Catherine Roche and David Fitzjohn

Oriel Fach

Wedge Crimson

by Natalia Dias, Josh Redman, and Lloyd Davies, a group of recent graduates from UWIC

 

Stairs

Photographs by students on the
BA photography course at
West Wales School of Art, Carmarthen

Main Gallery

Uncertain Journeys

5 September to 3 October

 

Opening on Friday 4 September at 7.30pm.

 

This is an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the above two artists.  In this body of work, both artists engage with the notion of the journey as a means to explore individual interests and ideas. While their work is driven by differing themes, there is an underlying thread present throughout, that of time and human consequence. While Roche journeys between past and present within her work through memory and reflection, Fitzjohn ponders the environmental future and its implications in his paintings; both are journeys of uncertainty.

The journeys in David Fitzjohn’s paintings are ones of potential transformation and relate to impending climate change. In his work, natural forms and the landscape, especially wilderness and woodland, are used as metaphors for both a lost ideal (Elysium) and a hoped-for future. Animals migrate in search of an environment that has been destroyed; environments themselves mutate.  Recently, the simple act of attempting to paint rain, with its implied impossibilities, has become a metaphor for the overwhelming power of nature and its indifference to human endeavour, highlighting our uncertain future.  Simultaneously, the paintings also operate on a purely formal level.  They are about the language of colour and its powerful, manipulative and seductive nature.

For Catherine Roche, the notion of a journey provides a route through history where past and present overlap and connect. Temporal space is navigated through landscape and objects. Physical journeys, made by walking a repeated route, provide a source to record and contemplate a changing experience and passing time. Through repeated drawing, she revisits these journeys, the process of making representing for her the ephemeral nature of memory and experience – affirming, removing, retrieving; exposing a network of traces. These pieces are a form of mapping, negotiating and editing, inscribing the essential. In the Object Drawing series, landscape and objects merge as decorative motifs engulf the picture space. An ongoing interest in objects as potential conduits for memory and imagination and as symbols of continuum motivates this work. While an object remains static, it journeys through time, a container for a physically tangible 'history', its resonance adapting to its user. These drawings are shards and fragments of temporal and uncertain journeys.   

 

Cath Roche Rome: Borghese Garden V | David Fitzjohn The Reindeer Pass

 

The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10.00am to 5.00pm.