Shelter, serenity, calming contemplation – the trees provide a space for sorrow or joy.
Arbour showcases a fabulous large willow installation by BBC4 Woman’s Hour Craft Prize Finalist Laura Ellen Bacon.
Laura Ellen Bacon | willow
Danielle Creenaune | prints
Forest + Found | sweet chestnut vessels
Juliet and Jamie Gutch | elm mobiles
Paul Schütze | photography
Patricia Swannell | drawings and prints
Laura Ellen Bacon is a British artist who lives and works in Derbyshire. Her sculptures are most often created on site, in both landscape and cityscape settings that have included, Chatsworth; Somerset House, London and New Art Centre at Roche Court. Laura's work is also created for interior settings, from private interiors to gallery spaces including, the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2011), the Jerwood Space, London and The Saatchi Gallery, London for 'Collect'.
"My large-scale installations are almost always built on site, allowing me to form my work in a way that truly fits a site. I began making my early works upon dry stone walls and evolved to work within trees, riverbanks and hedges, allowing the chosen structure (be it organic or man-made) to become host. I am still powerfully driven to create ‘spaces’ of some kind and over a decade into my work, my passions have also returned to not only merging with the simplicity of dry-stone walls, but towards powerful connections with architecture. The sculptures that I make have a closeness with a host structure or the fabric of a building; their oozing energy spills from gutters, their 'muscular' forms nuzzle up to the glass and their gripping weave locks onto the strength of the walls. Whilst the scale and impact vary from striking to subtle (sometimes only visible upon a quizzical double take), I relish the opportunity to let a building 'feed' the form, as if some part of the building is exhaling into the work."
Abigail Booth & Max Bainbridge work collaboratively under their studio practice Forest + Found. They work with wood, natural pigments and textiles, to produce sculptural and wall-based works. Bainbridge works on sculptures, taking the natural forms of the material as a starting point for carving and working sections of wood into anthropological objects. Booth produces large, abstract textile pieces that deconstruct the language of drawing and painting using natural pigments to produce fragmented compositions on the wall. Specialising in building relationships between grounded objects and the abstract, liminal space in their textiles, they create installations that allow audiences to interact spatially and conceptually with their work. Architectural structures, ancient landscape and cultural objects are all starting points for physical process and visual compositions. A silver birch from Epping Forest gives life to the series of vessels in our window installation. Born in 1991, they studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts before setting up their studio, Forest + Found, in late 2014.
Danielle Creenaune combines inherited and imagined landscapes sourcing imagery from Western Europe and Danielle’s native Australia. As a recurrent concern in Australian art, to address notions of artistic and personal identity through large scale landscape painting, Danielle’s landscapes are atypically intimate. In the etching Border, she creates the landscape by intricately outlining the overgrown trees and shrubbery, leaving both the trees and the space between, empty. Her lithographs have a painterly quality and are graceful and intriguing. She responds intuitively to each landscape and conveys it though a varied language of marks and tone. These prints are rhythmic, which reflects the changing seasons and the movement of water. Danielle describes her work as being about “memory, private connection and sense of belonging.”
The different elements of each sculpture are in perfect balance, they glance past each other, always intending to, but never touching. Juliet and Jamie Gutch's mobiles are created from different undulating leaves of wood or painted metal. Juliet and Jamie were commissioned to create a site-specific artwork for jaggedart, for the Spring Show 2010, responding to the theme of water. The work hung low in the window, its shapes, movement, shadows and rhythm evoked the ripples and motion in water. Juliet and Jamie Gutch have completed a large-scale installation for the new John Lewis store at the Westfield Stratford City, East London. They have also been commissioned for "A Murmuration of Starlings", for the reception atrium of the new Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital.
Paul Schütze series of photographs convey different views of Hampstead Heath. Taken with his phone on Instagram, the secret corners in the Heath are altered, scaled, changed, filtered, thus attaining a magical, almost fairytale-like dimension. Branches emerge gigantic in the foreground; the blackness of a pond reflects like an enchanted mirror. Born in Australia, Paul lives and works in London. Paul's career has spanned video, print, audio art and perfume. An award-winning film-score composer, he has worked with James Turrell. A major piece of his sculptural/audio work was commissioned for the Hayward Gallery's Sonic Boom exhibition.
Patricia Swannell’s works are a meditation on time as reflected in the trees that we encounter every day. Her tree portraits in graphite convey the passage of time with the repetition of each tree’s characteristics – common name, Latin name, location and the date - echoing the endless repetition of seasons through time. At the centre of each drawing is a seed or cutting from that tree that represents both the starting point of the tree and its future. Trees, the lungs of the earth, are potent signifiers. Rooted in the earth while reaching to the sky, they connect us to both past and future human generations. Patricia's focus on environmental matters is reflected in her work for The Royal Botanic Garden Kew at Wakehurst Place. Her photography and print project Legacy; A Reciprocal Tribute, at the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Wood, Leicestershire records the growth of the woodland by photographing one family, in the same place with the background of the growing woodland, every year, over the next six decades. She completed an MA in Fine Art at City and Guilds.
