Exhibitions

Georgie Hopton lives for part of the year in Upstate New York, in America’s Catskill Mountains. In 2005, after conquering the perennial bed, she moved on to creating a vegetable garden, which quickly became a passion and a preoccupation. In 2006 Hopton tentatively made the first photographs of herself and her garden’s wild output, beginning a series she called ‘Harvest’. Continued each summer since, 2009 was her most abundant 'season' to date, with vegetable prints and sculpture being added to the series. Work from each year will be shown in this exhibition for the first time.

In Cut And Come Again the garden and the artist’s relationship with/to it is the subject under scrutiny. Grown out of the need to work, whilst immersed in the new found joy of gardening, the products of sweat and toil are wheelbarrowed or trugged from garden to studio and form both the materials and inspiration for the artist’s finally more burning purpose; the creative act. The result is a visual celebration of the symbiosis achieved between the fundamental urge to feed the body and the existential need to feed the soul.

Hopton’s photographs in the ‘Harvest’ series are humorous, strange and thought provoking. Parts of her semi-clad or naked body are juxtaposed alongside often peculiar looking garden produce. Aprons, last seen in Glorious 1950’s Technicolor and here snatched up for modesty and whimsy’s sake, all at once revel in, gently chide and eroticise an idea of domestic bliss no longer relevant. Hopton enjoys this ambivalence, loving to excess the sensual pleasure of a scone-scented kitchen and the opportunity her Upstate life gives her to create one, whilst detesting the relatively recent notion that women existed only to provide a warm, welcoming and nourishing home for their husbands and children to return to. The candour and attitude that each image holds is quietly liberating, mirroring Hopton’s ‘revelation’ on realising that the garden need not be a retreat from the creative process, but an integral part of it.

These images serve as a self-portrait that examines the relationship between the artist and her crop, the external and internal self. The vegetable prints, meanwhile, explore the realms of the imagination and the conscious notion to recycle and adapt materials – so prevalent amongst serious gardeners and today’s conservationists. The instinct to make pictures is channelled through the childish activity of potato printing. An abundant vegetable garden provides numerous variations on the potato and the artist is able to satisfy her desire for fresh/new printing ‘tools’ by the bushel. Gourds, pumpkins, beetroot, courgettes, aubergines – any vegetable tough enough to withstand the weight of paint and pressure is sliced and daubed.

In the tradition of Botanical Art, the artist has conjured flora, which, shaped in thick acrylic paint, sit heavily on contrasting, weightless newsprint and appear at once sculptural and flat. These marks are imbued with the story of the journey that has brought the artist and her work this far and appear like the physical manifestation of Hopton’s dependence on her garden and its living and dying joys and disappointments.

For his first show at Poppy Sebire, Danny Rolph presents a new series of sapphire blue backed triplewall paintings. These new works are a continuation of Rolph’s investigation into his discourse with space. They are taking on a more direct relationship with painting's topology. The deep blue plastic ground upon which the actions occur offer up an infinite recessional space that resembles the night sky. This blue ground is where Rolph performs his analysis on forms and on colours and their ensuing drama

Rolph’s approach to each painting’s composition has as its starting point the horizontal lines of the triplewall material; the lined structure establishes a calm to the basic plane.

Rolph effects his universe of information through collage, mixed media and paint on three layers, like a musician would plot his musical score. Reclaimed magazine cuttings of London buses and pages from colouring-in books of power rangers are some of the collaged elements that make up Bonar Law.

Bright vinyl fragments and decorative cardboard cutouts are nailed to the surface. The recurring theme of antiquated forms of transport in this painting are an intentional direct reference to motion. Scrap images of old-fashioned aircraft are paradoxically trapped in a static moment of stillness within the painting’s layers.

Back-Roads Journeys begins in ‘The Diner’, an installation at Alan Cristea Gallery, where visitors are introduced to the Diner Waitress, unhappy in her job, waiting on the Trucker’s table; he’s stopped by for a quick burger. Their portraits are set alongside still lifes of fast food, a new series of screenprints on plexiglass of classic American diner food and a triptych interior scene made familiar through American road movies. The love story moves to ‘The Gas Station’ at Poppy Sebire’s gallery where we see the Diner Waitress who, having quit her job for a new life in the South, is hitching a lift with her friend the Trucker. Here, the narrative evolves with the addition of new characters associated with life on an American highway.

Boo Ritson depicts characters and still lifes drawn from her own imagined narratives merged with borrowed Americana. For each piece she paints her subject in a thick emulsion and then has the scene photographed whilst the paint is still wet.

The resulting image sits somewhere between painting, sculpture, performance and photography. Ritson has always located her work in an American cultural context and has been fascinated by the process and by history of painting. In these new works at Alan Cristea Gallery and Poppy Sebire, she introduces her first ‘unfinished’ subjects, each one defined as much by what is absent as what the viewer sees.