OPENING NIGHT: Thursday 19 July 6-8pm
GALLERY HOURS: Wed - Sun 12-5pm
A fetish can be many things. It can be an object regarded with awe as the embodiment of a potent spirit or idea, one which elicits reverence, respect or devotion. It can be a course of action to which one has an excessive commitment, or something that causes a habitual erotic response.
The nine artists who accepted the challenge of responding to the theme of Fetish have explored its many permutations in very different ways, resulting in an exciting range of works including sculpture, printmaking, photography, painting and fibre art.
Leonie Andrews employs long stitch to portray objects she has stumbled across which seem to have a kind of animation about them. In her hands, everything from parking meters to fishing floats might become fetish objects.
Sally Dooner is an avid collector of objects both natural and man-made and suggests that her actual art practice and processes of assemblage and sculpture are themselves a kind of fetish. Her collected material is here displayed in light boxes and photographs.
Sarah Jones likes her work to both hide and reveal at the same time. Her long fascination with the photographs of Eadweard Muybridge results in wonderful layered prints incorporating painting and stitching. Gina McDonald has responded to a Brancusi quote featuring ‘fetish’ with delicate, sensitive prints.
Sylvia Ray casts body parts in fine clay to create works that are mischievous, provocative and amusing. Using friends and family members as subjects and models, she explores the ideas of pleasure, play and fun in ways that are light-hearted and sometimes profound.
Eleanor Jane Robinson has always loved walking at night and seeing glimpses of people’s lives like little lit tableau. She also believes that in an age of surveillance cameras, cctv and reality television we all live complacently in a voyeuristic culture. Her drawings of ‘gazes’ (the lookers) and ‘glimpses’ (what is seen) have been stitched on swathes of cloth reminiscent of curtains.
Daniel Smith, a man with ‘way too many projects and not enough time’, has nevertheless found the space to create quirky little dioramas portraying some of the myriad sexual foibles and fetishes we humans are prone to.
Rose Turner , initially inspired by sci fi film, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, explores a flower/human morph which brings the body and the plant world together in a disturbing union. Her painting realises the idea of probing and fingering the fine depths of a flower.
Clare Weeks has a fascination for relationships between seemingly disparate co-existing elements. By taking found road kill, placing and photographing it on wallpaper, she creates a new artificial landscape which portrays man’s impact on nature and the desire to bring the natural world into the domestic environment.
