Summer Showcase: Country Lines - Cut, Carve, Stitch, Weave, Trail

Dylan Bowen / Mandie Gillard / Lucy Turner

28 July – 27 September

Our Summer Showcase celebrates the power of the maker’s mark presenting ceramics by Dylan Bowen, prints and textiles by Mandie Gillard and basketry by Lucy Turner. Bringing together three artists using different media, the exhibition explores how physical technique lends vitality and meaning to their images and forms.

Dylan Bowen’s slip-decorated earthenware is rooted in the making process, and his works have a sense that they have been fired just before evolving into their next form. Dylan moulds, throws, carves or hand-builds the clay. Slips are dripped, trailed, poured or brushed. Nothing is predictable. The resulting maverick pots capture the spontaneity of a practice that continually challenges pottery conventions while nodding to them. His gestural style is also fed by music, outsider art, American abstract expressionism and contemporary American ceramics.

The versatility of natural willow is celebrated in Lucy Turner’s basketry and lampshades. Coppicing and processing the willow in different ways generates a variety of natural colours and textures that create the rich contrasts in her work. She combines contemporary and traditional indigenous weaves to make sculptural vessels that are full of movement and upward lift. Materials such as driftwood, rope and dyed leather are often introduced to balance or interrupt the rigorous structure of the linear weave.

Mandie Gillard’s ‘Frew Folk’ come to life with an exquisite use of pattern and texture in lino prints and framed textiles. Japanese folk craft and print traditions inspire her quietly contained domestic dramas. In print, thick black lines flow from head to foot, character to character, figure to ground, charged with every nick or ink blot on her lino block. Mandie’s sewn images are saturated with colour, as each stitch of dyed silk or textured quilt catches the light, offset by areas of dense appliquéd felt. As in her prints, it is line and mass that give the work its stability and movement.

Image Credit: Courtesy Dylan Bowen