Upstairs at The Art Shop, Cross Street

OPENING SATURDAY 31 AUGUST 2-4PM

paintings, works on paper & woven textiles

Royal Academy Schools trained artist, Catherine Baker uses the raw material of sketches and notes on her walks to give a rich, resourceful starting point for her acrylic and mixed media paintings. Carmarthenshire based artist, Ainsley Hillard combines the traditional skills of weaving with photography and sound, to create artworks and installations that are often particular to a location and the memories it holds.

Arts Council of Wales Collectorplan scheme available for the purchase of original art. More information via the link below.

 

CATHERINE BAKER – ‘I am passionate about the landscape around Britain. My work is firmly rooted in the landscape I experience from walking through it.  This could be through a city park or industrial estate, a coastal path, or the remoteness of a moor or plain. The paintings are the result of a distillation of the essential colours, marks and lines I encounter on these walks. Personal memories, associations and traces of the history of a place – geological or man made – are important for me. I’m looking for poetic rhythms, echoes: some kind of resonant statement. My process begins with sketches directly from the landscape, adding notes of colours, descriptions of light, shapes and mood. Later in the studio I work on a series of paintings, using elements from the sketches and memory of that time and place. I use mainly thin wash layers of acrylic colour with lines of paint, pencil or charcoal.’

Catherine studied in London at Kingston Polytechnic followed by a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Academy Schools. She has exhibited her work both in the UK and abroad, including the Burlington Gallery, Mall Galleries and the RA Summer Show in London, The Royal West of England Academy in Bristol and in Lithuania and the Czech Republic.

AINSLEY HILLARD – Ainsley is fascinated by the physical and metaphorical construction of cloth and its relation to body, memory and space.  She has created a series of jacquard weavings and hand-embroidery that directly reference the natural landscape and ancient woodlands of Carmarthenshire.  The weavings transfigure original photographic images which, by their nature, capture the essence of a moment in time. Through the weaving process, these images are then transformed into three-dimensional structures, merging the material nature of the threads with the two-dimensional photographic image. These very different ways of encountering the world meet in the surface texture of the woven panels, engaging our senses in an experience beyond just the visual.

Ainsley’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally. She was awarded First Prize in the Wales Contemporary 2023 juried exhibition and First Prize in the International Textile Exhibition, Belgium. Her work is included in the Contemporary Art Collection of the National Trust and the Cotsen Textile Traces Collection (George Washington University Museum, USA) to name a few.