TELLING TALES

In Telling Tales, five artists find different ways to reflect on and respond to the present, through a heady cocktail of colour, texture, pattern, the juxtaposition of new and old, and the search for quiet in a noisy world.

Sandra Von Haselberg reaches for new universes in her work. Through the use of digital tools and photography, they become altered, idealised versions of the familiar. Colour acts as both an expression of emotional release and a platform for conceptual thought. Beautiful but ultimately alien fairy-tale landscapes provide the viewer with a solitary vantage point to overlook vibrant utopias.

The search for personal space and the sublime is also at the heart of the photography of J Tapani. Finding this in an urban world is the challenge and he draws the viewer in first to a meditative, quiet space before asking them to question the subject of the work itself.

In contrast, the inspiration for Marianne Nix’s work is the Natural World, drawing together cumulative influences from History and personal experience, and specifically the stories of Darwin and the plant explorers. Her photographs of tropical plants from Kew Gardens are re-imagined and re-cast using traditional oil paint glazes and digital manipulation, bringing together the old and new in layered mixed media compositions, evoking a sense of the exotic and a wistful nostalgia for foreign lands and time past.

Sarah Barker Brown’s paintings focus on the female body to seek insight into the inner truths about the lives of women. Intimacy, sexuality, pleasure and female friendship form the themes on which she weaves her narrative path, the way lit by tenderness and nostalgia. In some, the backgrounds are emptied, the figures free and unanchored by the material world; in vivid contrast, others are highly decorative and densely layered, but the limbs and bodies of her women take strength and power from this, and the delicacy of the transfer process she employs reflects the sense of the fragile world that surrounds us.

Whilst Jukka Kettunen’s work is also figurative, using classic postures and artistic symbols from the past, his work is focussed on creating new meaning from old masterpieces. Inspired by the ethereal and timeless paintings of the Italian Renaissance, and the way in which time itself has reworked it over the centuries to produce a deep and enigmatic power, he overlays them with contemporary views and forms. Thus he both accelerates and collapses time to tell stories that reach back into the past and forward into our on-rushing future.