Points of View Nicola Tassie & Bryan Ingham 8 April - 7 May 2005
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Through the juxtaposition of new works in ceramic by Nicola Tassie with etchings by Bryan Ingham (1936-1997) the exhibition engaged the viewer in a practical and conceptual investigation into viewpoint and picture making. Tassie and Ingham, although from different backgrounds and generations, have a common set of reference points from which their art evolves – both working in the genre of still-life and influenced by artists such as Morandi and Nicholson, both fundamentally concerned with analysing the visual field and pictorial space.
Ingham’s still-life compositions focus on a single form that is subjected to endless variations and extensions. Somewhat abstracted, the images display a facturing of subject and shallow pictorial recession associated with Synthetic Cubism. Rather than ideological concerns, Ingham’s etchings display an inquiry into picture making, he wrote that the ‘true subject is that of shape, pattern, colour, texture, line, relief: abstract qualities closer to those of sculpture or music.’ |
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It is also apparent on viewing the prints that Ingham’s absorption and delight in the very process of etching can be considered subject of the images too, thus making them a union of composition and process whereby the subject matter can be seen as a foundational element.
Tassie’s engagement with still-life is somewhat ironic; trained as a painter, she is best known in recent years as a ceramicist. Alongside her practice of making functional ceramic ware she has been consistently creating still-life groups that interrogate the practices of sculpture, ceramics and painting. Tassie makes hand-thrown ceramic objects that are reproductions in clay of mass-produced jars and bottles. These objects are components of very precise modular compositions, each group undergoing interventions in surface – glazing, incising, puncturing – that unifies them.
Tassie imposes a scopic frame onto the work whereby the surface treatment imitates (and at times confounds) the effects of transparency or of cast shadows in order to flatten the three-dimensional assemblage into a two-dimensional composition. In effect, transforming the ‘real objects’ into the purely pictorial – a kind of reverse trompe-l’oeil.
An illustrated catalogue with text by Geoffrey Quilley was produced to coincide with this exhibition. Copies are available from Standpoint Gallery.
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