Martin Smith, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Martin Smith 
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
11 March - 23 April 2005

Martin Smith shows a new series of ceramic works investigating properties of space through varying accents of colour, shadow and reflected light. This is a development of his ‘Oscillate’ series and continues a line of artistic inquiry that began with ‘Wavelength’, a site specific installation made for Tate St Ives in 2001. Each work is composed of two elliptical or circular units, derived from sections of cones and cylinders and fabricated from an open textured red brick clay. They sit on discs of coloured glass whose hue is amplified or deeply muted in reflective inner surfaces of platinum leaf. Dependent on the spacing of the clay units, sometimes open, sometimes tight, one area can seem brightly lit and another in deep shadow. As a result of alternative colour and light responses the viewer gains very different perceptions of the inner spaces of the pieces. Due to their apparent stability and weightiness, the clay forms bring a sense of materiality and inertia. But in his deft use of colour to articulate light and space Martin Smith also conjures up a curiously contrasting sense of the ephemeral.

MARTIN SMITH is widely regarded as one of the UK’s most innovative ceramic artists. He has exhibited internationally and was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum, Rotterdam in 1996. His work is represented in numerous public collections including: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He was awarded a Chair as Professor of Ceramics and Glass, Royal College of Art, London in 1999.

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

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

Chun Liao at Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Chun Liao
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
15 October - 13 November 2004

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1998, Chun Liao has won wide critical acclaim for her exquisite porcelain pots. These are informed by her research into ancient Chinese porcelain bodies and glazes, knowledge she transforms and extends to produce distinctive, contemporary form.

The tapering shapes are finely thrown and finished in a single glaze colour. Chun Liao has recently chosen to restrict her palette to a clear glaze, either used alone, or stained black or with copper carbonate, but she encourages subtle variations of tone and texture through the density of their application and by differing temperature settings of the kiln. Other decorative details are similarly understated, such as where the thin rims of the pots are left delicately ragged, or where tiny rods of applied silver wire descend deep into a wall during the firing process, melting to leave a green coloured trace.

The new body of work is intimate in scale, varying from barely 1cm to 7cms in height. Chun Liao‘s approach is deceptively simple - to throw pots this size demands an extraordinary degree of skill, with the smallest requiring the clay to be steadied on the wheel and pulled up using only the ring or little fingers. Their diminutive scale serves to magnify the characteristics of each form. It underscores their preciousness and calls attention to their seemingly endless range of subtle nuances.

CHUN LIAO was born in Taiwan in 1969 and came to Britain in the early 1990s. She trained in ceramics at Brighton College of Technology, Bath Spa University and the Royal College of Art. Her work has been widely exhibited in the UK, the Netherlands, USA and China and is included in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Crafts Council, London.

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

Emma Woffenden, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London

Emma Woffenden
Barrett Marsden Gallery, London
10 September - 9 October 2004

Emma Woffenden is widely acclaimed as one of Britain‘s most innovative and talented glass artists. Her haunting, enigmatic forms can be reminiscent of transient experiences that hover on the edge of consciousness, such as those which occur between waking and sleep. They are often presented as tableaux or in an installation context, with each autonomous element contributing to the whole. There can be a sense that these presences are on the cusp of transformation - that something vaguely unnerving is about to unfold.

Emma Woffenden employs a full range of glass-working techniques. The forms are variously blown, cast, slumped or fabricated from sheet glass and often combined with other materials. Each work is a distillation of references and her abstract, organic forms, in particular, touch a visceral nerve. These are cast in clear glass, then ground and polished, giving rise to a range of impressions: heaviness and solidity, transparency and magnification, sensuousness and luminosity.

The physical and evocative characteristics of the works are further heightened through her deliberate juxtaposition of opposites, the organic forms contrasting sharply with the more austere representations of man-made objects. The stark, minimal shapes of two faceless grandfather clocks are dark, but reflective. Their deep shadows rhythmically shift from side to side with the pendulum swing of an overhead light bulb, marking the passage of time in eerie silence.

EMMA WOFFENDEN, b. 1962, trained at West Surrey College of Art and Design, 1981-1984, and the Royal College of Art, 1991-1993. Alongside her studio based practice she has collaborated with Tord Boontje on the design and production of the award winning Transglas range of glassware and was curator of the exhibition Solid Air, Crafts Council Gallery, 2001 - 2002.

Examples of her work can be found in numerous public collections including the British Council, Belgium; Ernsting Glass Museum, Germany; Broadfield House Glass Museum; Brighton and Hove Museum; Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Crafts Council. Recent exhibitions (with accompanying publications) include a major solo show at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland (1999), and No Horizon, a series of site-sensitive installations created in response to the architectural spaces of Fabrica, Brighton; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; and Firstsite, The Minories, Colchester 2003 - 2004. Emma Woffenden is represented by Barrett Marsden Gallery.

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