DAVID DEGREEF-MOUNIER | BIDDY HODGKINSON | CATHERINE LEON | SUZANNE MOXHAY | BRONWEN SLEIGH
The show’s title was taken from a Yeats poem, The Wild Swans at Coole. Melancholic and pertinent to autumn, a season of dramatic natural change, the poem is a beautiful lament on our powerlessness to intervene in the passing of time and all that its entails. The artists on show differ in the manner that they treat time as both a destructive - and constructive - process.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
The Wild Swans at Coole, by WB Yeats
David Degreef-Mounier’s installations encapsulate process, over all else. Held in a moment, fire catches in veins on the surface of raw wooden shapes, cut to precision, yet never uniform. Each new work he makes is a development on the last: his chief intention being the journey that links concept with result.
Biddy Hodgkinson’s painting celebrates the truism that the process of time is unstoppable, no matter what we are taught. Far from being a cause for alarm, Biddy’s abstraction reminds the viewer of the beauty in natural decay, through her use of various organic elements alongside paint on her canvases, as well as earth and mineral ores.
Catherine Leon’s extrovert pieces, rhythmic with colour and light, are lyrical to the extent that they leave the viewer with a visceral sense of abandon. They speak a subconscious language of a longing to experience the elemental truths of nature, form and time.
Suzanne Moxhay’s works are a deliberate manipulation of scale, matter and time. Her frozen, filmic scenes are representative of a present that seems in itself artificial, eerie even. Nevertheless, they include visual references which root them in present events or versions of some kind of future.
The ordered, geometric precision in Bronwen Sleigh’s architectural etchings and drawings belies the conflict the artist feels over the impact humanity has on its environment: on the one hand a marvel, yet nonetheless inevitably destructive.