STORIES & NEWS

A LOOK TOWARDS BRIGHTER THINGS. Spring is found in the warmth of the sun, the heads of snowdrops dotting banks and the rich assembly of wild garlic. Its colours and sounds mark the change of seasons and offer a simple sense of reassurance and joy during these uncertain times. Lina Peterson’s jewellery encapsulates the budding of spring. Each piece a slice of lasting sunshine. Soft pastel shades are painted onto simple wooden petal-like shapes and blocks reminiscent of flowers in bloom. Lina absorbs the contrasting patterns and colours found in individual petals; for instance tulips hold the subtle bleed of pink into white and meet contrasting blocks of yellow against red. Lina wants “to capture something of the softness of these flowers, but also the exuberance, the too muchness, the joyousness.” The abstract form of a petal is found repeatedly in Lina’s work forming a key component. Within this form Lina leaves “saw marks and imperfections on the wood, allowing colour and texture to take centre stage.” The use of colour is central to Lina’s work. Her collections are titled; ‘Testing Colour’ and ‘Carved in Colour’. Each colour combination creates a different emotion. Lina has a painterly application of colour onto wood. She layers thick resins and opaque matte surfaces to form blocks of solid, bold colours which meet the tones of translucent shimmering watercolours. In all, these painted surfaces contrast with the rawness of the wood. Lina studies “how colour and material can come together to create a visual dialogue about process, form, and surface.” She investigates how creative processes can be made visible. The carved blocks have a childlike sense of joy and naivety - building blocks of colour that capture the pleasure of making. Ideas are generated directly from discoveries made during the making process. Lina sets up working strategies for herself that “include an element of chance as this makes things exciting and unpredictable.” She therefore, might stumble upon, the surface of a cut material, a new colour or how something looked before it was completed, to be explored further. There is a constant dialogue between one piece of work and the next. For the ‘Carved in Colour’ collection, wood is carved, painted and then carved again to reveal the unpainted wood below. The patterns become a mapping of the making process. A sense of rhythm and movement is created across the surface of each piece. Lina uses carving to make as she sees it as a tool that; “creates a tension between surface and material and between colour and the wood itself.” Lina has expanded her collection to include wall based work which is an exploration into the application of colour onto wooden panels and the process of assembly. Some panels of wood are carved and painted. Other panels are painted exploring colour application techniques such as the bleeding found in watercolours, mixing paints and resin that are then cut up and assembled. She is also working on pieces that are constructed from a collection of wooden elements with a rough sawn surface, painted in block colours and then assembled. These are interpretations of drawings that in turn come from her embroidered work. The wall based work draws on her “aesthetic language and plays with materiality and colour.” The new larger canvas seems to allow bolder mark making and brush work. There is a deeper sense of pattern and movement created with the paint. It’s fantastic to see Lina’s work on a larger scale. New compositions are created with wooden panels and blocks collaged together to form a landscape of pattern and colour. Lina has a fifteen year long working relationship with wood she holds knowledge over the processes she uses, but she always aims to surprise herself when making; “to generate results that feel intuitive and fresh.” We asked Lina how she is continuing her practice during these difficult times. She has been able to set up her studio at home; “I pre-cut some wood before lockdown so am currently doing some painting and sketching and drawing. I’m also able to do textile work at the moment. Other creative projects are taking place while looking after my daughter - such as a theatre and a robot!” As projects have been put on pause for many of us and the soundtrack to our lives muted, the opportunity to plan new projects arises. This Autumn we hope to showcase a large collection of Lina Peterson’s jewellery alongside her new range of wall pieces. We look forward to brighter times with our Lina Peterson jewellery showcase. Purchase Jewellery by Lina Peterson.

FLOW GALLERY, SITUATED IN THE HEART OF NOTTING HILL, IS A PEACEFUL SANCTUARY FOR HAND CRAFTED OBJECTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD. As the streets quieten and the world spends more time in the home, we have been looking into the lives of our collectors, seeing how stillness has been created through their collections and curation of handmade objects. Yvonna Demczynska, founder of Flow, lives surrounded by a remarkable gathering of art and craft. In her gallery home, there is an eclectic mix of materials and objects that meet harmoniously with the soft walls and light streaming in through tall windows. Woven brushes from around the world including Poland, Japan and Scandinavia are carefully hung and arranged in an open cabinet. While ceramic vessels, plates and jugs, often used, are placed together on a beautifully simple floating shelf. In a quiet nook under the stairs, stillness can be felt in a gathering of a large textured stoneware vessel byEva Brandt and the hand carved, deep wooden bowls byHans Henning Pedersen , both from the Island of Bornholm, Denmark. Artists alike find tranquillity in the making of objects which can be displayed as landscapes of still life.Malcolm Martin and Gaynor Dowling , collaborative artists working in wood, carve vessel-like-sculptures that draw light and movement across their surfaces. Their work pushes the boundary between a two-dimensional textured surface and the volume of a three-dimensional form. The pieces byMartin and Dowling share a central role of the hand of the tool. As their still life sculptures move into the collectors’ home they take their audience back to the maker’s hand, the studio in which it was formed and the imagination from which it was conceived. This is perhaps the most generous offering that an artist and their work brings to us. They breathe calm into our homes, creating still moments as they catch the casting sun and shadows throughout the day. PHOTOGRAPHY BYBETH EVANS

Cécile Daladier’s vases, which she calls Pique-Fleurs, are a departure from standard vases for big bunches of flowers. She prefers to give individual flowers more attention. Her previous career as a musician perhaps helps to give the arrangements some rhythm. A wonderful article inSpace & Process recently described her practice in her studio in Provence more fully, with beautiful photography byLinsey Rendell .

THIS YEAR KATIE SPRAGG & KAORI TATEBAYASHI WERE SELECTED FOR OUR RESIDENCY IN COLLABORATION WITH SOMERSET ART WORKS. AN EXHIBITION OF THE WORKS RESULTING FROM THE TWO RESIDENCIES WILL OPEN ATFORDE ABBEY 22 SEPT - 31 OCT 2017 Flow Gallery in collaboration with Somerset Art Works and with the support of The Arts Council grants arranged two residencies of one week for artists who work in urban environments yet whose work is deeply influenced by gardens and meadows.Forde Abbey owners very kindly provided a perfect environment with its magnificent gardens and a grand house ( originally a Cistercian Abbey) full of history. It was to be a retreat from city life, time out to experiment and draw and write. Here's Katie Spragg's wonderfully descriptive account of her recent residency at Forde Abbey House and Gardens: In May earlier this year, myself and Kaori Tatebayashi spent a week at Forde Abbey, a still family-owned grand house, gardens and surrounding land on the Somerset/Dorset border. We arrived from London on a glorious May evening and immediately set out to explore the gardens. It was certainly very picturesque with the golden light dappling across the great lawn and dazzling off of the three ponds dotted across the gardens. The gardens at Forde Abbey are a great mix of curated, planned landscaping and areas left to be 'wild'. The meadow grass, a particular favourite of mine, as those who know my work will know, was in full flower with purple clovers and yellow buttercups. Circling the great pond at the top of the garden we found an overhanging tree with ferns growing from it, and the beech house, a highlight of our brief planning-visit a few months earlier, then a mass of twisting curling branches was now a leafy outlook across the lake. In these rainy few days we occupied ourselves with sketching and painting, drawing outside when it wasn't wet, taking hundreds of photographs, visiting the local Harvey Stone quarry where I filled the back of Kaori's Mini with lumps of stone from their waste pile, catching newts with jam jars and a bright torch late at night, sleeping in our four poster beds in the abbey, eating hearty lunches in the cafe and going on a tour of the family's goat farm, pick-your-own strawberry farm, private pond and learning some of the details about farming. It felt like a completely different world to what I know from my suburban upbringing and now living in London. For our final two days the weather improved. I spent a day running a workshop for a group of local school children; we toured the gardens - painting with sticks and dandelions and using the 10 foot fountain to create a 'drawing' before the children made an amazing installation from clay, modelling two worlds that merged in the middle - one a landscaped garden, the other a space where nature had taken over. On the last day, myself and Kaori completed our residency by driving to the families private pond where I took my first outdoor dip of the year, it wasn't as cold as I'd (feared and) expected! I became really interested in the confluence and contrast between the curated nature of the Forde Abbey gardens; the lumpy topiary yew trees, mowed lawns and the shapely ponds alongside the untamed areas free to grow bracken, bramble and dock leaves and areas of meadow grass. Also the planted rock garden and then the welsh poppies, maidenhead ferns, succulents and clovers that grow from the stone of their own accord. It was this that has inspired five new works that I have created for our exhibition in the abbey in September, as well as being inspired by the materials of the abbey itself - I have worked with stone and coloured glass for the first time."