Let Us Play
The art of leisurely pursuits
The visual language ranges across all cultures, all ages.
Exhibitions can be the stimuli for discussions, bestow a sense of pride, of identity, a love of artistic appreciation and fuel a deeper understanding of a gallery’s visual content. This exhibition celebrates the joys of favoured pastimes and recreational activities all as important to one’s wellbeing as is the cultivation and appreciation of your inner artistic essence. Every exhibition has a story to tell, and each of these twelve works offers a separate leaf or page to embellish the overall jaunty playfulness of this ‘picture book’ show.
What reaction do each of these artists solicit from the viewer? Perhaps their imagery may pinpoint activities which awaken familiar responses with perhaps a subtle nudge toward a sense of enjoyment or pleasure.
Ceramic painter, Barry Hughes’ tumbling clown, balances in mid cartwheel before tiers of smiling faces. From such a simplistic image the viewer might experience sensory overload, conjure up the flavoursome hit of candy floss, a whiff of dry sawdust, the knot in your stomach, the thrill as you perch within the voluminous sweep of the big top watching the scintillating swirl of performers and animals.
Or, you might find yourself settling into the hushed preoccupation of writing to a loved one as in multimedia artist, Lina Marsh’s postcards from abroad. Possibly not the sort of news you’d want to be on the receiving end of, as each postcard is jam-packed with the heart stopping daily reports on board the Endeavour. Still these stories weave languidly from artwork to artwork, surreptitiously bedding in the viewer’s psyche. So now is the time to play, a time to shake off those serious thoughts, gather up your stories and dive into the rabbit hole.
”What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”
Alice in Wonderland
“Beyond my eyes horizon – a moon washed thought,
put the word within a box and take away the key.”
Joy Hester. 1920 – 1960
