Main Fair: Stand 17 on the ground floor/mezzanine we will be showing work by:
Fred Coppin
Alice Kettle
Katharine Le Hardy
Olivia Stanton
Candida Stevens Gallery presents the work of four living artists.
Alice Kettle (b.1961)
Poppy by Alice Kettle is a memorial piece made in honour of women refugees around the world and the exagerrated isolation of refuge. Since 2017 Kettle has been working with groups of refugees, with the making of her epic work Thread Bearing Witness for The Whitworth in 2018, consisting of three monumental pieces made with refugees from Syria, Iran, Pakistan and Uganda. The sudden termination of international travel in 2020 saw an end to these exchanges and a change occured in Kettle’s practice. The focus of her work shifted and for the first time in her career, her focus was a personal one. Suddenly alone, she started to make work in response to her immediate surroundings in Somerset. Having recently moved to the countryside she experienced a new awareness of her environment and the delicate balance between humanity and nature. The new body of work, entitled 'Thread Bound’ depicts the person negotiating their relationship with the environment, the work is concerned with addressing the importance of the reciprocal relationship of humanity with nature so that there is no dominance of humanity. The figure becomes blended with nature, a new kind of togetherness which was occuring for the artist personally.
Fred Coppin, b. 1989
Fred Coppin captures an eternal sense of optimism in his work through a distinctive combination of amplified colour and playful forms, in which he exaggerates the world into a permanently dream-like state that allows us, as viewers, to linger in a moment of utopian calm. Coppin’s paintings are tied together by an uplifting impulse to dissect, exaggerate and reassemble the world around us into its most hopeful state. Light and colour play a significant role in Coppin’s work. This stems from his interest in photography and, more deeply, the emotional and aesthetic power of sunlight. Light is indicative of the positivity Coppin tries to convey and the way light operates in straight lines draws back to his interest in geometric design. Coppin’s calming motifs and refinement of complex images into simple shape and colour, treads a careful balance between energy and quietness.
Katharine Le Hardy (b.1981)
Katharine has long been admired for her landscape painting. During the early months of 2020, with access to the physical world restricted, she started painting children at play, at a time when her children were home. Partially induced by memory and nostalgia this series triggered a new enquiry, an investigation into the space between the real, the past, the lost and the hopeful. In this latest series the landscape has returned. The figure has become almost fleeting, the human is suggested but is less and less emphatic. The scapes are vast and strong and emphasise the permanence of the land, the figure has become an outline, as if passing through is all that humanity will ever do amidst the wonder of nature and the majesty of the land. There was an optimistic playfulness to the 2020/21 works, their dreamlike quality emphasised by the use of a clean bright sugary palette. This remains in these new works. These paintings feel nostalgic and fantastical and yet strong and assertive in equal parts.
Olivia Stanton (b.1949) trained at Byam School of Art (now part of Central Saint Martins), London from 1973-77. As an abstract artist she uses shape and colour to express her experiences, in these recent paintings she talks about how she became preoccupied with the proximity of the shapes, ‘they would almost touch, but not quite’. This tantalising closeness was what she says she was feeling in 2020, the constant possibility that reconnection would resume. Whilst she says there was a peace to her experience of painting in isolation there was also a ponderous ‘not quite connecting’ quality which she expresses through the placement of her shapes, there is nearly always a fine line to be found separating each form from the other. Having lived for many years in the South of France, and now on the South Coast of England, there is an evident influence of both nature and architect in her work.
