Current & Future Exhibitions and Events
Confluence
a collaboration
Julia Brant & Rosemary Terry
Exhibition & Artists' Book
Friday 18th - Sunday 20th September
Open 11am - 5pm with pop-up cafe
Confluence is the result of a collaboration: Rosemary Terry’s woodcuts, selected from a previous project in 2022 have found a common purpose with some of Julia Brant’s haiku (short 3-line poems originating in Japan) written over 25 years. Both seek to capture a moment in nature in the changing seasons that gives insight into a wider universe. The images and the haiku are not meant to ‘match’, but to show how one person’s perception can be echoed by another’s to convey a shared mood or feeling from a different perspective. From this collaboration has come a limited-edition book of poems and images, together with an exhibition of the 28 printed pairings.
Julia Brant first encountered the arts of Japan as a gallery curator. This led to an immersive investigation of many of the iconic Japanese craft skills – swordsmithing, armour, lacquer, ceramics, and metalwork to name a few. Later, she encountered and became intrigued by haiku, the short 3 line poems intrinsic to Japan that captured the fleeting nature of life, death and above all, the many aspects of nature that the crafts of Japan portray so well. Being part of a group that met regularly to write and compare haiku, was instrumental in deepening her perception of the literary form. The haiku in this exhibition were originally written from a personal viewpoint, as a. personal record, particularly a visual record, of the world and nature.
Rosemary Terry studied sculpture at Norwich & Birmingham Schools of Art and taught at Wolverhampton School of Art for many years, to support her sculpture practice. For her, sculpture has always meant carving, first of all in stone and later in wood, often on quite a large scale. Lately though she has made a sideways move to creating rather small woodcuts. Unlike other kinds of relief printing there is potential to exploit the materiality of the surface - the woodgrain - expressively, which links it to the carving of wood. Woodcutting tools rather resemble miniature carving chisels and gouges, and the cutting process has parallels with carving, but ideas can be realised much more quickly. She’s now working between smaller-scale carving and woodcut printing to explore ideas in 2 and 3d from her studio at Eagle Works Studios Wolverhampton.