New work all ready to go to West Wharf Gallery, Cardiff CF1 5DB. Opening event 15.03.2025 3-6pm.
Exhibition continues to April 25th. Open Fri & Sat 10am – 5pm
Concentric is the latest of a long-running series celebrating International Women’s Day, conceived
and curated by Jacqueline Alkema.
Top image: Operative 116. (2020-2025) Oil and oil bar on 5 panels. Total size 80 x 55 cms
Below: Operative 122 (2025) Oil and oil bar on 5 reversible panels (each 15 x 44.5cms)
Using the modernist art aesthetic I was born into; inspired by engineering manuals and diagrams demonstrating systems for the use of resources; responding to vast engineering works I witness in and around the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, the ‘Operatives’ relate to intermeshed creative and destructive forces.
I am grateful to artist Jane Lawson for this reference: ‘In her 2021 book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira describes modernity as a worlding story, one that presents itself “as a general project of civilisation that seeks to engineer society through humanism, reason, science, progress, and technology” but that rests on a foundation of violent extraction, exploitation and ecocide that is leading to climate breakdown. We need to enable modernity to die a good death in order for something better to be born, but we will only be able to create something genuinely different if we first become aware and suspicious of what modernity allows us to desire and imagine.’
Jane Lawson. Artist Environmental Lead at Castlefield Gallery and co-ordinator of SPARK Network