a&e Gallery: 2010

Sunday, 6 June 2010

Next Show

Not Holding The String

Fri 11th June
6-9pm

Tuesday, 18 May 2010

"Not Holding the String" draws together sculptures, drawings and animations by Matthew James Kay in an exhibition inspired by occurrences of mistake-making, grace, doubt and faith in everyday life. Employing the stuff of common experience, Kay documents his experience of being human, a quest for the mysterious lurking in the mundane.

Steering clear of definite meanings and prescriptive individual interpretations, Matthew James Kay's work invites the viewer into a dialogue with the exhibition as a whole. Kay's assemblages are reconfigured items of the artist's own domestic life, left over paint from decorating, a ripped innertube, the bees that mysteriously appear (dead) in the living room each spring, a shoe rack there just wasn't space for, an ill-kept bonsai, tokens of affection... This ephemera/detritus comes together to create new objects for thought- disused props that take up the role of protagonists in new narratives.

The artworks in "Not Holding the String" stand as markers in the artist's ongoing exploration of the domestic adventure as a place of frustration and a process of becoming. The works inhabit a transient place where personal and circumstantial transformations occur in wrestling with the desire for real adventure, balancing our need for contentment and joy with the reality of dissatisfaction and doubt.

Private View: Friday 11th June 6-9pm
Exhibition Open: 12th - 27th June

Next Show

NOT HOLDING THE STRING

Matthew Kay

P.v

11th June 2010

www.matthewjameskay.com

Tuesday, 11 May 2010

May Day celebrations are historically routed in the psyche of the British Isles. The Rites of Spring, opening on May 1^st, presents work that reflects on the customs, ceremonies and meanings surrounding this institution.

Traditionally the origins of May Day, and the eve before, were given over to revelry and sexual desires, as an invocation of fertility, death and renewal. Jayne Eagle’s installations and sculpture consists of these notions reflecting on the folklore and mythological aspects surrounding them. Customary objects are used within the pieces, such as the Hawthorn tree, specifically chosen for its symbolic legacy. Besides being the tree of choice from which the maypole was cut, it has often been linked to fertility, and has carried a duality of sexual associations from abandonment to the tree of chastity. Informed by ideas of the Uncanny and imagery from Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, the work draws upon the familiar whilst containing the unexpected.

Alice White works in the realms where pagan beliefs give way to a wistful, more idealised May Day, with children’s parades and young May Queens. Imagery taken from nostalgic May Days in England, she focuses on the background children, the losers, the smiles of disappointment. Working with household gloss paints in pastel shades, saccharine disenchantments are reflected upon. This supposedly idyllic, childhood moment containing the rites of passage, it is a fairy tale of flowers, dresses and parties of which all little girls dream… but not every little girl will be a queen.