Barnaby Hosking
08 Sep - 11 Oct 2007
BARNABY HOSKING
This exhibition brings together three new pieces that compliment each other and work together to give an introduction to my process, aesthetic sensibility and personal vision as an artist working today.
Untitled II is as much an abstract work as it is figurative: the filling up of the white skeleton with black clay is both visually stunning and also symbolic of creation and/or death; the blacking out is followed by the revealing of an external skeleton as light is reflected off the wet clay. The obvious sensual element during this part is intentional for its contrast with the otherwise austere presentation of this work. However, sensuality is universal throughout my work primarily to express the intimacy and solitariness of my experience of making art and to communicate a desire to appreciate beauty outside of oneself when one is alone, silent and free from troubles and distractions.
The effect of covering the screen with black velvet allows the image only to be seen near the viewpoint of the sculpture, thus connecting the two elements and leaving an apparently black void when one views the screen from an angle.
Cave Painting (Swildons Hole) immediately invokes in me a sense of adventure but more importantly a sense of escape, not away from oneself like an extravagant holiday, but a journey within, to experience the darkness, silence and stillness that is an ever present world underneath the activity above ground. This transition between two worlds is emphasised by the entering to the caves through a hole at the bottom of a tree.
The journey into the cave can be seen as a metaphor for the experience of the extreme closeness and sometimes claustrophobic relationship between the artist and his work. The use of the natural pigment from the cave walls furthers my need to sustain a simultaneous awareness of the possibilities of where the work of art may exist: In the process of making the artwork; in the artwork itself; or whether it is left somewhere in that cave.
This exhibition brings together three new pieces that compliment each other and work together to give an introduction to my process, aesthetic sensibility and personal vision as an artist working today.
Untitled II is as much an abstract work as it is figurative: the filling up of the white skeleton with black clay is both visually stunning and also symbolic of creation and/or death; the blacking out is followed by the revealing of an external skeleton as light is reflected off the wet clay. The obvious sensual element during this part is intentional for its contrast with the otherwise austere presentation of this work. However, sensuality is universal throughout my work primarily to express the intimacy and solitariness of my experience of making art and to communicate a desire to appreciate beauty outside of oneself when one is alone, silent and free from troubles and distractions.
The effect of covering the screen with black velvet allows the image only to be seen near the viewpoint of the sculpture, thus connecting the two elements and leaving an apparently black void when one views the screen from an angle.
Cave Painting (Swildons Hole) immediately invokes in me a sense of adventure but more importantly a sense of escape, not away from oneself like an extravagant holiday, but a journey within, to experience the darkness, silence and stillness that is an ever present world underneath the activity above ground. This transition between two worlds is emphasised by the entering to the caves through a hole at the bottom of a tree.
The journey into the cave can be seen as a metaphor for the experience of the extreme closeness and sometimes claustrophobic relationship between the artist and his work. The use of the natural pigment from the cave walls furthers my need to sustain a simultaneous awareness of the possibilities of where the work of art may exist: In the process of making the artwork; in the artwork itself; or whether it is left somewhere in that cave.