Article written by Peta-Jane Field featured in the September issue of Inside Cornwall.
An Open Space for Open Minds
With its elegantly arched windows and high ceilings, Open Space Gallery in Penryn is very aptly named, as discerning art lovers will find its roomy interior very conducive for contemplating artwork. Having successfully run an on-line gallery for the past eighteen months, gallery owners Martin Jorgensen and Kim Blackbourn are delighted to have a ‘real’ gallery at last. “We love Penryn and feel it is quintessentially Cornish,” Martin explains. “Our aim is to promote dynamic contemporary art, by established names and newcomers who share a common commitment to originality and quality. We especially believe it is vital to nurture younger artists’ careers too.”
The groundbreaking exhibition Solarize certainly lives up to those ambitions. It is an artist-led exhibition initiated by Jesse Leroy Smith who helped to organise the exuberant celebration of contemporary art Revolver in Penzance last summer - indeed a number of artists who showed their work at that event are exhibiting new work for Solarize. “We are little bit like a posse swarming around West Penwith!” laughs Jesse. Stacey Ebel, a photographer whose work shows the landscape as seen through the lens of a pinhole camera, believes, “Artists find each other, a group will coalesce spontaneously, when the time is right for them to put their energies together.”
The work displayed expresses this impetus, presenting a twenty-first century slant on a conventional subject, the landscape, which has always played a large part in work by Cornish artists. By using a variety of contemporary processes, digital photography as well as printmaking and painting, to record or manipulate images of the landscape, this body of work explores and highlights the tension between the physical and the ethereal, the natural and the synthetic. “In Cornwall the landscape has often been to the point of non-existence, and yet its essence remains a powerful and primal,” Jesse explains. “I am painting on old copper etching plates, and the lines of the original etching remain as ghostly reminders of the previous image under my painting, creating a cryptic symbiosis between the old and the new which echoes the whole concept of this exhibition.”
Volker Stox uses the computer, the ultimate twenty-first century technology as his primary tool, to produce one-off fine art prints. An electronic pen is his paintbrush, the VDU his canvas and his palette is limitless. Glimpses of little scraps of found images, landscapes, architectural drawings, man-made structures and old prints haunt his work. Yet he believes, “You can’t avoid the landscape when you live in West Penwith. It creeps into the work, not in a literal sense, it sneaks in through the backdoor.”
Dedicated printmaker and photographer, Simon Jaques says, “I enjoy the immediacy of Polaroid photographs, I see them as the alchemy of the twenty-first century.” His image of a mobile phone mast thinly disguised as a plastic tree taken with a mobile phone is an ironic post-modern Disneyesque comment on modern society - the plastic ‘trees’ line the M4 yet undisguised mobile masts pollute the skyline in the Scottish highlands! Richard Ballinger’s glistening solarised pieces are reminiscent of iconic sixties pop art, their lurid florescent colours sublimate prosaic subjects, such as caravans and mobile homes. Beth Copley’s photographs of the coast path between Penzance and Marazion counter any preconceived ideas of a picturesque coastline, as the Long Rock industrial estate and the railway fringe the beach. James Hankey’s images expose the moodiness of the landscape and its scars caused by natural and man-made processes.
The methods used to produce all these pieces may be well known to the cognoscenti, but they remain a mystery to many, and thus this exhibition will be a revelation for the vast majority. On Friday 5 September, there is a special treat planned when all the artists will be in the gallery, primed and ready to share, in Jesse’s words, ‘the weird ways they arrive at their images and how it is not at all A to B!’
