Just follow your eyes…

A Forest presents a collection of works by Caroline Achaintre, Anna Barham, Chiara Camoni, Sarah Chilvers, Peggy Franck, Anne Hardy – a group of artists represented by the gallery alongside those from our wider community of friends and peers. The networks are many and intersect.

The exhibition follows a similar logic – with an idea that these works spoke to each other, and to me, and with an excitement to put them all together and let them develop and inflect each other – to see one through another, myriad view points.

Achaintre’s woollen tufted work, tree like, looks perhaps as if it grew from the ground. Camoni steals the spirits of her garden in the remote Tuscan Hills, by wrapping flowers and plants in silk where they leave their marks, appearing unpredictably and identifying with the seasons. Franck’s cataloging of large stones inherited from a family collection and transposed onto printed carpets, draws together a history of movement and migration. Anne Hardy likens her “VHS curtains” to rain, no doubt both visually and audibly as both of these formal qualities are ever present in her larger scale immersive installations. All these things I have in mind whilst looking at Chilvers new paintings in her studio, as I began to interpret her systematic drawings and paintings as maps or diagrams to navigate dense forest like environments. The gallery is filled with the sound of Barham’s video Sick Ardour. Structured around the familiar mating call of a cicada – an insect more often heard than seen – the work explores the permeability of a body to sound image and space. Whilst the isolated sound track is a continuous presence and back drop to the exhibition, the video will be screened in full on 20th May at LUX as part of ‘Orgasmic Streaming, Organic Gardening, Electroculture’ curated by Karen Di Franco and Irene Revell.

I hear her voice
Calling my name
The sound is deep
In the dark
I hear her voice
And start to run
Into the trees
Into the trees
Into the trees

Suddenly I stop
But I know it’s too late
I’m lost in a forest
All alone
The girl was never there
It’s always the same
I’m running towards nothing
Again and again and again and again *

* song lyrics from ‘A Forest’ The Cure