NIGHT WALKING

[ezcol_1half]Samantha Cary, Denise de Cordova, 
Tom Hammick, Fionna Murray
4 December 2019 – 17 January 2020

‘But even if I find my way out of the forest
I shall be left with the inconsolable memory
Of the treasure I went into the forest to find
And never found, and perhaps is not there
And perhaps is not anywhere? But if not anywhere,
Why do I feel guilty at not having found it?’

(T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party)

Night Walking presents paintings and sculpture by four contemporary artists from the UK and Ireland, in an exhibition that explores ideas about dislocation and connection.

In her essay The Materiality of Mild Fear Denise de Cordova writes about her travels to the deep woods of British Columbia, Canada and the USA, experiencing first hand ‘the sensations and thinking that can only take place by walking, usually alone, in deep wood spaces; the deep inside of the forest, which Berger describes as “like the inside of a glove by a hand within it.”. The draw is fear and the uncanny – a heightened awareness of mortality and vulnerability.’. De Cordova shows a series of carved and painted sculptures – ‘deep woods women’ who carry burdens, or weapons, of stone or crystal.

Tom Hammick is also drawn to far off places including the Arctic and Newfoundland, as well as to the forests and fields around his UK home in East Sussex. He has often spoken about using images of landscape as a form of metaphor, enabling him to articulate thoughts about man’s position within the wider framework of nature. In his recent work Faded Forest a figure walks amongst undergrowth and trees. The patterns of fabric and foliage intermingle to the point that the human form becomes almost camouflaged.

Fionna Murray’s enigmatic paintings explore ambiguities concerning memory, displacement and notions of home. Sourced from stills in the film Blow Up, (shot in London in 1966), images of the city are mediated through the act of painting to settle into a parallel space of the imagination. Familiar places are seen from afar – details of a ‘metropolitan pastoral’, that hangs somewhere between reality and artifice.

Samantha Cary finds fascination in the anonymous neighbourhoods of suburban England, where the evidence of human presence is recorded in ‘ornamental plants and well kept hedges that tell of a longing for the exotic …’. Night walks take her past houses whose garden gates and lit-up windows form apertures into the lives within.

For further information please contact Emma Hill or Philip Mudd at the Eagle Gallery on + 44 (0)20 7833 2674 or email emmahilleagle@aol.com

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