Sow:Sew
Jeanette Appleton
Saturday 7th June -Saturday 2nd August 2008
Preview: Friday 6th June 6.00-8.00pm
Sow:Sew is a major solo exhibition of new work by Jeanette Appleton developed during an extended residency at the University of Huddersfield and informed by the artists research at the John Innes Science Centre, Norwich. In Sow:Sew, Appleton explores the boundaries between hand and mass production through a series of vibrant, large scale felt artworks. These works, along with a series of smaller scale exhibits in paper and felt, examine the relationship of cloth to land, through the sowing of seed by hand and machine, being likened by Appleton to marks and making in stitch and felt. Sow:Sew is an Arts Council funded exhibition.
Image credit: Adaptive Landscape Series, II
Photographer credit:Dewi Tannatt Lloyd
Colour Room
Figure 8
Friday 11th April - Saturday 31st May 2008
Preview: Thursday 10th April 6.00 - 8.00pm
Photo Credit: The Housatonic at Stockbridge, Frank Briffa
Drawn together by a passionate belief in paint as an expressive contemporary medium, North East painters Harry Bell, Ian Bennett, Frank Briffa and Maureen Stephenson joined forces in 2004 to show together as Figure8.
Colour Room, focuses on the artist’s colouristic approach to painting. The artists’ work is stylistically varied, ranging from realist, through abstraction to the wholly abstract. The stimuli that trigger the making of these paintings spring from diverse impulses and interests. The paintings, however, do exhibit two unifying characteristics – a strong interest in colour, and strong composition.
Surface Tension
Jointworks
Saturday 16th February – Saturday 5th April
Preview: Friday 15th February 6.00pm-8.00pm
Gallery Talk: Wednesday 20th February 12.00noon-1.00pm
Through the use of film and photography Surface Tension explores the physicality of dance and dancers, looking under the surface to see what is often hidden and altering our perception of space and gravity. The installation considers the body in its simplest and most complex form, stripping away external factors and looking at what we are all made of, skin, bone, muscles and nerves. Jointworks bring together this evocative and striking collection of work for the first time.
Josef Albers
Screen Prints
From the Formulation: Articulation portfolio, Josef Albers, 1972
© The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and DACS, London 2008
Saturday 12 January – Saturday 9 February 2008
Preview: Friday 11 January 6-8pm – All welcome
As an artist and teacher, Josef Albers (1888-1976) exerted an enormous influence on the history of modern art in Europe and America. This National Touring Exhibition from The Hayward presents an overview of Albers’s career, from his early geometrical abstractions at the Bauhaus to his famous experiments with colour in the Homages to the Square series.
This exhibition of silk-screen prints has been selected from a portfolio called Formulation: Articulation, designed and produced under Albers’s direction in 1972. It includes works from all the major series of his life: the Homages (1950-75), Graphic Tectonics (1941-42), Structural Constellations (1949-76) and Variants (1947-55).
Hayward Gallery Touring from the South Bank Centre, London on behalf of the Arts Council, England
Enox
Carl von Weiler
Ox Drawing, Carl von Weiler, 2007
Saturday 24 November 2007 – Tuesday 8 January 2008
Preview: Friday 23 November, 6-8pm – All welcome
Gallery Talk: Friday 7 December, 12noon-1pm – Free
Working across many different disciplines within the Arts, the Dutch born artist Carl von Weiler will bring to the gallery installations of drawings and sculpture.
Von Weiler is currently completing phase one of an outdoor public artwork for Skerningham Woods, Barmpton, Darlington. The installations in the gallery will reflect this public commission, and pay homage to an extraordinary story that originates from the Skerne River area near Ketton Hall, namely that of the Durham Ox (circa 1801).
Myles meehan gallery opening times: 10am – 8pm Monday to Saturday
Auto-Anomalies
Jonathan Marshall
Friday 21 September – Saturday 10 November 2007
Auto- Anomalies is an exciting exhibition featuring charcoal drawings, oil paintings and sculpture based on the figure and the face. Marshall explores his own personal ideas of human existence to create work that is challenging and beautiful in its sensitivity.
The exhibition brings together for the first time this collection of work produced over a five-year period marking an important milestone in the artist’s career.
Reclamation
Lewis Robinson
Friday 27 July – Saturday 15 September 2007
This innovative exhibition features drawings and sculpture, which deals with mental and psychological space. Robinson’s methodology is one of considered improvisation with found and made forms. What is unearthed is an uneasy pensiveness and melancholy.
The works are an exploration of a personal journey with a desire to make sense of complex and sometimes difficult feelings, moving from intense anxiety to calm resignation and contemplation.
His drawings similarly present ‘mental scaffolds’ onto which ideas are hung. Some are sparse open appraisals of travelled space; some are claustrophobic in nature with a multi-layered spatial enquiry.
Variation
Darlington Borough Collection
Saturday 2nd June – Saturday 21st July 2007
This exciting exhibition reflects the range of artworks in the Darlington Borough Art Collection. The work spans over 150 years and has a breadth of theme and subject matter, including landscapes, portraits, local scenes, seascapes and animals. These artworks are created using different styles and media, featuring oil paintings, etchings, tapestry, watercolours and drawing.
Variation shows work from both locally and nationally renowned artists including Graham Sutherland, John W Carmichael, Tom McGuiness and John Dobbin. The viewer is presented with a unique opportunity to interpret each piece individually, and in the broader context of the collection.
Non-conforming Areas
Laurence Ward
Thursday 5 April – Saturday 26 May 2007
This thought-provoking exhibition uses photography to investigate and document urban space, recording the way in which our environment evolves and decays.
Ward focuses on areas where contrast and transition occur, poignant traces of past activity are evident or where mess and incompatibilities remain. He draws attention to areas that may normally be considered insignificant, for example wastelands or piles of building materials encouraging a curious, investigative relationship with our environment.
Perceptions of Landscapes
Peter Hicks / Neil Hodgson / Chris Percy
Friday 19 January – Saturday 17 May 2007
This collaboration between acclaimed landscape painter Peter Hicks, photographer Neil Hodgson and poet Chris Percy takes its inspiration from the sweeping landscapes of the North Yorkshire Moors and coastline.
Their work celebrates the natural world in all its glory but on different scales; Peter's canvases covering square miles, Neil's photography, square inches.
Surface Tension
Hannah Finlator / Helen Donley / Elizabeth Talbot
Friday 17 November 2006 – Saturday 6 January 2007
An exhibition by three North East artists whose work focuses on contemporary representational oil painting. There are historical and psychological references in the subject and techniques of these paintings that have a strong connection and resonance.
Finlator employs the tradition of panel painting in the minute detail prevalent in early painting. Her figures have a seriousness and strength of character that is wholly opposite to Donley’s ghost like images. Talbot’s artwork seems to fit into the romantic ideal of 18th century landscape painting but on closer inspection there is an intensity of emotion that sits under the surface in a state of heightened tension.
Homescapes
Lindsay Duncanson
Friday 22 September – Saturday 4 November 2006
Lens based artist Lindsay Duncanson will be developing a body of work that first emerged through a commission with curator Wendy Scott in 2002. Lindsay’s work explores the notions that we use to frame ourselves within our lives and within landscapes.
She uses illusions in geometry that the mind creates to cushion us against the immensity of nature and the world, exposing the vulnerability that these constructs protect us from. In the exhibition representations of these structures and shapes signifying our connection of the home.
Census of Marine Life
Ørnulf Opdahl
Friday 28 July – Saturday 9 September 2006
In June 2004 Ørnulf Opdahl joined the Norwegian research ship G.O. Sars and set sail with scientists from 16 nations on a two month expedition to study the animal life inhabiting the mid-Altantic Ridge, a sub -marine mountain range several thousand metres deep, between Iceland and the Azores.
This exhibition of watercolours is Opdahl's response to the trip above and below the ocean. A touring exhibition from the University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Falling Down
Friday 9 June – Saturday 15 July 2006
Video installation artist Anton Hecht worked with a poet and choreographer on a new multimedia piece for the gallery. It was filmed in and around Darlington and included groups of local residents forming words from a specially commissioned poem.
The final work will be a large projection with accompanying computer prints.
Addressee Gone Away
Friday 7 April – Saturday 20 May 2006
Rednile projects Ltd worked with North East emerging artists to create an exhibition researching the concept of "inhabiting" the gallery over a period of time, changing the space and leaving behind evidence of their process and human presence.
Sarah Warden will be working with co-founders of rednile, Michael Branthwaite, Janine Goldsworthy and Suzanne Hutton – www.rednile.org
Bill Peronneau
20 January – 4 March 2006
Bill Peronneau, an American photographer, now lives and works in Northumberland. He has work in collections internationally. This exhibition includes his fascinating Muhammad Ali series, where Peronneau has captured the young boxer in his prime. These are intimate and sensitive images and firmly establish Peronneau as a gifted artist. Also included are beautiful stills of landscapes and cityscapes.
Tectonics
Kevin Laycock
18 November 2005 – 7 January 2006
Kevin Laycock is both an artist and musician. His recent body of work explores the parallels between structural abstraction in painting and musical theory in relation to colour and form.
The creation of his intensely considered paintings is governed by systems similar to those followed by composers. Laycock responds to Arthur Bliss' (1891 -1975) renowned work Colour Symphony.
Kevin's recent paintings seek to examine the musical associations of colour. He is returning the musical score to the colour that inspired it, exploring the related qualities of music and paint and finding a painted equivalent for the musical structures and sounds that are discovered.
Katherine Gili, Charlotte Mayer, Victoria Rance, Almuth Tebbenhoff and Sheila Vollmer
23 September - 5 November 2005
New commissioned work by five international sculptors that hold a shared passion for working with steel. These artists are not a group but there is a commonality and connection in their work. This is a unique opportunity for the north-east to see sculpture of this calibre and the first time that these artists have exhibited in the region. The exhibition is kindly supported by The Corus Group and Arts and Business.
Mythscapes
Alice Kettle
29 July – 10 September 2005
Mythscapes, the outstanding textiles exhibition by Alice Kettle is highly evocative, covering the extensive themes from our very existence. Alice explores suffering, hope and renewal and extensively references mythology. Her intricate delicate threads create the most powerfully reminiscent pieces; they are building blocks, skilfully referencing forms and composition from contemporary art whilst remaining attentive to medieval painting.