5th February 2022 - 27th February 2022
Private View: Friday 4th February 17:30 – 19:30 All welcome!
An exhibition of works by five selected alumni of Falmouth University, sponsored by Falmouth University and Penwith Galleries, St Ives.
Five voices from five different places combine for the first time to present ‘Between Places’, an exhibition exploring the world in which we live and the boundaries between places we inhabit, explore and dwell, both physically and metaphorically.
Sabrina Brouwers is an Italian/German geometric abstract artist based in London. Sabrina graduated from Falmouth University in 2019 with a Bachelors in Fine Art and holds a Post-graduate Diploma in Graphic Design at the University of Art London, in Chelsea. Sabrina’s artistic practice is an emotional response to the world around her. Influenced by the urban landscape where Sabrina lives, the circles in her work represent an abstraction of the subject matter telling stories of her own lived experiences and reflections.
Sabrina’s nomadic upbringing and curiosity for visual perception has encouraged her to respond to man-made landscapes and the complexity of our natural surroundings. By observing how we process the natural versus man-made, Sabrina have become very interested in the therapeutic effects of visual simplicity and how they are present in our urban landscape.
Having lived in multiple countries, and the struggle to pinpoint a place to call home, Sabrina’s practice denotes a constant search for grounding in her study of symmetry, repetition and the composition of each piece around a mathematically plotted grid. By introducing the fluid shape of the circle, she challenges the rigid order of the base grid and uses the deep black circles as grounding elements to visual simplicity.
Sabrina’s layered process builds a dialogue between emergence and disappearance by revealing the previous layers through sanding and scratching. Documenting her journey on the grid creates a map for her to navigate, deconstruct and simplify – the subtle lines of colours expressing an underlying emotion of the moment.
Manon Dowse: “These paintings enquire into the polemics of human relationships. Centred on the figures itself they intend to stretch into the beyond of human emotions such as, Love and Hate, Honesty and Deceit, Desire and Indifference. The distortion and reconfiguration of the bodily form ignites a sense of monstrosity alongside the familiar, perhaps even friendly, creating a poetical drama for the expression of feelings and ideas. The exposure of such vulnerabilities in these works are in many ways articulating an internal faculty, which ultimately drives the paint to canvas. These works are intuitive explorations that manifest and emerge from my visual sensibilities, and in doing so I seek to create highly personal visualisations that elicit meaning capable of profoundly touching and resonating with the viewer.”
Juliet E P Gibbs (b. 1996, Somerset) is an artist currently living and working in North West London. She graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth University in 2018.
Gibbs’ work focusses mainly on the contrast between the organic and the man-made. The work seeks to look at the direct impact humanity poses in relation to the world we live in, and how nature inevitably fights back. This age-old conflict creates an interesting ‘push-and-pull’ that we can all observe in the places we live, work and visit. Gibbs uses transparent washes and layering to construct boundaries, creating a disconnect between the viewer and the painting.
Work based on glass-houses looks at microcosmic environments built in unlikely settings. Huge glass buildings housing rare and exotic plants not naturally found in European climates. Otherworldly plants that cling to moisture and heat, growing in curated environments: An artificial wilderness that clings to steel girders and concrete foundations instead of dense jungle.
Elli Masterton is a Zimbabwean-British painter who studied Fine Art in Falmouth, Bournemouth and Venice, Italy. She has been practicing art professionally since 2020.
Light, beauty and complexity speak to Masterton of God’s attributes made manifest. The primary motivation behind her work is to capture moments where these qualities are most apparent. Thus seeking to communicate the sense of awe and joy she experiences toward the Creator of the universe and hopefully inspire this in others. It is His fingerprint that can be seen in the everyday; just in the same way that an artist’s hand can be identified in their breadth of work. Masterton observes the transient and transcendent living side by side and she abides in between.
In an often overstimulating world, Masterton finds the simplified process of painting with wine comforting; just a bottle of vino and a brush. Conceptually, the subtle tones and ephemerality of her paintings speak to Masterton of both the spiritual and the fragility of life. While life can seem hopeless – evil, selfishness, godlessness and death permeates – the light in Masterton’s work represents the Light of the World, the personal Saviour who is Jesus Christ.
Katie Riesner: Driven by an enduring interest in the natural world, Katie Riesner is a UK-based photographer and experimental artist. Believing strongly that the camera is a tool that can be used to see the world anew, she explores abstraction and the often-overlooked aspects of our world with close attention to detail. Having cultivated an obsession with looking to find beauty in difficult times, photography became a form of therapy for Riesner in her youth. Her recent projects have stemmed from this; becoming about both trying to find beauty in the mundane and creating her own “alternate” version of the world we know.
