Author: Bob Chaundy

Former BBC News journalist now writing and podcasting for Considering Art.

Corey Whyte – Enter the Golden Quarter

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that my local garden centre was already stocking up for Christmas. Watching Santa’s grotto ready to be assembled in mid-September shouldn’t surprise me as it happens every year at this time, but somehow it did. Retailers term the run-up to Christmas and other holidays as The Golden Quarter. Sculptor Corey Whyte has appropriated the title for his first solo exhibition which looks at the way society operates within a culture of commodification and how society itself has become commodified.

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Sara Shamma – Modern Slavery

When Syrian artist Sara Shamma heard eyewitness reports of Yazidi women and girls being paraded on a platform by their Isis kidnappers in a modern slave market on the Iraqi/Syrian border before hundreds of glowering men, and then sold to the highest bidder, she was naturally shocked. Their prices, she discovered, were even advertised on the internet – the youngest being the most expensive.

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Nicole Wassall – Precious Mettle

For her new exhibition entitled Precious Mettle at London’s Fiumano Clase Gallery, British artist Nicole Wassall has created a series of works that serve both as aesthetic pieces in their own right and as metaphors for underlying themes prevalent in our society today. Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Wassall has managed to pull off the trick of using highly complex processes to create artworks that appear simple yet are anything but simplistic.

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Frost, Heron, Lanyon Scott: Four Giants of British Modernism

Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and William Scott were groundbreaking British post-war artists who were inspired by the Cornish landscape. These major figures are featured in a new exhibition at Beaux Arts London entitled Giants of British Modernism. The four, together with many others such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach, were pioneers of British abstract art and were associated with the St Ives School. 

The fishing village of St Ives attracted artists for its spectacular scenery and the clarity of its light. Patricia Singh, co-director of Beaux Arts, ran the Will’s Lane Gallery in St Ives in the 1970s and knew three of the four artists well. Peter Lanyon had died in a glider crash in 1964. The exhibition features 5-6 works from each painter. In the following interview she was able to give me a personal insight into the artists’ works and the creativity behind them.

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Enter Through the Headset 4 – various artists

Donning the Virtual Reality headset for the first exhibit in Gazelli Art House’s latest edition of its annual showcase of artists working in VR, I found myself being guided around a cityscape. Everything about the scene was geometric – the grid street pattern, the windows on the skyscrapers and the universal shape of the buildings themselves that hemmed one in, somewhat oppressively so.

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Margaret Curtis – Surface

“I like the clay to speak for itself”, says ceramicist Margaret Curtis, speaking to me at the launch of her new exhibition, Surface, at the Contemporary Ceramics Centre in London. Her pieces, whether they be large vases and cylinders or small bottles and cups, have one thing in common – their imperfection. “I make them in the round, sort of precise, then I start pushing them and poking them and distorting them and let the movement of the clay give a lot of feeling.”

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