This exhibition draws together two artists whose sensitive and gentle love of life is clearly apparent in their works. Jane's hands caress the clay until the human form emerges as an empathetic portrait which invites you to stay still and gently touch. Lara uses a similar gentle approach to her garden series, applying line and paint with a delicate spidery hand and a tender admonition to the viewer.
A testimony to the long relationship between the sculptor and painter, their lives and children, this exhibition unites and highlights the high regard they hold for each other.
Artist information;
Lara Faroqhi - Artist Website
Selected works from current series, World Interior.
"My current focus is on drawing, which I supplement with prin- ting techniques. Part of my work includes hand-drawn and animated films. I rely on repetitions, accidents, and overlap- ping, so that structures become interwoven, disrupted and multi-layered.
In this current series World Interior, I engage with the care, development and the cultivation of gardens. In it, we reflect upon our relationship to nature. In the drawings, I construct, as it were, a subjective garden on paper. Geometrical outlines of a landscaped garden counterbalance its boisterous growth. Any artistic image is a construction and represents the creati- ve process. So the image of a plant is drawn out of lines and marks, whereby in the silk screen printing, the same illusion is created with many dots. A line drawn on paper and enlarged by the computer will become a pixelated grid of tiles."
Numerous works are in private collections in Germany, Great Britain, USA and New Zealand, including Kupferstichkabinett Berlin (Department of Prints and Drawings), RBB Art Collec- tion, Investitionsbank, Lockbund Collection, Cleveland Clinic Art Collection, Kinemathek Arsenal, Collection Künstlerhaus Bethanien.
Jane Hamilton - Artist Website
Selected works from private and public commissions spanning 30 years of sculpting.
Jane Hamilton was born in Suffolk, England. She spent the first six years of her life in West Africa, a vivid childhood experience that has had a profound and lasting effect on her work.
" I love the elegance, the sensuality and dignity that, for me, are such an integral part of native African culture. I have always been drawn to the 'feet in the dust' feel of people, the essential strength or vulnerability that exists in all of us when everything else is stripped away. I like sculptures to be uplifting, to have a sensual feel and beauty that can touch the inner emotions that we all have, but often tend to ignore"
Dance is another medium that Jane uses to express beauty, fragility, strength and emotion through forms and figures that we can all relate to.
" For me, dance is probably the ultimate form of expression, the interpretation of emotion through music and movement. I love that contradiction between seeming fragility of dancers and the great physical strength that you know underlies it. That was something that Degas understood very well"
Her formal training began at Falmouth School of Art, then on to the City and Guilds School of Art in London. At a later period she studied part time at the Sir John Cass School, London.
Her work can be seen at her studio in Oxfordshire. She is a member of The Society of Portrait Sculptors and currently lives and works in Oxfordshire, together with her husband, Simon Allison, who is also an artist and together they established and run their fine art bronze casting business; Lockbund Sculpture Foundry