Tracing Space

Tracing Space is a group exhibition by twelve artists whose relationship to place and often to certain locations is central to their practice. They include artists with a particular sensitivity to their environment, who gather and absorb the images, sounds, and stories of the places they observe and walk through again and again. Their experience of the locations they are connected to over time – across different seasons, in changing weather, and at different times of day – informs their painting, though often it will have a resonance beyond any specific site or starting point.

The title of the show references Georges Perec’s 1974 text ‘Species of Spaces’ / ‘Espèces d’espaces’ which, while Perec is writing predominantly about interiors, architecture, and urban space, offers an approach to thinking about our environment which can be applied to all spaces that we move through and within. Perec relates the acts of observing, describing, and writing as a means to pin something down, to fix it and give it permanence. We might also consider this the business of painting or drawing, whether descriptive or less apparently representational, and when Perec talks of words and signs, we might think of marks, lines, brushstrokes.

The title hints at mapping a place, whether physically through walking and observing, or metaphorically, through memory, history or myth. Themes of permanence and belonging on the one hand, and transience, flux and loss, on the other, are here. Present also is the idea of investigating place as palimpsest, an archaeological uncovering of layers of meaning - tracing what was there before, what remains, what changes over time. The locations in which the artists’ work is grounded might be real – including Scotland, North Yorkshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex, Essex, London, Somerset, Devon - or imagined places, syntheses of actual sites, memory, and history.

The artists are: Sarah Bold | Simon Carter | Gordon Dalton | Lloyd Durling | Salvatore Fiorello | Lee Johnson | Louisa Longstaff-Scales | Stuart Low | Calum McClure | Ben Risk | Kate Sherman | Cassie Vaughan.