OFF - GRID
The river Cherwell flows from a trickle at Hellidon to a surge at Oxford. Winter finds it cutting through deep snow, rising to flooded heights. No landmarks are to be found, no waymarkers to be navigated as the known landscape is consumed, overlaid with a new world. In April, mess and muck is left behind, clinging to grasses and tree trunks, and then the green days come, with a dry heat only to be tempered by a slide down muddy banks into a swirl of green and brown, reeds and pebbles and dipping branches.
Juliet Bankes and Isabel Wilkinson explore the other worlds accessed through the portal of the River Cherwell. The worlds of pagan kings, eyes and camera lenses, cognitive maps, the May Queen, industrial relics and river gods all opened up by the freedom of walking, sliding and thrashing along the banks through changing seasons.
In creating this show the artists sift through their memories and lived experience of this river and its tributaries that flow past both their houses and the gallery itself. Using print methods and sculptural techniques such as collograph, digital, monoprint, carborundum and cast concrete the artist have created a new constructed landscape where all permutations of the river exist simultaneously.
Counter to may peoples perceptions of printmaking, the production of editions in multiples, Bankes and Wilkinson present here a series of unique works.