Sortilege

10-11 and 17-18 June 2023 : 11am-6pm

Nutshell Studios, Old Market, Nailsworth GL6 0DU

Curated by Patricia Brien and Viviana Rossi-Caffell

This exhibition responds to the heightened sense of nature-culture mergings in a psychological space informed by the physical experience of the land. The artists involved in their respective practices respond to the strangeness of dreamscapes, mythologies, and sensing the surreal in the quotidian. In this context, the theatre of the imagination is a photographic space of investigation where the works operate as portals into the subjective. There is a sense of personal serendipities being woven into physical, existential and chimeric environments. Artists explore potent archetypes from Western and Eastern traditions and draw forth new knowledges prefigured in ancient wisdoms. The figure of the Genie associated with shapeshifting, possession and madness is a guiding presence in sculptural form. Meanwhile a new archetype emerges from the tidal force and silted bed of the River Severn, a phantasmic deity of the end times but one that activates ancient kin relationships with rivers as sacred creative sources. The animal kingdom too appears in powerful dream incarnations where the unconscious communicates the stories that humans have forgotten. The mediums, messages and constructed realities are layered, repeated, disassembled and finally broken. The endings are found to be the inner realms, the otherworldly and the future tense. It is a curious specular landscape encircled and transfixed by spectral fantasies.

Part of Site Festival 2023.

With works by:

Patricia Brien, Su Fahy, Michelle Grant, Nick Phillips

James Porter, Viviana Rossi-Caffell, Louise van den Muyzenberg