony Caro, Table Piece Z-8, 1978-79, (rusted and varnished steel)

Margaret Mellis, Two, 1979, (driftwood construction)

Margaret Mellis, Fisherman, 1990-1991, (driftwood construction)

Margaret Mellis, Marsh, 1989-1990, (driftwood construction)

Friday, 10 November 2017

Of Gardens Long Run Wild - John Caple

Of Gardens Long Run Wild, by John Caple at John Martin Gallery, Mayfair, London.

I was really pleased to see that John Martin had another exhibition of John Caple's atmospheric paintings. John Caple is completely self-taught. His family have farmed and quarried in Mendip in Somerset since the 18th century. The tight community in which he grew up has a rich history of people whose stories were passed down through successive generations. His paintings feature re-occurring faces of his mother, grandparents, uncles and others in scenes derived from his imagination through stories he is told of their pasts. Each painting describes specific episodes in the lives of these characters.

'I hoped to produce a series of paintings which would explore a relationship to both nature and mystery. In a world in which we can feel increasingly disenchanted from the earth, I wanted to think about the search for re-enchantment and a simpler wildness within us. It is perhaps that small wilderness within that shapes our relationship to the macrocosm, and so ultimately shapes the world we live in. I looked to poetry hoping to find insight and was immediately drawn to Queen Mab by Percy Shelley. A visionary poem, seen as revolutionary when it was published, the importance of nature remains at the very heart of Queen Mab throughout its length. It describes for me a nature that is at once both simple and profound, pragmatic and mysterious, where hope is a fragile beauty that we each hold within our hands'. John Caple, 1917.