Encounters, London Art Fair, London
17-21 January 2024
Vane is pleased to announce the gallery’s participation in the Encounters section of London Art Fair. We are presenting work by David Fox, Nick Fox, Kirsty Harris, Stephen Palmer, and Matilda Sutton at Stand E2.
Vane presents five artists that provide different perspectives as to how humans make a physical and/or psychological imprint or projection on the spaces, objects and beings that surround them. Visually, many of the artists’ works seem to have little in common, appearing in opposition with each other even. Indeed, the aim is not to present an aesthetically complimentary union of works. Rather, the commonalities are to be found in the (unseen) intention that underlies their creation, specifically an interest in various forms of dualities and binaries. Themes of concealment, of things not being what they first might appear recur throughout each artist’s work.
David Fox’s paintings of site-specific landscapes capture moments of everyday life most often associated with excursions during leisure time. Often depictions of mundane and overlooked everyday spaces, these range from views of his native town of Tullamore in the Irish Midland region to others documenting the border with Northern Ireland, painted as a response to Brexit, highlighting the uncertainties that faced the only land border with the UK. Whilst the politically charged nature of many of these sites is often ‘hidden’, the viewer is drawn in by the ambiguity and other world qualities of these relatable yet unpopulated scenes.
Nick Fox’s recent paintings and sculpture revisit interests in the symbols that speak to thresholds of desire, longing and to the complexities of intimate personal relationships, giving rise to a keen sense of the pleasures and the limits of double meanings in the construction of codes. His imagery – folds, loops and knots used symbolically as tokens of remembrance, devotion, or loss – gives form to ideas of transition, transformation, and to the uncertainty and rewards that come with communicating and connecting across the emotional spectrum. Painted organic forms, twisted rope fragments, and other votive knotty objects sited in uneasy landscapes that become spaces for contemplation and revelation to communicate hidden codes, desires and pleasures. In each work, Fox quietly reveals symbolic fragments of remembrance, longing, love and lust.
Kirsty Harris’s paintings depicting nuclear bomb tests are both beautiful and confrontational, depicting moments of manufactured violence that radically disrupt the landscape and creating cultural, historical and iconic symbols in their wake. The events they depict are both ‘unnatural’ in their man-made destructive consequences, whilst also the result of manipulation of the very elemental basis of life, the atom, the smallest particle of a chemical element that can exist. Her paintings, delicate silverpoint drawings and other works aim for a quiet sense of unease, to harness the beauty and fragility of the chosen medium, capturing ginormous, fleeting moments of history in a consuming and meticulous manner.
Stephen Palmer’s recent paintings and drawings start with a model made from a sheet of A4 paper that has been defaced through a series of actions. The paper is first scribbled on with blue or red biro, and sometimes more defined geometric shapes are added, also in biro. It is then folded, screwed up, ripped, cut up, and finally unfolded or reassembled as if an attempt has been made to once again make the paper good. These ‘originals’ are then re-rendered as flat artworks, either paintings or drawings, of almost photorealistic quality, facsimiles of their source material. The slow and labour-intensive process of rendering these objects in gouache or graphite pencil onto another sheet of A4 or on paper mounted on board, is the absolute antithesis of the process that goes into making the models.
Matilda Sutton’s practice is a form of storytelling through image and object. Drawing from posthumanist and feminist philosophies, myth, literary and historical narratives, but also from being a creature herself, her inquiry is into how we categorise our world and ourselves. Playing with binaries and conceptual dualisms, her practice takes ‘gender’ and ‘species' in its hands to prod and poke them. Taking symbols as tools, it is a kind of wayfinding, charting a journey through the dark, misty places in between. Rooted in both archetypal, cultural narratives and personal experience and embodiment, the resulting imagery often features beings somewhere between humanness and animalness.
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