Last day of 'land water darkness' exhibition at the Gas Gallery - Saturday 4 October 2014

Tomorrow (Saturday 4 October) is my last day for this exhibition which has run since 4 September. I will be in the gallery upstairs from around 1pm until closing at 5pm, after which the exhibition must come down. There are more photos on display than ever, so if you haven't been for a while - today over 30 new photos went up, most of which are mixed media pieces with aint and/or ink. Everyone welcome, look forward to meeting you!

The Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy is located about 50 metres left of the rail station, or parking is at Matalan and cross the road. Look for the red brick building with a huge glass front.

Indigo's photos shown with Mar Shro Gora at Cardiff's Scratch Platform

 

 

Above a rather shabby Irish-themed pub, a nice square of banquet chairs and leather sofas surround a professionally lit bit of floor, the platform for an evening of experimentation. On this floor treads a cream silk-suited creature in a hat suitable for meeting, or possibly impersonating, royalty. In one black-gloved hand she holds a camera. In the other hand she also holds... a camera, and a red ribbon, which she proffers to an unsuspecting soul in the front row. He takes it, and she moves slowly away, all the while taking photographs of herself.

Meanwhile, my photographs are being passed around the room.

This is my friend Mar Shro Gora performing the first version of a performance art piece she calls 'Taking the self for a walk', in a reworking of the famous line by Paul Klee. My photographs, a series also depicting a night time walk, are a last minute addition to this performance at Scratch Platform, held in Four Bars, Cardiff, on 31 August 2014.

The photographer Piri was also taking photos of Mar Shro, but for some reason I was not. Am entitled to the odd night off.

Photos and performance copyright Mar Shro Gora 2014.

With thanks to Fizzi Events for making Scratch Platform happen.

Indigo's videos screened at Stories by Gaslight evening

A darkened room, a standing lamp, a wooden floor, three rows of chairs, a gradually accreting audience, a sheet with wavy wrinkles serving as a screen onto which images of ceaseless waves melt into the electric colours of evening.

Or, to give the prosaic account:

Was very pleased to be asked to screen my videos at the 'Stories by Gaslight' evening at the Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy on 3 September 2014. Organised and hosted by Peter Stevenson, 'Stories by Gaslight' has become a regular feature in the upstairs gallery, allowing the traditional art form of storytelling to exist surrounded by contemporary art. My work was the opener for the narrative ballads of folk singer Lynne Denman, whose songs from long-ago Virginia I found particularly enchanting.

Screening list (all Aberystwyth premieres):

'WATER: aberystwyth' (2014)

'treemorph' (2014)

'WATER: plymouth' (2014)

'Daisy Daisy' (2014)

That'll do, Pig.

Photo copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Exhibition preparations: installing the furniture

The furniture in the gallery is to create the open studio workspace for me as I will be in Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons (and probably other times as well). Do drop in and say hello, feel free to ask questions. Videos will be playing when the artist is present, so that's an added incentive to visit.

All photos copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Indigo Violet Larkin's exhibition 'land water darkness' continues at Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy in Aberystwyth until 4 October. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday 11am to 5pm, and admission is free. Indigo Violet Larkin will be present in the exhibition from 2-5pm Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and quite probably at other times as well.

Exhibition preparations: painting the walls

Monday 1 September - day -3

The exhibition space is mine! Previous work has been taken down... and hundreds of tiny marks are now visible on the white walls, and must be painted over.

 

The use of a paintbrush in the hand is always pleasurable.

The more marks are painted over, the more marks become visible.

While working, I am put in mind of an artist called Hiwa K. Kurdish, he attended art school in Germany before coming to the UK. He began by painting all the marks off the white walls.

He did this every day. When he returned from a week's absence, someone else had taken over his space and there was blue paint everywhere. Patiently, he began returning every square centimetre to pure white.

Eventually they called him in and demanded to know when he was going to produce some work. His response was to continue painting the walls, even though they didn't realise this was the work. Oh, and he hung a pair of rubber gloves off the clock.

They threw him out.

Hail Hiwa K, for making us notice the minute, the medium, the surface, the Forth Bridge-ness of the life without mindfulness.

All photos copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

More on Hiwa K at http://hiwak.net/ 

For those not familiar with Scotland's Forth Bridge, the idea is that as soon as the worker finishes painting it, the work needs to start all over again in a never ending cycle.

Exhibition preparations: the empty space

 

Some photos of the empty upstairs gallery at Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy, just before my exhibition 'land water darkness' was installed. All photos copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

 

Feeding the eyes: George Shaw

 

Continuing the theme of approaches to landscape, in preparation for my forthcoming abstracted landscape photography solo show...



Recently have been enchanted with the thoughtful stillness of George Shaw's Coventry landscapes, peopleless and often read as melancholic because of the run-down nature of the postwar, post-energetic subject matter. The colours are made from a limited palette designed not for the landscape but for painting model airplanes, Humbrol enamels which imbue the surface of the canvas with the gloss of childhood memory, or the embalming of death. Shaw uses a soft touch and resists the urge to overpaint details with these hobbyist hues: the smallest branches of bare trees become a hazy halo consistent with brushwork elsewhere.

 

For me the most exciting thing about the paintings is the compositional balance so many of them exhibit: large squares balanced against small, each building becoming a network of squares dividing the canvas like the sections of a Mondrian. Often the foreshortened perspective of the ground, such as broken concrete slabs or a strip of paving, draws the eye in to the main part of the picture, where abandoned buildings crumble, or cookie-cutter suburban houses rest, all in a surprising luminous beauty enhanced by their mathematically precise geometrical structure that is the world of Shaw's paintings.



 



Seeing one in Cardiff at the National Museum Wales was a timely pleasure.

More info: Tateshots' George Shaw interview for the 2011 Turner Prize http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-turner-prize-2011-george-shaw

George Shaw's 'The End of Care' is displayed at 'Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art' at the National Museum Cardiff, until 7 September 2014, admission free. http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/whatson/?event_id=7012

Photos: George Shaw 'The End of Care', 2013 (installation view and details). Photos by Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Indigo Violet Larkin's exhibition 'land water darkness' opens at Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy, Aberystwyth on 4 September. Private view 5 September 6-8 pm, sneak preview video screening as part of 'Stories by Gaslight' 3 September. Admission to gallery free; tickets for 'Stories by Gaslight' £5.

Feeding the eyes: Graham Sutherland

Only so much time can be spent looking through one's own back catalogue before visual refeshment is needed. Feeding the eyes, I call it. So last week a visit to the National Museum Cardiff was in order. The current exhibition in the contemporary gallery features five glorious late canvases by Graham Sutherland, as well as a glass case full of his found sculptural objects, and sketches inspired by these objects. All off bounds to the happy snappy instagrammer. However a lovely Sutherland lurks in the permanent collection, on the curvy wall featuring landscapes of Wales.

So now it's back to looking at my own permanent collection, in preparation for my solo show next month.

You want to take better photos? Look at paintings.

Above:
Graham Sutherland painting reproduced in catalogue ('Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World') as browsed at National Museum Cardiff. Photo copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Below:
Painting: Graham Sutherland, Mountain road with boulder, oil on canvas, 1940 (detail). Photo copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

'Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art' is on until 7 September 2014, admission free.

Indigo Violet Larkin: artist statement

About Indigo Violet Larkin

Indigo Violet Larkin works with light and lenses. Her photographs and videos reflect abstract qualities of landscape, details. She thinks of them as painting with light. Sometimes the work is performative, about the process of Indigo making the work.