Dawn Badland: Bird and Bone

17 May - 13 July 2008

This exhibition, by Kent-based artist Dawn Badland, arose from her exploration of the Prentis ornithological collection held by the Guildhall Museum and from her discovery of the Victorian collector’s own book, Birds of Rainham by Walter Prentis. Further research followed, including a trip on the River Medway with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds to look at nesting sites on the salt marshes and an inquiry into the species currently associated with the area. The work seeks to provide an insight into the Prentis collection and the Victorian interest in accumulating and displaying birds and eggs. Badland’s imagery, derived both from the Medway landscape and from bird plumage patterns, combines current and past information and can be seen as a documentary process to record new findings.

www.dawnbadland.com.

Krystal Orphanides and Seainin Passi: Woodland Wonderland

9 March - 11 May 2008

Krystal Orphanides produced a range of screen-printed wallpapers and decorative hand-cut wall panels based on the theme of a Woodland Wonderland. Brightly coloured moths and birds flutter across woodland florals. The delicate hand-cut wall panels would complement both public or private interior spaces, used as either a room divider or simply as a grand statement piece.

Seainin Passi takes inspiration for her work from the natural world, the multiple in nature: the blade of grass, the pebble on the beach, each the same but different, individually modest but in profusion suggesting a sublime, omnipotent life force.

She takes her observations into the workshop in the form of an emotional connectivity to the outside world. She deliberately uses modest materials and through the act of making while using simple, low-technology processes, tries to draw out their latent life, their otherness that is revealed in the form of light. By emulating the multiple in nature, she aims to empower the component parts and using movement and light, suggest transformation. Seainin is intrigued by the notion of creating an intimate, tactile experience that can also embody characteristics of an installation.

Wendy Daws: Memory

26 January - 24 March 2008

This exhibition, by Medway-based artist Wendy Daws, featured a series of acrylic installations on the subject of memory and narrative told through light and shadow. The viewer was encouraged to study the work carefully, to play detective to discover the stories hidden in the artworks.

The continuous memory blanket (a contemporary tapestry) on the wall featured the artist's interrelated personal experiences. Individual episodes are linked by threads - the ties which bind us - illustrating how Wendy perceives a sense of interconnection between the people and events in her life. Although the stories represent Wendy’s life, they have a resonance in all our lives.

In contrast, the semi-circular shaped pods embraced the viewers, allowing shadows to fall upon them, drawing them into the narrative process.

Artwork demonstrating the development of the memory blanket and a series of contemporary portraits, inspired by Victorian silhouettes, was on display along with Wendy's emergency jewellery kits in the Craft Case room.

To view a short film combining time lapse and real time footage that documents the installation of the exhibition, please visit www.spaghettiweston.com/wendydawsmemory.html.

For further informationabout the artist, please visit www.wendydaws.co.uk.

Cleo Mussi: Bring in the Green

1 December 2007 - 13 January 2008

Cleo Mussi is an established mosaic artist who is respected within the applied arts, both nationally and internationally. Originally trained in textiles at Goldsmiths College of Art, her interest in recycled fabrics and her knowledge of pattern, print, weave and stitch translate easily into mosaic.

Cleo uses a broad selection of mass-produced, recycled tableware; coloured tiles and handmade tessellating tiles, which are cut and pieced together. Her deconstructed and reconstructed series of works combine inherent patterns and forms from recycled ceramics. These pieces connect tastes, aspirations and desire for ornaments across the classes. They hold cross-cultural references in fashionable design through travel and commerce and represent industrial ceramic history. Chinese ceramic meets Wedgewood, Poole sits next to Japanese porcelain and Staffordshire unites with Homebase to form intricate and humorous works. Cleo is interested in the inherent details, the combinations of marks and glazes, as well as functional forms that can be combined to produce works whose content reflect design styles and fashions within British ceramic history.

Her recent work unites a motley collection of abstracted ideas and cropped images. Imagery is gathered, cropped and placed to form ornamental collages and sculptural forms, exploring relationships; life events (birth, marriage, death); mother, father and sibling images. Currently, her ideas are inspired by Indian miniatures, 16th century and early 17th century English portraiture, as well as the applied arts of Mexico and Romanesque frescos.

For further information please visit www.mussimosaics.co.uk.

Greig Burgoyne: Undercurrents

17 March - 13 May 2007

Glasgow-born artist Greig Burgoyne’s paintings examine our complex and contradictory relationship with the coast. We escape to the coastal landscape for leisure and contemplation, yet it is also a place of work and survival with an unremitting, elemental and corrosive force.

The man-made structures around Greig's home in Hastings provide a trigger point for his imagination and vision. He wants to convey the emotional states and the experience which the objects and structures found in this shifting landscape speak of. The topography and the redundant structures are brought together in surreal, almost dream-like landscapes, where heavy mechanistic forms take on a life of their own. They are juxtaposed against pebble-strewn shores, sun-streaked skies and wooden fishing boats, poised somewhere between the real and the imagined.

Greig graduated from the Royal College of Art, London with an MA in painting. As well as installation projects and curatorial work, he exhibits widely and has work in numerous public and private collections in the UK and abroad. Most recent solo shows include:

• Studio 21 Fine Art, Halifax, Canada;
• Insel Galerie, Wiesbaden, Germany;
• Artspace Gallery, London;
• The Scottish Fisheries Museum;
• The Russian State Museum;
• Falmouth Art Gallery Cornwall.

Jessica Zoob: Towards the Light

20 January - 11 March 2007

Jessica Zoob trained at Central School of Arts and Nottingham University. During her training, she travelled extensively, including a period of research in China. For seven years she worked as a theatre designer under the name Jessica Tyrwhitt. Her credits include work for the Hampstead Theatre, the Royal National Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, York Theatre Royal, The Gate and Greenwich Theatre.

She now works exclusively as a painter and regularly exhibits in and around London and Lewes. Her paintings are in private collections worldwide.

She creates evocative landscapes in paint, worlds that expand the imagination. They have been described as images to dream into.

For further details please visit www.jessicazoob.com.

Lise Bech: The Lie of the Land

2 December 2006-14 January 2007

Lise Bech lives and works in the southern uplands of Scotland where she grows a wide range of willows for her basket-making. In addition to her cultivated willow beds, the local landscape provides a rich source of other traditional basketry materials and more experimental fibreplants, which are occasionally used for embellishment.

Working exclusively with Scottish willow - much of it organically grown, tended and harvested (coppiced) by hand - she weaves traditional as well as contemporary pieces for today's lifestyle with integrity and in a sustainable fashion.

For further information please visit www.bechbaskets.net.

Karin Mori: Reunion

14 October-26 November 2006

Karin Mori's recent work celebrates the directness, simplicity and tactile pleasure of drawing, alongside its capacity for recording complex layers of expression and meaning.

Her semi-abstract work is inspired by a range of sources, most notably anatomical and botanical forms, and memories connected to her native Hawaii. Through her working process, she joins diverse imagery and approaches into new hybrids, which seem to reflect or embody the transformative nature of drawing.

The contrasts and reconciliations inherent in her approach also appear through the materials and the ways they are used - the velvety black of charcoal plays against the silvery sheen of graphite, and deeply incised hatch marks lie beneath thin washes of ink. The resulting drawings can be experienced on both a sensory and emotional level.

Brenda Hartill: Golden Sun - Silver Tree

12 August-8 October 2006

Brenda Hartill is best known for her embossed abstract collagraphs and etchings, as well as her collages and mixed media works, the latest using encaustic wax to embed found natural objects, as well as print elements and collage.

Her inspiration is the natural forms, erosion and textures of the landscape, and her recent move to Sussex has triggered one of her occasional returns to the figurative, in a series of the winter landscapes. However, her main love is abstracting the essence of the landscape, in richly coloured textured works, often enhanced with silver and gold leaf.

For further information please visit www.brendahartill.com.

Julian Rowe: The Broken Love of Doctor Browne

10 June-6 August 2006

Julian Rowe's installation arises from the artist's fascination with the way that landscape can be read as a document of past human presence and how, beyond the scientific investigations of the archaeologist, the earth contains an accumulation of emotional resonances.

Many of the objects that he makes are rusty and fragmented abstractions that seem to have been found or dug up, implying a forgotten function and story. In this installation, he has put them into an ambiguous narrative context - the collection of Doctor Browne. The decayed state of Browne's enigmatic and abandoned collection makes it archaeology twice over.

Laura McCafferty: A Generation

1 April-28 May 2006

The illustrative and narrative work of Laura McCafferty documents the lives of real life characters in everyday situations. Her screen-printed and individually hand-embroidered textile pieces incorporate fabrics gathered from a broad range of sources – new, old, found, recycled, loved and donated.

Jo Lawrence: Found

28 January-26 March 2006

An exhibition featuring "human objects" created from discarded everyday domestic items with integrated photographic elements and stop-frame animation films by Jo Lawrence.

The process of combining everyday found objects with photographic elements appears to create a link between the real and imagined world. The appropriation of everyday objects re-seen as body parts evoke memories of both playful and darker aspects of childhood toys, theatre and puppetry. All is not quite as it appears: a brush, a crushed teapot or glove becomes a head; whisks or spoons are limbs; a flattened sieve or wallpaper scraper is part body or garment.

The use of photographic faces instils an innate identity, with a suggestion of a past, an implied personal history. The figures occupy a borderline world as human objects and are the result of an involuntary preoccupation with a sense of the uncanny.

To view a 360 degree panoramic virtual tour of the exhibition, please visit www.spaghettiweston.com/RochesterArtVR.htm.