Overview

June 13th – July 26th 2009

Overview is a series of works linking themes of aerial viewpoints, boundaries and fragmentation, made by Susan Kinley over the past three years.

Walford Mill Crafts in Wimborne is hosting this solo exhibition, which will explore in depth ideas of change and transience in the landscape, through a series of floating panels using translucent materials.

These include glass, silk and fine metal gauze, combined in layers with innovative processes such as water jet cutting, digital print and laser cutting.

Susan has a long career making both large and smaller scale commissioned works for particular spaces and environments, often working with light. Starting points are photographs of places, such as aerial viewpoints, overviews where archaeology, land and sea become lines, shapes and patterns, a visual language waiting to be de-coded. One set of hanging, laminated silk panels have evolved from an image of a stream that has been both enlarged as a digital print and used to create laser cut patterns of flickering light running up and down their length.

This exhibition features several works that have evolved from aerial photographs taken by Susan of the Isles of Scilly in Cornwall. Fragments and sections of images have been re-assembled to make new juxtapositions of shorelines, islands and map like boundaries. These have then been fired and digitally printed on to glass and silk, and as in ‘Channel’, held in invisibly stitched layers of fine stainless steel gauze as a floating panel.

An installation that is central to the exhibition, ‘Island Fields’, has been made possible by funding from Arts Council England South West. Consisting of a floating horizontal ‘field’ of shaped, printed and fired glass sections, it links themes of ancient field systems with changes in sea levels. Imagery and materials are both solid and transient – as sea levels rise and fall, panels change when viewed in different light and from different angles.

As each work explores a particular time and place, focus changes from near to far, moving from overview to detail. Repetition of cut-outs, shapes and imagery are on the borderlines between pattern and recognition.

This exhibition is a unique opportunity to view a body of inter-linked works that have been brought together in one space, creating a resonance of imagery, colour, media and materials that constantly change as the onlooker moves around them.

‘Overview’ is a touring exhibition organised by Walford Mill Crafts and it is available to tour to other galleries. Please contact Christine Lawry on 01202 841400 for further details.

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