8-25 MAY 11-5PM TUESDAY-SUNDAY : 'THE VILLAGE' PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION BY JACK LLOYD
8-25 MAY 11-5PM TUESDAY-SUNDAY : 3D SCULPTURE GARDEN WITH SUMMERHOUSE EXHIBITION SPACE
9-10 MAY 11-5PM ARTISTS' TRAIL WEEKEND :
JACK LLOYD & BECKY WAITE OPEN STUDIOS
16-17 MAY 11-5PM ARTISTS' TRAIL WEEKEND :
EMILY MUGRIDGE OPEN STUDIO thewhitegallery is delighted to be part of this year's bollington festival and we have lots of exciting exhibitions & events planned.
we’re hosting a
new exhibition of work by the popular manchester-based photographer, Jack Lloyd, whose images of Bollington (including the evocative 'bollington heights' & the quirky 'palmerston street', both below) have become quite a talking point.
jack will also be taking part in the
Artists’ Trail, which happens over two weekends during the festival. the artist will take contemporaneous photographs of Bollington and build a new piece of work from scratch. “it’s a really exciting project,” says jack, “as the work will be very much influenced by the things happening around us on the day.”
visitors to thewhitegallery will be able to watch Jack at work on his laptop, combining image and text to create a unique photomontage of the village, which will be available to buy.
a sculpture garden will also be open at the rear of the gallery, with work by various artists including jeff teasdale, gavin darby and david broadhurst. work by amy daniels, a recent graduate and ‘art in clay’ award winner, will also feature alongside recycled-plastic installations by new artist becky waite.
talented local painter, emily mugridge, will be painting and exhibiting too in the summerhouse as part of the artists’ trail.
FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT FESTIVAL ARTISTS: JACK LLOYDJack's original work for thewhitegallery offers a unique perspective of Bollington. As an artist based in Manchester he views things from the outside, presenting the village in a completely new light.
“I work in the photographic medium, using digital techniques. Pictures are created from multiple images with the intention of conveying a sense of the area. My artwork documents how people use the environment and the marks they leave behind. I walk around the area I intend to photograph and try to capture the many elements - sounds, smells and visual rhythms – that are present. I have never felt that any one shot alone will convey the complete reality of a scene..."
‘the village’ exhibition includes a series of six original images created specially for the 2009 Bollington Festival. All of the limited edition prints on show are available to buy.
EMILY MUGRIDGEEmily Mugridge is a painter and Fine Art lecturer. She trained at University College Falmouth and lived, worked and exhibited in Cornwall for several years before returning to Cheshire.
Her paintings are based on rural and urban landscapes. Emily’s primary concern is creating a personal record of ‘how it feels to be somewhere at a particular time’, rather than creating a faithful representation of a place.
A recurring theme in Emily’s work is human impact upon the natural environment - evidence of construction and organisation of land spaces contrasted against natural phenomena.
Emily uses a range of traditional and non-traditional media depending on the overall effect she wants to achieve. She often stitches and folds the canvas before painting, drawing, applying tile grout and collage, scraping, sanding, stencilling, spraying, splattering and washing the work to build up layers of texture and colour.
GAVIN DARBYBased in Nottingham, Gavin Darby works with scrap metal to recycle it into birds, flowers, dogs, or anything else it wants to be. The raw material is found in the skip of an agricultural engineer, fly tipped, discovered or donated.
Where possible the found material is not heavily worked, so traces of its previous life are visible. The finished piece is not painted or chemically treated but left to react to its environment and to weather in.
Gavin’s snails in particular have proved very popular in Bollington, adorning mantle pieces and gardens around the village: if you drive to the end of Water Street and look up to your right, several of the little critters decorate the iron railings of a roof garden.
The full size horse exhibited in the sculpture garden took Gavin three months to construct and is made entirely of recylced metal - the legs and body used to be a shop security grill, the hooves are pistons, the shoulders are car suspension arms & the twirly bits are electrical cable.
As well as selling his work through galleries and his own business, Frailloop, Gavin has worked on a variety of commissions designing sculptures for hospitals and schools. He has also made a pair of 20 foot high cricketers out of scaffolding for a village in Northamptonshire.
AMY DANIELSAmy Daniels is a ceramic artist making sculptural objects for indoor and outdoor spaces.
Inspired by junkyards, she collects obsolete objects and examines their qualities, striving to recreate the details seen in discarded metal and the deteriorating surfaces of old industrial structures. The effects of nature and time on the artefacts of urban life are important aspects: rust, cracks, bright layers of peeling paintwork and rough, worn edges are the qualities she transfers through her work.
Each piece has a unique surface and form, and is slab built using crank clay. A geometrical shape is often used as a body to carry intricate and delicate surface details. The piece can then be sited in a garden setting, and allowed to slowly become part of its environment, echoing the beauty in discarded junkyard treasures.
Amy Daniels won a Highly Commended Student Award at the Art in Clay Ceramics Festival at Hatfield House in 2007 and in
March 2008, her work was featured in Craft&Design Magazine.
DAVID BROADHURST
Born in south Manchester, David spent three years on the south coast training to be an art teacher. He then returned to the north- west to teach in Cheshire. After a long and fulfilling career in primary education David retired from full time work in 2007. He is presently enjoying a busy life that includes serving Bollington as its Town Clerk, leading art workshops in schools and working with the education faculty at Manchester Metropolitan University. David illustrates and paints in watercolour and acrylic. He also hand builds quirky models in earthenware clay. David also works in schools creating large painted boards for installation in play spaces.
For his contribution to thewhitegallery sculpture garden, David has created two whimsical little figures out of clay, to be found climbing the summerhouse roof.
JEFF TEASDALEMuch of Jeff’s work is sculptural and combines a love of earthy textures and colours translated into raku ceramics, with other ‘found objects’ incorporated into them, such as pebbles, sticks, bones and stones collected from the landscapes he happens to find himself in at the time.
In 2007, Jeff designed some wall sculptures for the ‘Purple Stripe’ entry by Macclesfield Borough Council at the Royal Horticultural Show in Tatton Park. The MBC ‘small garden’ theme was to illustrate just what was possible when transforming a small back-yard, the like of which is common in Macclesfield and Bollington, into a garden of limited space. Jeff used roof slates as a base and a spiral motif of ‘found objects’, all of which had been unearthed when digging gardens – old plant pots, pebbles, bits of china, and broken mirrors and glass. The spiral was inspired by snails - ‘our garden is alive with them; they have probably lived here since long before our Victorian house was built, and will no doubt still be here long after it has gone!’’ It is also a potent form in terms of shapes found in nature (ammonites, pine cones, leaf stems for example) and thus mathematics, and Henri Matisse’s study of nature was reduced to this common but most complex of forms.
BECKY WAITE
Becky Waite was born in Macclesfield in 1986. She studied embroidery at the Manchester School of Art.
Becky’s work explores the jewel-like potential of discarded waste and takes the form of sculptural pieces and window installations. A love of light and the pure sensory energy of illuminated colour informs much of her work.
During several trips to India, Becky learnt traditional folk embroidery techniques such as aari and mirror work, which she incorporates into her art, juxtaposing the traditional with the avant-garde.
Becky’s installation art for thewhitegallery sculpture garden was inspired by her graduation chandalier made entirely of recycled plastic bottles. She wanted to recreate that sense of light playing on plastic, and both the canapy and her dingle dangle trees reflect her love of sunshine and colour.
BOLLINGTON FESTIVAL ARTISTS' TRAIL MAPS & SOUVENIR POSTERS
thewhitegallery has helped to produce the open studios map for the artists' trail, illustrated by local artist and gallery exhibitor, dean entwistle.
please visit the gallery to pick up a map and also buy a souvenir colour poster which we've had printed as an additional fund raiser for the festival. other venues selling the poster (for £2) include the post office, the library and the festival box office.
mixed media painting by jo deas
