'Midlands Open 2015' At Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donington

David Booth, 'Space Matters', Fluorescent Perspex & Aluminium, Date Unknown

I found myself over at Castle Donington’s Tarpey Gallery, in North West Leicestershire, again recently, accompanying my good friend Suzie to the opening event of their ‘Midlands Open 2015’ exhibition.  I've been lucky enough to have my painting, ‘Map 3’ selected for the show, - something that feels like a small piece of affirmation in the slightly anti-climactic aftermath of the ‘Mental Mapping’ exhibition in which it first appeared.  I suspect that slight sense of come-down was inevitable, given how immersed Andrew Smith and I were in the run-up to that show, during the first half of this year.  I’m deliberately taking a step back to reassess my own work just now, so it’s good to know there’s still at least one piece out there to ‘represent’ and at least keep the pot simmering.  I’ve submitted a few more pieces of the ‘mM’ work for consideration elsewhere too, but there’s no point getting ahead of myself here, (chickens, hatching, etc.).

Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donington, Leicestershire

'Map 3', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 2015

The Tarpey event doubled as an introduction to the open exhibition, but also as an unveiling of both the gallery’s recent extension, and extensive new sculpture garden.  The new additions signify the ambition of Luke Tarpey and his father to grow their gallery into something of a regional art hot spot, and the numerous visitors squeezing into the building and strolling amongst the sculptures outside suggest this is paying off.  They’ve run the ‘Midlands Open’ for several years now, although this was the first I’ve attended.  It felt like a pretty significant event on the day.

'Midlands Open 2015', Tarpey Gallery Sculpture Garden

'Midlands Open 2015', Tarpey Gallery Interior

It’s in the nature of any open exhibition to be something of a mixed bag, and this show is no different.  However, regardless of the varying aesthetic or stylistic priorities of the work exhibited, the standard of execution was impressively high throughout.  Given the gallery’s need to pay its own way as a commercial enterprise, one must accept that most of the work passing through it must do so in the hope that someone might pay good money to place it in a domestic setting.  Naturally, the danger is that a certain lack of ‘edge’ or reversion to accepted ‘good taste’ can prevail, but Luke Tarpey and his team seem to be avoiding the worst pitfalls of such a situation.

Sam Shendi, 'Mother & Child' Steel, Date Unknown

Sam Shendi, (Background): 'Evolution', Steel.  (Foreground): 'Troy', Mixed Media, Dates Unknown

Amongst the work in the ‘Open’ are a number of pieces that might be said to offer a little challenge, or to at least run counter to the expectations of context.  Notable here are Sam Shendi’s colourful, pop-informed (and seamlessly executed) sculptures, and David Booth’s ‘Place Matters’, - a cascade of fluorescent acrylic shapes, partly tumbling over the building itself.  Both artists injected a satisfyingly synthetic element into the setting of greenery and historic buildings.  Alongside his larger exterior pieces, Shendi also has a couple of smaller pieces indoors, intriguingly made from 'crushed classic cars'.  These single-colour monoliths retain a pleasing monumentality, despite their domestic scale.

David Booth, 'Space Matters', Fluorescent Acrylic & Aluminium, Date Unknown

To be honest, I don’t really know where my own work would naturally situate itself on the consumable, portable artefact spectrum.  It’s something I’ve only really considered fairly recently, as I’ve started to think more seriously about exhibiting work.  Viewing ‘Map 3’ in two rather different public contexts, in the space of a few weeks, only serves to magnify such questions in my own mind.  I rarely consider such things as potential audience, (and saleability - even less), as I’m producing my work.  Nevertheless, even, (especially), if one has aspirations to make obscure films and photographs about underpasses and fence posts, alongside paintings full of scrambled texts, - some thoughts about the settings in which they can best thrive are inevitable.  There may be considerable differences between the art one person might choose to live with, and that which another might deliberately venture out to view in a gallery setting.  And that’s before one considers the difference between the public and a commercial sectors. The functions of a gallery as a place to visit, a place to have experiences, and a place to purchase, clearly require a bit of untangling.  I guess it only really matters that the work is produced for its own reasons, first and foremost. It's when thoughts of a potential market or audience creep in too early, that problems arise. 

Sam Shendi, 'Souls - Yellow', Steel - Crushed Classic Car, Date Unknown

Oliver Lovley, 'Broadmarsh Bus Station, Nottingham', Acrylic on Linen, Date Unknown

Anyway, it’s best not to make assumptions, and I spent most of my visit to this exhibition just viewing the work on its own terms.  Amongst the other pieces that caught my own eye were Oliver Lovley’s spatially ambiguous, near-monochrome painting 'Broadmarsh Bus Station, Nottingham'.  I was also rather intrigued by Chris Reynolds' painting 'Unwrapped' not far from my own piece.  It’s probably no surprise that I was attracted by its torn layers and pleasingly battered and scratched surface.  Outside, amongst a variety of sculptures inspired by organic forms, Miles Halpin manages to bring a slightly sinister, alien quality to his rusted steel pods.  The thought of plunging a hand into those forbidding orifices reminds me of that camp 1980s 'Flash Gordon' film [1.].

Chris Reynolds, 'Unwrapped',  Mixed Media, Date Unknown

Miles Halpin, 'Fruit Of The Tree Of Knowledge', Steel & Wood, Date Unknown

‘Midlands Open 2015’ continues until 15 August 2015 at: Tarpey Gallery, 77 High Street, Castle Donington, Leicestershire, DE74 2PQ.  (‘Map 3’ hangs above the stairs, - careful you don’t hit your head on it.)



[1.]:  Mike Hodges (Dir.), 'Flash Gordon', UK, Starling Films/Dino De Laurentis Co./Universal, 1980

Kerri Pratt, 'Point Place Time' At Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donington

Kerri Pratt, 'Room With A View', Acrylic On Canvas, 2014

It’s been a busy summer for me this year, with large portions of time taken up with my preparations for a project I’ve agreed to undertake for the Melbourne Arts Festival next month.  I don’t want to talk too much about that now, but will write some kind of report, as and when it reaches a culmination.  However, it does explain why I’ve been spread a little bit thin of late, and why I’m a little late writing this post.

Kerri Pratt, 'Detached',  Acrylic On Canvas, 2014

I found myself in the small, North Leicestershire Town of Castle Donington not long ago, accompanying my close friend Suzie to the Private View of Kerri Pratt’s exhibition ‘Point Place Time’ at the Tarpey Gallery.  Kerri is a Derbyshire-based painter, represented by the gallery, and a recent recipient of the prestigious Jonathan Vickers Fine Art award.  That prize represents a substantial financial sum, and will help Kerri to fund her practice effectively full-time over the coming year.  This will see her relocate to Derby, from her current workspace [1.], whilst undertaking some additional community-based art work and mentoring Fine Art students at the University of Derby.

Kerri Pratt, 'Anonymity', Acrylic On Board, 2013

Viewing the work on display, it was easy to see what may have caught the judges’ eyes.  The paintings operate within the general mode of cityscape, but with an emphasis on the ambiguity of locations that feel vaguely familiar but difficult to place.  This is clearly indicated by at least one view of Venice, focusing on its obscure, shadowed backwaters, rather than its spectacular but over-familiar aspects.  Were it not for a subtle flavour of architectural historicism, the mood of such pieces might just as easily recall Birmingham or some post-Industrial Northern locale.  In addition, there’s as much emphasis on optical viewpoint as on subject selection.  There’s a relish for dramatic perspectives and several subjects acquire increased dynamism through dramatic diagonals and sharply converging orthogonals.

Kerri Pratt, 'Still Waters Run Deep', Acrylic On Board, 2012-13

I’m guessing that at least some of her images derive from her own East Midlands back yard.  ‘Room With A View’ particularly impressed me, with its nod towards the beginnings of Cubist abstraction and delight in the atmospheric potential of anonymous vernacular architecture.  I also love Kerri’s willingness to just fill a portion of middle ground wall with an almost arbitrary passage of flat, custard yellow paint, in almost as direct a manner as the actual masonry might have been coated.  Devices like this, and the flattened perspectives and interlocking wedges of contrasting tone feel like a British Heartlands take on Richard Diebenkorn’s mid period views of anonymous built environments.

Richard Diebenkorn, 'Chabot Valley', Oil On Canvas, 1955

Throughout the show, Kerri demonstrates her confident paint handling.  She utilises a wide vocabulary of eloquent marks and happy accidents, and is adept at counterpointing passages of fluid and dry brushwork.  There are numerous examples of how to modulate nominally blank, surfaces with visual textures.  Returning to ‘Room With A View’, there’s an exciting ambiguity about the curtain of dragged brushwork that blocks our view into the far distance.  It manages to suggest either trees, or some harder, scaffolded edifice, whilst being equally just about paint too.  

Kerri Pratt, 'Urban Vista', Acrylic On Board, 2012-13

Kerri’s no stranger to the atmospheric potential colour either.  For all her delight in shadowy tonality, paintings like ‘Seeing Red’, show a bold confidence with glowing reds, whilst elsewhere, I was delighted by a passage of daring electric ultramarine employed to describe the reflected light from an obscure Venetian canal surface.

Kerri Pratt, 'Seeing Red', Acrylic On Board, 2012

‘Point Place Time’ is a small but genuinely satisfying exhibition and I found plenty to absorb me as I viewed and re-viewed each painting.  My own take on the urban environment tend to be more synthetically abstract and freighted with textual components, but I do sometimes wonder if, one day, I might end up simply trying to depict it.  Paintings like this show just how rewarding that might actually be.  Kerri herself also proved highly approachable and more than happy to talk about her practice in engagingly down to earth terms.  If this is what she’s achieved since graduating as a mature student in 2011, (and whilst holding down a day-job and raising a family), it will be fascinating to see the results of her coming year of full-time immersion.

Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donington

Should anyone find themself in the Castle Donington area, I’d definitely recommend a visit to The Tarpey Gallery, (as a detour en route to the nearby East Midlands Airport, perhaps).  Housed in an attractively converted barn, behind the town’s oldest house, it showcases an impressive roster of represented artists and transcends both the scope and quality of work one might typically expect from a small, commercial gallery in such a location.  Proprietor, Luke Tarpey is clearly committed to the artists he represents and the premises extension now taking shape, and plans for a sculpture garden beyond, speak of his ambitions to create a significant outlet for contemporary art in the region.

Mandy Payne, 'Void', Aerosol Paint On Concrete,  Date Unknown

In addition to Kerri Pratt’s work, I was also interested to see a couple of pieces by Mandy Payne, whose images of the (im)famous, Modernist edifice of Sheffield’s Park Hill Flats particularly chime with my own current interests.  She has herself been recently shortlisted for the John Moore’s Painting Prize and I am particularly intrigued by her recent experiments with painting on concrete.

David Manley, 'DDA5 - Swine Flu', Acrylic On Aluminium, 2013

I was also pleased to find one of the circular ‘Epidemic’ paintings by David Manley that impressed me in Nottingham, earlier this year.  David is another artist who exhibits and sells through the Gallery and I’ve been regularly following his blog for some time.  An enjoyable evening was therefore capped when I discovered David himself was in the room and was able to introduce myself and chew a little fat with him in person [2.].  Again, it seems that online activity has led to a little enjoyable real time contact.

Kerri Pratt, ‘Point Place Time’ Continues until 20 September at Tarpey Gallery, 77 High Street, Castle Donington, Leicestershire, De74 2PQ.

[1.]:  At Long Eaton’s Harrington Mills Studios. 

[2.]:  Coincidently, David teaches in my own hometown of Lincoln and is a fellow Cornwall enthusiast.  We chatted for several minutes about his plans to revisit Moushole, the Cornish village I reported from myself, earlier this year.