In My Element

Sara Davies, Maura Hazelden, Maria Sears and Rosalind Sharples

Monday 13 December 2004 - Thursday 6 January 2005

Rosalind Sharples

Artist's Statement:
This show combines different but related themes contained within the overall concept of journeying. I enjoy walking through this countryside and like most people find it a good opportunity to ruminate. The expedition becomes a pathway both through the mind as well as through the landscape. For this reason many of the paintings have the words of a poem around the edges. The words and images do not illustrate each other, they are connected by association. They augment rather than dictate to each other.

Some of the paintings are more literal than others. They have all been taken from observation of local landscapes, but some represent one moment in time and others represent a more composite experience of walking through land, sea and air.

So with one exception the show explores voyages through the inner and outer worlds we inhabit, the interaction of the elements and how as we walk they combine inside our minds to form the patterns of impression and memory. This one exception is the image of a mother and child (A Silent and Holy Night). I have included this one because it is the partner to the image of the couple on the road (Joseph wore Green Wellies). they are my Christmas paintings but in my Christmas story I celebrate the holiness of each couple's journey home through their own and familiar landscape; and each mother's experience in loving her child. This is an ongoing theme of mine, the celebration of the sacred in our ordinary lives.

I am also exhibiting in a Christmas Show being held at the Arts Centre in Fishguard. The work there is sympathetic to the themes explored in this exhibition.

Sara Davies

Artist's Statement:
Born in Pembrokeshire, I returned to St Davids four years ago where I now live and work.

The local beaches around the Pembrokeshire peninsula inspire these drawings. I have used soft pastel as my main medium for the seascapes to recreate its subtle movement and translucency. The velvety textures of the pastels are ideal for blending to achieve depth and the luminosity of the sea’s changing colours and to capture the natural elements of light and wind on its surface.

Maria Sears

Artist's Statement
My drawings are entwined with my words, my thoughts, my music, my plants, my delight.

I have been working as an artist for many years. I am unsure about categorizing myself in metal, but recently I find drawing and painting express my ideas well.

I like to work unchecked, so as not to begin with a fixed image. This work springs from me. I am fascinated by unexpected events and meetings and how they come to add so much to our lives. Even in our apparent bleakness. It is a playful place.

Maura Hazelden

A BIT ABOUT MY WORK
I prefer not to explain my work too directly with words as it is, after all, visual and works in a more abstract manner than most language. But perhaps it is useful to express some of the starting points for my work. I do have an ‘artist’s statement’ but that is still perhaps a little abstract and is more evocative than explanatory!

My main themes for some years have been memory and perception in the domestic and the landscape/ place, control and order (and that which is sublimated), journeying, sensuality in the everyday and the feminine. This exhibition shows two strands of work that I rarely show together: landscape and the domestic. The landscape work looks at a place that I visited regularly until I was just nine. Since then it has filled my memory and dreams. I returned in September 2003. I was interested in how well my memory had served me and about the significance of the place to me. Memory, like dreams, will not be pinned down; it has to be allowed to wander in order to function. Sometimes there are huge gaps in memory, one thing is remembered with clarity, while something that sits beside it is forgotten. How much of our memory is our own? Do we add things as we are told them, about a childhood incident say, and use photographs to add further to the memory, then, assume that the whole package comes from the original experience? Then there is nostalgia, which seems to me to often be faulty memory and certainly very selective; often memories of smells, textures, flashes of memory when looking at an object or image from the past. It seems to be an imagined memory of life as our grandparents, of a time we are born into but did not experience.

I use whatever medium I feel most appropriate to explore my ideas (photovisual, performance/live art, painting, collage, textiles). I fill notebooks with writing and drawing. I use the camera. Photography as a medium interests me as it is often a way of viewing our memories; do we remember the place or the photograph of it? Do we remember time and vision, either side of the photograph? Photographs seem so familiar and trustworthy. And I enjoy the photographic process: the light to make the image, the grain, printing and handling the paper. I re-photograph and re-photograph the photographs themselves.

The cognitive process of categorisation creates order and definition. It then proceeds to control and ritualise.

The domestic order of memory
The memory of domestic order
The order of domestic memory

1 sublimate
curb
govern
subjugate
repress
silence

unsubstantial

2 order
organise
structure
arrange
categorise
neaten
contain

3 evanescent
ephemeral
fleeting
transient
elusive
intangible

insubstantial

4 give an orderly structure, to systemise. bring the affairs (of another person) into order, make arrangements for (a person), arrange or initiate, provide, take responsibility for.
the condition in which every part, unit etc., is in its right place; tidiness; specified sequence, succession.

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