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Art in the Gallery Summer 2008

KEVICC Artwork exhibited for moderation by examiners   This annual exhibition from the Art department of GCSE and A level final work pieces reflects the superb artwork that is produced during the year.
KEVICC Design and Technology and Fabric Technology Departments   This annual exhibition from the Design and Technology and Fabric Technology departments of GCSE and A level final work pieces is one of the opportunities we have to display the excellence achieved by our students.     Outdoor heated bar unit made by Adam Furneaux Y13

Recent exhibitions

The 21 Group   The 21 Group, formed in 1967, is one of the longest established exhibiting groups in Devon. It consists of up to twenty-one practising artists who work and show independently but also exhibit together at least twice a year. Almost all the members have had full time art education and many are, or have been, art teachers. Their work covers a wide range of different mediums – oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolour, mixed media, collage and many different methods of printmaking. The subjects explored in the work are as diverse as their mediums, varying from detailed figuration to extreme abstraction.     Use this link to read biographies of the 21 artists.        Jenny Pery	Moira Mellor Madeleine Strobel
Ernie & Gahan Oliver and Patrick Lessware   Patrick Lessware Gahan Oliver Patrick Lessware	Ernie Oliver   Ernie Oliver   Ernie Oliver
George Davis     Use this link to see more of George's artwork
The F Word  www.theforgivenessproject.com   The Forgiveness Project is a charitable organisation which explores forgiveness, reconciliation and conflict resolution through real-life human experience. The organisation hopes to promote peace and reconciliation using stories, and in particular this powerful exhibition, The F Word , to open up a dialogue and promote understanding. The organisation works in prisons, schools, faith communities, and with any group who want to explore the nature of forgiveness, whether in the wider political context, or within their own lives.   Forgiveness is a journey. Today you can forgive and tomorrow you can feel the pain all over again   Anne Gallagher … truly an education of the human spirit.   Anita Roddick
Handmade lamps by Pia Leete   A fusion of pure FSC Birch, organic linens, silks and light. Each piece is naturally inspired and a stand-alone work of art. Warm light filters through a contemporary range of designs throwing gentle shadows and creating a warm ambience as well as functionally lighting a room. The best advice I have been given since starting my business is to dream first, and then make it happen. Harvest information, but not to be limited by what others think is possible. To find what I do best and give it my all. Thus I make to the very best of my ability. Firesprite products are designed to last a life time both in durability and in Simple style.   Pia Leete was recently artist in residence at KEVICC, linked to the Design and Technology department. More information is available on her website www.fire-sprite.com	detail
ARIEL VIEW – exhibition of new sculptural work by SW Sculptors & Sculpture Bretagne
SW Sculptors hosted their second annual exhibition at the Ariel Centre in Totnes. This followed on from a successful exhibition at Dartington in the summer, celebrating the spiritual home of the group, whose diverse talents and achievements radiate from their founder and central members and from meetings in Totnes. The difference in this exhibition was the inclusion of a group of invited sculptors from Brittany. In 2003, some intriguing and inspired sculpture magazines from Sculpture Bretagne fell by chance into the hands of some Devon Sculptors, who ventured to Brittany with no preconception that this would develop into a vibrant correspondance. Highlights were the invitations to participate in Sculpture Bretagne's annual showcase exhibition in Landivisiau in Spring 2004 and 2006, where Devon sculptors enjoyed unique and unpredictable moments in the hospitality of the Breton group. Two Devon sculptors (Tony Wood and Angela Holmes) were excited by the opportunity to put on a two man show in the small coastal town of Locquirec last summer; sadly the last major exhibition for Tony Wood who died shortly after his work had received much interest there. Some may remember the SW Sculptors exhibition shared with Sculpture Bretagne at the Ariel Centre in Autumn 2005, as well as mesmerising films of the work of Breton kinetic sculptor Francois Hameury. In the run up to Christmas, a second show titled 'Ariel View' exhibited exciting new work from members of both groups.	Luke Shepherd Hands
Tati Dennehy Ceramic Sculpture Angela Holmes Mercurial Louis Beauvais Andrakka
Sculpture Bretagne The association was founded on 21 April 1989, by Morley Troman and Roger Goncourt, in response to an article by J.Geffroy complaining about his isolation from other sculptors in the region. This now numbers about 80 members from Cotes d'Armor, Finistère, Ile et Vilaine, Loire Atlantique and Morbihan (the five Breton Departments covering an area about the size of Wales). These are professional sculptors – which is defined as creators of original work made to professional standards, who take into account the criteria of the association. The aims of the society are to unite professional sculptors, to promote good exhibitions and to establish the public and private infrastructure required for this – and, in general, to promote and protect the interests of the members. Important parts of this are conservation and education; also international cultural links and exchanges. Another aspect of this was to produce a review, which was started in 1992. The president and committee are elected every three years, and previous presidents include François Hameury (1998–2001) and Francine Toulemonde (2002–2005). The current president is Jean Marc Loiseau.	Val Bonsey Yew
Wendy Newman and Colin Bigwood… Private Views
Wendy has lived in Devon for twenty eight years, raising three children whilst teaching at KEVICC. She has always painted landscape, and, like Colin who appointed her, believes very strongly in the value of her own practice underpinning her teaching experience. Similarly, she has contributed to the local choral music scene and continues to work with children in this area. Wendy included retrospective, as well as new works, to celebrate her fiftieth birthday which she reached in November. Use this link to see Wendy's paintings…	Wendy Newman Flame Tree
Colin's work has been collected both privately and publicly throughout the southwest and abroad. He was for many years the Head of Art at KEVICC, where he appointed Wendy, and on his retirement divides his time between painting and jazz drumming. For Colin this is something of a retrospective exhibition as he was eighty in November. Use this link to see Colin's paintings…	Colin Bigwood Swans, Low Tide
Bruce Timson… Abstract Landscape   The outdoor environment acts as the initial subject matter for my work. This can be quite specific and representational to begin with and is then slowly abstracted through the process of painting. Thus the act of painting, in itself, gains precedence over the subject.   Abstraction allows me to make reference to changes in scale, viewpoint and time. The layering and splattering of pigment, and the scraping back of paint to reveal earlier marks, is symbiotic to the sedimentary process of changing land use within the observed environment.
South Hams Artists Taster Exhibition   Art lovers in Devon seized the opportunity to view original art works at the Taster Exhibition at the Ariel Centre from over 80 South Hams artists. The Exhibition was part of the Devon Art Works 2007, the largest Open Studios event ever held in the county, involving over five hundred artists. During Devon Art Works artists and artist groups opened their homes and studios to visitors and showed work that ranged from traditional painting and ceramics to installations and performance pieces. This was a flagship project of Devon Artist Network, an artists' membership organisation, and follows on from the highly successful Nine Days of Art events that have been staged regularly since 2000. The new annual event saw studios across the county being opened simultaneously for the first time.
21 Group with their 40 Years' Anniversary Exhibition   This Totnes-centred Group celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Founded by the late Jane Prout in 1967, its philosophy then, as now, was for an identifiable style and personal commitment from each member. High standards were achieved by limiting the numbers to twenty one. Over the years the Group has gone from strength to strength with new members coming in from time to time, providing different approaches and techniques; few of the original twenty one remain. The current members number twnety, with one place soon to be filled, and they are Colin Bigwood, Nick Collier, Jean Coombe, Sally Cottis, Lawrence Freiesleben, Sophie Gurney, Mary Gillett, Anne Hinkins, Chris Keleher, Moira Mellor, Wendy McBride, Wendy Newman, Jenny Pery, Penny Robinson, Rita Smith, Madeleine Strobel, Stephen Taylor, Clody Wain and Vincent Wilson. For the past few years the Group has been delighted to exhibit regularly at the Ariel Centre.	Anne Hinkins
Royal Opera House Collections on tour Creating Dance Theatre   Will Tuckett: creating danced theatre Will Tuckett works with a series of regular collaborators which includes dancers Zenaida Yanowsky, Adam Cooper, Matthew Hart and Will Kemp, designers The Quay Brothers, Les Brotherson and Nicky Gillibrand and composer Martin Ward.   Johan Persson: photographer Johan Persson's intimate portraits of work in progress and in performance provide a unique insight into these artists at work.   Will Tuckett is a young choreographer who started by creating work for his contemporaries at The Royal Ballet School such as Darcy Bussell and William Trevitt of BalletBoyz fame. This interactive exhibition allowed visitors to explore shows created by him for ROH2 in the Linbury Studio Theatre since 2003. It includes family shows The Wind in the Willows and Pinocchio, dance drama The Soldier's Tale and Timecode, created for young people with The Royal Ballet and ROH Education. Visitors were able to see costumes and head dresses and view extracts from the shows on a specially commissioned DVD. On the DVD, Will Tuckett talks about the process of creation in an insightful interview with Deborah Bull, Creative Director of ROH2. A touchscreen allowed visitors to select which aspects of being a choreographer or creating a show they would like to see & hear about. The interview footage was intercut with footage from the rehearsal studio and from live shows.   Johan Persson began his career as a dancer but when injury forced his retirement from The Royal Ballet in 2002, he turned to his other great love, photography. Persson has had exhibitions of his images at the Royal Opera House, The National Theatre, The Riverside Gallery in Richmond and The House of Commons, as well as in Canada and Japan. His book The Royal Ballet, 161 images was published in 2003.   The Royal Opera House Collections were formally established in 1969 to record the history of the Royal Opera House and its Companies and departments, including The Royal Ballet, The Royal Opera, the Chorus, the Orchestra and more recently the work of ROH2, from when the first Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, opened on 7 December 1732. The Collection ranges from production and artist photographs, press cuttings, playbills and posters, administrative records, audio visual recordings, costume and set designs, to headdresses and jewellery.	Will and the Weasel photo Johan Persson
Gerard Wagner… a retrospective… Seeing the Spiritual in Colour   Gerard Wagner (1906–1999) was a very prolific painter who worked for most of his career in Switzerland in the small town of Dornach near Basle. He was born in Wiesbaden in Germany, but the family moved to Manchester when he was 6 and he spent the next 14 years in England. He studied figurative drawing in St Ives with a local artist before spending some time training at the Royal College of Art in London. When he heard of the new approach to Art being developed by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian researcher into all aspects of the spirit, he joined a group of followers of Steiner in Switzerland and received further training in the understanding and use of colour. He subjected himself to a long period of apprenticeship while mastering new techniques in painting and almost nothing from these fourteen years remains. Only in the 1940s did he begin to feel ready to produce paintings that were true to the laws of colour, and he continued to paint uninterruptedly until his death in 1999. He covered a wide range of themes from Biblical ones, to depiction of good and evil beings, to plant and animal metamorphoses and the development of the human being in the different epochs of history. The colours are powerful and vibrant, and many of the paintings on show use plant colours specially developed at the Goetheanum laboratories in Dornach, Switzerland and give great luminosity.   The selection in the exhibition focused on a wide range of pictures revealing the wonders of the plant world, but none of them was naturalistic. Wagner occupies a unique niche in modern art – one that is difficult to describe since he falls into none of the usual categories. He was one of those artists who explored very sensitively the inner dynamics of colour and its own inherent laws. In the last 10 years his work has begun to be more widely acknowledged after major exhibitions at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and then in London in Spring 2006 and most recently in Krakow, Poland. All of these have drawn many very positive responses from the public.   On Tuesday 23 January at the official opening of the exhibition, Robert Lord, the curator of the Wagner collection, gave a short introductory talk on the paintings.	July 1951
Making It Yours: Ceramics   For the whole of the Autumn term we were extremely priviliged to be one of only three schools in the country invited to be part of a new initiative to take a major museum collection into schools. This groundbreaking initiative, developed in partnership with Ofsted, marked the start of the Crafts Council's new way of working nationally in craft education. The tour of Making It Yours: Ceramics was supported by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and the Foyle Foundation. Making It Yours featured very prestigious pieces from internationally famous artists, such as Turner prize-winner Grayson Perry, and Janice Tchalenko, whose work is also well-known locally. There were 44 pieces from 24 artists in a very 'hands-on', informative, and also very high-tech, display. One of the many purposes of Making It Yours: Ceramics was to draw attention to the vitality and diversity of works made in clay today. Works included a wide variety of thrown, hand-built and slip-cast ceramics such as teapots, cups and saucers, mugs, and jugs. At the other end of the scale were works that extend beyond the functional, challenging the boundaries between ceramics, sculpture and painting. The works were divided into two themes 'Useful Pots' and 'Beyond the Vessel', and the exhibition hoped to answer questions such as How was it made? Why does it look the way it does? Why was it made?	Grayson Perry Mad Kid's Bedroom Wall Pot
Blowing Hot and Cold photographs by Alan Bond & Paul Taylor   Alan Bond Work & Selected Commissions: 2005/6 Curated 'Continental Breakfast, London' in Slovenia. 2004 Workshops at Centro d' Arte Dedalo, Italy 2002 Founded Seven Seven Contemporary Art 2000 Commissioned to make nine paintings for Enterprise IG 2000 Founded Beyond the Desktop, creative training for design companies 1999 Designed and made site decoration for NGO/Governmental conference, Westminster 1998 Designed and project managed major set for Indian Independence Anniversary at Royal Albert Hall   Paul Taylor   Use this link to see Paul Taylor's photographs…	Alan Bond   Alan Bond
Michael Carter   Michael Carter works exclusively with monochrome film, and he defines his photographic style as Subjective Realism. The material means and the idea are related.   Film photography, although it cannot be the guarantor of descriptive truth, is not susceptible to modification in the manner associated with the digital image, nor does it carry the suspicion of modification. Thus film will remain the mode for those photographers whose primary inclination is towards picturing aspects of external reality. The world outside themselves as it is perceived in the frame is the sole source of the image.   The Realism in Subjective Realism does not describe by definition a harsh or squalid dimension hidden or ignored by the ordinary gaze, nor is it some kind of social index which proposes that some forms of living are more 'real' than others. Realism, here, refers to the unconstructed nature of the elements which constitute the image. The elements are 'found' together; they were not arranged by the photographer in order to be recorded as an image. So as the image is not the fantasy of the photographer, it can be seen as real. Having knowledge of the image's reality, its record on negative film, and its appearance on an uncomputerized print, combines to heighten the impact of actuality on the observer. The image has a time and place identical to the observer's world and this intensifies the connection between world and observer and promotes aesthetic engagement.   One aspect of the Subjective in Subjective Realism describes the expressive intention seen in much of the photography which has hung on gallery walls – that is, the straight image captured when it seems most loaded with the photographer's symbolized feelings, when the outside world in the viewfinder strangely comes to seem an image of interior life. But in Subjective Realism this expressive intent is extended to include not only the subjectivity of the photographer but the objects themselves. Subjective Realism attempts to convey both the appearance of the subjectivity of objects and the implication that these objects, through their aligned forms, have established relationships with one another and are thus participating in a Drama of Objects.
Eliot Siegel   Eliot Siegel's photography seeks out the unexpected in the city environment. Formerly a fashion photographer, his attention now turns to the lifeless mannequins of city shop windows and the chance juxtapositions of reflected sky and cityscape. He also explores a fascination with the urban environment where posters appear overnight only to receive graffiti and to weather, disintegrate and become part of the ever-changing wallpaper of the city. 'The walls cry of the desperate and hopeful, the desecrated and the illuminated, a ritual of painted, scratched rantings by the self-proclaimed preachers of the street.'   'Photography changed my life at the age of 14, when I found that I could organise the world into simple rectangular frames as I saw fit, without constraint. I admired the works of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Friedlander and Gary Winogrand amonst others and was determined, in spite of family protestation against, to make a life of it.'
Paula Cloonan & Gaenor Blackledge   Two Devon Artsculture artists came together to exhibit at the Gallery…   Paula Cloonan is a reportage artist and illustrator. She regularly makes sketches during performances in the Ariel Centre and later uses the sketches for her vibrant, colourful paintings that are full of movement.   Gaenor Blackledge enjoys drawing from life, capturing character in lively images that reflect the moment. Gaenor also runs life drawing sessions and residentials at the Courtyard in Chulmleigh, North Devon and Prussia Cove, Cornwall.	Paula Cloonan Benjamin Zephaniah
Little Footprints   This was a mixed media exhibition on the theme of the loss of a baby, many by bereaved parents and family organised by the Totnes Babyloss Support Group. This was to celebrate the launch of their new website www.littlefootprints.org.uk. They support bereaved parents and families when a baby dies and meet monthly in Totnes. Art is a way many people find to express their grief, whether they are artists or not. Art can touch those grieving in a very direct way, as they recognise something from their own experience in a work of art and it can also communicate something to those who have not experienced such grief. The art on show represented 25 artists, both local and from all over the country. Maxine and Clinton by Ian Douglas 100–1 by Glad Fryer	Untitled by Maureen Lacey
Textiles and Photography from the KEVICC 6th form   Exhibition of textile and photography work from students aged 16–18. The quality and skill shown in the work was stunning. KEVICC was very proud to exhibit it.

 

 

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