The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge in Canterbury hosted a collaborative exhibition between the 7th and 15th of September featuring three contemporary female artists; Ruth McDonald, Harriet Gifford and Kristiina Sandoe. The focus of the exhibition, entitled ‘A Different Viewpoint’, was the city’s River Stour and how a combination of painting, print work and photography can capture a permanent glimpse of the ephemeral river landscape. I found relevance to my own art practice within the work on display in how the artists chose an unusual combination of styles and mediums, for example film documentary alongside nonrepresentational rivermud collage, to produce striking and conversational pieces of art. In my own A-Level work I also explored unfamiliar methods of mark-making; using soil, wood ash and blood, and aimed to experiment with the aesthetics of bringing together unlikely materials to evoke a response. However, I feel the paintings in the exhibition demonstrated a level of maturity that I have yet to develop as an artist; that is knowing where abstraction and incompletion can form a finished work.
Also while in Canterbury I visited the Sidney Cooper Gallery to see the Christchurch MA student’s final degree show; titled ‘Prism’, which coincidentally featured more work by Harriet Gifford. The exhibition as a whole was enlightening in that I could see and read how university standard art projects are conceptualised and brought together, and the personal development of ideas and processes which make up art practice. I enjoyed perusing each student’s pieces both as individual works and a coherent whole, and seeing how their independent styles became recognisable throughout the show; again something I lack at this stage but aim to achieve.
Overall, I derived a great deal of inspiration from the two exhibitions.
As a side note, it was interesting to see how Harriet Gifford’s photographic work was depicted differently in the two gallery spaces and the consequential effect on how the audience received the work. The final presentation of an artwork is something we only began to explore at A-Level due to space restrictions, but comparing the respective impacts of Gifford’s photography at the Beaney and the Sidney Cooper Gallery demonstrated how important careful placement and considering the audience truly is; certainly something to take into greater account in the future.
laurenhollowday 