Sara Radstone, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Sara Radstone
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
19 November 2004 - 8 January 2005

Sara Radstone explores themes of history, memory and place in works that probe the traces left by human activity and their evocative power. Some recent sources of reflection include sites as diverse as Rodinsky‘s room in London‘s East End, with its accumulations of matter marking the idiosyncratic interests of a single life, to the landscape of North Cornwall that bears the imprints of the different demands on the land made by successive generations of people.

Rather than employing explicit signs, Sara Radstone often composes sections of a piece from casts taken from man-made or natural artefacts, which, through the stages of her process, become only faintly identifiable. A number of the works are composed of fragments, as if remnants of some former whole. Many hang from the wall - their outlines echoed by shadows that raise uncertainty as to where the piece finally ends and the background begins.

While surfaces are densely textured - dented, eroded, or carrying the accretions of time - the forms are stark and understated, their colours elemental. Sara Radstone has described her approach as seeking ‘simplification ...a paring down to austerity’ and her aim to make artefacts that appear as ‘nudges in the line of vision.’

Ultimately Sara Radstone‘s works contain a penetrating abstract charge, one that evades literal interpretation and which finds true resonance at an unspoken level of human existence.

SARA RADSTONE (b. 1955) trained at Herefordshire College of Art (1975-1976) and Camberwell School of Art, London (1976-1979). Acclaimed as one of Britain‘s leading ceramic artists she has won a number of major awards including an Arts Foundation Fellowship (1993). Other stands of her professional career include work as a lecturer and writer within the visual arts field. Radstone‘s work has been exhibited internationally and is found in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum, USA; Shigaraki Cultural Park, Japan; Museum die Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt, Germany; the Victoria and Albert Museum, British Council and Crafts Council, London.

BARRETT MARSDEN GALLERY
17-18 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DN
www.bmgallery.co.uk