Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Siân Bowen: Ream
11 January – 8 February
Reviewed by: John Cornall
Both of these exhibitions present novel approaches to drawing. Susanna Heron's 'Elements' consists of seven, long elliptical forms – or 'elements' – transcribed one on each of seven walls of the main partitioned gallery. These shapes – enlarged six-fold from the original drawings – in solid tone, or made up of smaller ellipses, resemble the black and white diagrams from a psychology of perception class; they reverberate, or push and pull, or move and stretch creating peculiar optical effects on a giant scale.
The Mead's main gallery, with its natural light, is normally a becalming place; 'Elements', makes it more so. Any suggestion of being boxed in by fixed dimensions, is broken down and replaced with a sense of the aqueous, of walls breathing, rippling and flowing. Most of all there is a sense of the animate, of the interaction between individual and environment, as if the underlying fluidity of perception were being revealed.
Susanna Heron started her career as a jewellery designer then as a sculptor. The turning point came when she replanted the famous garden at her family home in Cornwall. Since then she has been involved in several environmental projects. The Mead installation is a rare foray into the gallery for Heron, it follows on from two recent public projects, one in Coventry – also characteristically involving watercourses – the other, at the Maronouchi Building, in Tokyo, a large glass wall etched with 'elements' like those at the Mead.
Sian Bowen's 'Ream' suggests reams of paper but also ream as a verb, an activity that is continuous, another kind of flow. Her works look like paintings but are in fact drawings on paper. Things are not so simple however. The paper has been heavily worked and is richly layered, stained and marked as if with age; in several cases we see it is wallpaper, plain, or with faded flowers. There is something of Rachel Whiteread here and the tradition of Tàpies – the wall as a visual poem; a palimpsest or accrued text of time's passing.
The drawing consists of vaguely anatomical and anthropomorphic imagery and an intricate repeated mark making that is – in keeping with certain conventions – like beading or stitch or an abstract indecipherable script; the suggestion again is one of duration, concentrated repetitious activity.
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JOHN CORNALL
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