1st – 6th November, open daily 12 – 6pm
Private view 1st November, 6 – 9pm
Dragon Vets focuses on the exploration of unfamiliar environments, a private endeavour that comes with a sense of personal uncertainty and catharsis.
The exhibition takes inspiration from JG Ballard’s The Crystal World where Sander’s journey into a crystallising forest exemplifies the mystery of adventure. This process, though beautiful and enchanting, poses a threat that symbolises the vulnerability of humans facing inevitable change.
Dragon Vets imitates the experience of exploring a cave, the claustrophobia and symbolism of descending into darkness in the hope of finding something unique; be it an object, sight or understanding. Each artwork is a haptic response to this journey and to the susceptible nature of humanity encountering the unknown. Alongside the risk of these endeavours comes the possible need for help or even rescue. Even the strongest and most resilient need care, support and community.
Including newly commissioned works by Noelle Turner, Gwenllian Spink, Georgia Grinter, Clancy Sinding Dawson and Peter Carrick the exhibition consists of paintings, light boxes, quilts, stained glass, light projection and sound.
The exhibition questions as to whether work made in direct response to these endeavours is just as successful as second hand documentation, be it personal or relatable, in identifying the therapeutic need for sharing experiences as a way of communicating empathy and understanding.
This demonstrates how these places can take on a spiritual significance, becoming visions or dreams that artists are able to exploit as a means of self discovery.
Peter Carrick’s elongated, androgynous figures find themselves wrapped up in various states of affection or melancholy, poised in surreal landscapes or domestic settings. Influenced by the effects of light and composition in High Renaissance painting and the flowing sections of Futurism, he combines deep stains of colour with contemporary imagery, such as the disco ball, to illustrate dream-like moments.
After drawing personal experiences from memory painting gives freedom to add personified objects, symbols and pareidolia to create strangely intimate works using paint and glass. b.1995, Chipping Norton, works in London, UK
Clancy Sinding Dawson’s creative education began in fashion design and then tailoring, although illustration has always been at the core of all her creations. This has culminated in her recent adoption of quilt-making as a principal medium. Her vivid, humorous drawings usually depict an absurd tableau with imagined characters, often verging on the grotesque. Disturbed by the environmental impact of the fashion industry and inspired by the slow, repair-focused nature of Savile Row, she now produces work using only deadstock, ecological or second-hand materials from old clothes and bedding. Here she has been influenced by the stylised decorative qualities of Pierre Bonnard’s intimate domestic scenes and the window as a metaphor for hope, change and a step into the unknown.
b.1994, Aarhus, Denmark, works in London, UK.
In a constantly evolving environment, Georgia Grinter recreates still moments found within it. Journeys; corners of buses, trains and car drives, with windows to look out of but not be in what is outside. Losing herself in repeated things that pass by, thoughts, memories and nostalgia simultaneously merge with where her body and eyes are.
Natural beauty blurs, while she situates herself in this claustrophobic high before getting off. Straight edges of city walls become curvy, bent around flooding light and consistent movement. Green hills are at the back of her mind, while rolling yellow handle bars are at the front. The machines that vehicles are, echo the integrated presence of people. With or like packets of paracetamol, people are quickly fixed, nature’s loss is glazed over in the sticky beer soaked pavement.
She interacts with this ‘glazing over’ in paint, playing with reflective qualities; glossy or chalky surfaces with different mediums. As the sun goes down, street lights cast shapes creating intimate spaces and colours become saturated as the contrast is turned up, using blues and pinks found bent around the edge of nature’s yellows and greens. Strings and threads are cast between visual similarities, mapping parallel hues that pin down thoughts, leaving them in different locations and picking them up on the way home. Between this fullness and stretching across the city, her own presence exists in the work.
Gwenllian Spink is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work is rooted in Welsh cultural landscapes. Her practice is materially led, and is often reliant on community participation. Most recently, she was commissioned by Natural Resources Wales to create a participatory sculpture highlighting the biodiversity present in the threatened ecosystems of raised bogs (2022).
Noelle Turner (b. 1993) is a British artist based in London. She studied Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, 2015. Her recent work has consisted of installation, sculpture, painting and writing, which reconsiders the relationship between ecological and technological systems, the balance of chaos and control in nature, and the spiritual world of objects. Drawing upon wide ranging influences, from religion, biology, cosmology, psychology to science-fiction, she investigates the prehistoric to imagined future worlds in search of knowledge to help understand a deeply personal present time: hope, sadness and searching.