SEA BREEZES | SUMMER SHOW
The Porthminster Gallery’s summer exhibition, ‘Sea Breezes’, opened with a sunburst of Summer colour on Saturday, 22 June. Featuring glorious paintings and ceramics by gallery artists, in a visual and textural celebration of the serene bays and rocky coastline for which St Ives and west Cornwall are famous.
The bold strokes and sweeping colours of Andrew Bird’s captivating abstracted acrylic paintings work in a magical dialogue with the meditative and calming sea horizon vista paintings by Martyn Perryman, which recall the intense, indescribable blue and rising hypnotic light over St Ives Bay.
Jenny Hirst’s spontaneous and atmospheric paintings evoke fleeting impressions of the wild, windswept, rocky shorelines of West Penwith’s ‘hidden’ places. Jenny expresses the coast’s changing moods through dramatic light and shadow on water, with sweeping sands disappearing and re-appearing with the ebb and flow of the tide.
Paul Wearing’s hand-built sculptural vessels are inspired by our interconnectedness with nature’s seasons and cycles, and in this new collection the rhythms of the sea and coast are evident. Working with grogged stoneware clay and by contrast, porcelain, Paul mostly uses coiling techniques to build his vessels, but also incorporates some press-moulding and slab-building methods. He renders the surfaces with brushed layers of slips and glazes that are reactive in oxidised firing, to bring disruption through blistering, cratering and crackling to the surfaces.
Antonia Salmon's handmade ceramic sculptures are inspired by the landscape and natural forms, archaeological artefacts, and 20th century sculpture. The making methods are varied: throwing and altering, hand modelling, coiling or construction from slabs of stoneware clay. Each work is hand burnished, smoke fired several times, and finally wax polished – it is an intimate and patient process.
Geoffrey Swindell’s new collection of exquisite and curious porcelain 'vessel' forms are reminiscent of 'alien' sea creatures, cast up onto a beach – some still alive, some just fragile exoskeletons. Originally a painter, Geoffrey has carried this discipline through to his ceramics, crafting objects that are not just simply coated in glazes but which have an essential and inseparable relationship of form, surface texture and colour. The various components for the objects are first thrown on his potter's wheel, then cut and trimmed when the clay is 'leather-hard'. Textures are applied using an array of tools, and the 'primed canvas' of the white porcelain surface is airbrush sprayed with overlapping layers of coloured slips, glazes and oxides, before being kiln-fired.
