Sanctuary

 

Glasgow Print Studio presents Sanctuary, a three-person exhibition in original print, painting and drawing.

 

In its essential definition, Sanctuary suggests refuge or safety from persecution or other danger, while also acting as a corollary for ideas of protection, shelter, harbour or asylum. Such spaces could be physical, psychological, political, creative, and sought individually or collectively. The three exhibiting artists' works interface with this theme in differing, complimentary ways.  

 

Ian Chamberlain lives and works in Bristol, UK, and in addition to his studio practice he is also a Senior Lecturer in M.A Multi-Disciplinary at (UWE) The University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. 

 

His work takes reference from a broad range of historical architectural forms, using shelter as a metaphor to highlight issues around isolation, boundaries and the need for protection. Structures that Chamberlain has recorded in the past refer to certain national or political agendas for defence, whereas his new interest in shelters is more about personal protection and the individual's need for safety and a chance to recover and rebuild. The structures are isolated through their composition and in various states of completion. Often the skeleton or framework of the structures is laid bare, heightening the sense of vulnerability and transition.

 

 

Her new images, published by the studio and shown for the first time here, continue on a theme she began a couple of years ago about time and the way it seems to loop and repeat during the year. For Jones, seasonal smells, tastes and sounds continually bring to the fore an ever increasing bank of lived experiences and with each repeated season there is a reassuring sense of continuity into the future. 

 

Tom Hammick is a painter and printmaker living and working in London. His universe of images may be read as containing a sensibility to sanctuary within individual and family experiences. Drawn into the possibilities evident in these worlds, their depths also suggest a precarity in the idea of sanctuary. Perhaps, Hammick wonders, sanctuary is no longer possible in any measure to match the needs of the world. Indeed for Hammick the creative act itself represents a gesture of belief in the sanctuaries that we crave and need, "despite feeling that dystopia is here to stay".