Sunlight & Water, 2023 by Jan Gaska

Highlights: 30 September - 6 October, 2024

New Art Highlights includes: Helen Sargeant, Jenny Mellings, Gill Newton and Jan Gaska

Ruin, Madron Moor, Cornwall, 2023

Helen Sargeant

I am interested in the metaphor of the house as body and container.

When my mum was a child she lived in close proximity to the Mên-an-Tol, a small formation of standing stones on Madron Moor. My grandmother told her never to go and play in an abandoned farm house that is located near to this site. She remembers it well and the old furniture that once it contained. The house in the photograph is the same abandoned house my mother was told not to play in.

I am wearing a blue dress and roleplaying a Madonna character based on Ithell Colquhoun's painting Attributes of the Moon and Piero Della Francesca's Madonna Del Parto.

Ithell Colqhoun writes about this house in her book The Living Stones she states:

“Nun-Careg also attaches to the ruined cottage that weathers in the corner of the field, why it remained in a state of dilapidation even at the height of the housing shortage I have often wondered. It could well have been repaired and if necessary altered but does the circle radiate so intense a force as to preclude human habitation at close quarters ? I remember noticing a similar house abandoned near the furzy down which hides the Mên-an-Tol another focal point for legend. ”

Pg 61-61, Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones, Cornwall, First Published 1957

Part of a series of images produced as part or the Mother, Magic and The Mên-an-Tol residency April-October 2023 in Cornwall. The residency explored my materilinal heritage and identity in relation to place and was informed by the work of Monica Sjoo, Ithell Colquhoun and Barbara Hepworth and Mary Beth Edelson.

Ghost Flowers, 2024

Jenny Mellings

On the archaeological site that I've been visiting regularly as an observer, many wildflowers have emerged in spring that are not often seen in fields and hedgerows . In this painting I've made prints with some of these using chalk on a landscape background of earth ochres.

74 X 94 X 2 cm