Kt

For some time my work has been concerned with the extremities of the  life cycle, the beginning and the end. There is much contemporary debate concerning when the ‘beginning’ actually is and long gone is the notion that we begin life at birth. My work is fed by wide research from observing  clinical procedures such as sonography sessions at the Harris Birthright Centre for Neonatal Medicine at Kings College Hospital, London. I engage with nature and geology, recently descending into the bowels of the Onllwyn Open Face Coal Mine in South Wales to collect samples. International museums showing collections, such as the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cluny in Paris and human simulacra in wax at  La Specola in Florence have been inspirational places.

The use of reclaimed garments has been a major element of the work produced over the last few years. These clothes are often picked up in charity shops, bid for on e-bay, given by friends and family or gifted to me.

Some garments have a known provenance, such as the children’s dresses from the orphanage in Cincinnati.  What most of these garments have experienced is a sort of collective time lapse, having been often packed up, discarded and shut away until a time when they are rediscovered, reborn, re-invented. 

Clothes are powerful unspoken signifiers of character, of era, financial status, gender,  place and much more. These codes are easily read by those who live within or are initiated into these particular cultural parameters. Of course the clothes and the signifiers mutate and are expressed and viewed with extreme difference around the world.

Chiara Grifantini is an artist specialising in high-quality Hand-Painted Textiles. She creates unique pieces such as cushions, curtains, wall hangings, and tablecloths using natural materials. Her Hand Painted textiles are home decor statement pieces.

Oil paint on raw canvas

Semester 1 year 3

Oil paint on wooden boards

Semester 1 year 3

Acrylic on canvas board

Semester 1 year 3

Oil paint on stretched canvas

Semester 1 year 3

Oil paint and fabric on canvas board

Semester 1 year 3

The Veiled Virgin, a 19th-century work by Italian sculptor Giovanni Strazza, demonstrates the extreme of this ambition, as one of the most exquisite illustrations of marble made ethereal.

Hewn from a block of Carrara marble and housed since 1862 in the Presentation Convent in Newfoundland, Canada, the sculpture is a bust of the Virgin Mary, with her gaze downcast as if in prayer or sorrow and her features shrouded by the thinnest and most translucent veil.

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 - May 7, 1840) was a landscape painter of the nineteenth-century German Romantic movement, of which he is now considered the most important painter. A painter and draughtsman, Friedrich is best known for his later allegorical landscapes, which feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees, and Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey the spiritual experiences of life.

Woman at the window 1822, oil

Wanderer above the sea of fog, 1818, oil

Centred in France and emerging as a reaction to the Baroque grandeur of King Louis XIV's royal court at the Palace of Versailles, the Rococo movement or style of French painting was associated particularly with Madame Pompadour, the mistress of the new King Louis XV, and the Parisian homes of the French aristocracy. It is a whimsical and elaborately decorative style of art, whose name derives from the French word 'rocaille' meaning, rock-work after the forms of sea shells.

In the world of Rococo, all art forms, including fine art painting, architecture, sculpture, interior design, furniture, fabrics, porcelain and other "objets d'art" are subsumed within an ideal of elegant prettiness

Rococo art is exemplified in works by famous painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) especially his 'fete galante' outdoor courtship parties; Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) with his pictures of love and seduction; Francois Boucher (1703-70) with his lavish paintings of opulent self-indulgence; the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) known for his fantastically decorative Wurzburg Residence Frescoes (1750-3); and the sculpture of Claude Michel Clodion (1738-1814), sculptor of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, best known for his Terracotta sculptures of nymphs and satyrs. In Britain, Rococo painting achieved its zenith in the female portraits of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Rococo was eventually replaced by Neoclassical Art, which was the signature visual style of Napoleon in France and of the American revolution

Idun is the goddess of youth – her name means “giver of eternal youth”. The other gods get golden apples from her. She stores them in a basket and they keep the gods young until the end of the world.

Idun is the daughter of the dwarf Ivald and she is married to Bragi. Together they are perhaps the least magical of the gods. The connection with the life-giving fruit makes her a goddess of the erotic, sexuality and offspring and she is also known as the “maiden of the gods”.

Idunn is a significant deity in Norse mythology. She is known as the goddess of youth, fertility, and the guardian of the golden apples of immortality.

The myth of Idunn and her apples emphasizes the importance of eternal youth and the fear of aging in Norse mythology. Her role as the guardian of the apples symbolizes the cyclical nature of life and the eternal rejuvenation that the gods enjoy through her magic.

Ken Currie is renowned for his unsettling portrayal of the human figure. The artist's rich, luminous paintings depict mysterious rites, rituals, and quasi-medical practices, offering a meditation on violence in its many guises.

Currie studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1978-1983 and rose to attention within a generation of painters known as the "New Glasgow Boys" in the 1980s. In 1987, Currie completed a powerful series of large scale History paintings for the People’s Palace in Glasgow, commemorating the massacre of the Calton Weavers. Through the 90's deeply affected by humanitarian events in Eastern Europe Currie's works evolved, his focus shifting to confront ideas of mortality and corruption, both physical and moral. Over the last 10 years Currie's work has addressed the horrors of the contemporary world, without shying away from their brutality or grotesque nature.

Ken Currie, Whitened Hands, 2017, Oil on panel, (c) Ken Currie, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery London and New York

Ken Currie, Swaddled infant III, 2006, Oil on Canvas.