WEALD CONTEMPORARY Presents: Helen Baines & Mirja Oksanen//EMBERS
Location: 35 North Rd, Brighton and Hove, Brighton BN1 1YB
Deeply rooted in natural world, Embers explores themes of transcendence and emotional geography. Helen Baines and Mirja Oksanen entwine narratives of history and memory seeking to articulate the passage of time through light and shadow, breathing life into stillness and mystery to the familiar.
Helen Baines
About the exhibition work:
The paintings I am showing at Weald Contemporary were made in response to walking through two distinct landscapes; the rolling countryside and woodlands of the Surrey Hills AONB where I live, and the rugged and majestic mountains of Snowdonia where I spent two weeks on an artist’s residency. There are recurring elements that thread through all of the work, the animate natural forms, the humble buildings that hold traces of human activity and always a preoccupation with the imperceptible notion of place. Walking and drawing directly from nature are pivotal in knowing a landscape more intimately, and these paintings are a result of this process, emerging over time, almost growing themselves into being from my preliminary drawings.
About Helen Baines:
The natural world in all its complexity is at the heart of my practice. It is an intimacy with the landscape and a sense of embeddedness that I am seeking to locate in my work. I’m particularly interested in the sense of place, how stories imbue landscape with meaning and significance, notions of transcendence; where we end and nature begins, and our own emotional geography. Meditating on our place within the more-than-human world, I explore narratives from history, ecology and folklore and shape them with my own embodied experience of nature.
Mirja Oksanen
About the exhibition work:
What connects the paintings in ‘Embers’ that I have used the filter of photography to see more clearly what interests me about each object. When planning the paintings, I take many photographs throughout the day. As the day passes, the flowers and objects in familiar domestic settings of window sills and tabletops are constantly transformed by the changing light. The outside world is present as a source of light.
About Mirja Oksanen:
Mirja Oksanen makes still life paintings which combine objects and flowers in domestic settings. In her work, she is looking to find the moments when the everyday becomes extraordinary; when objects and plants are illuminated and their details are revealed. She paints still life images that combine flowers, plants and objects connected through colour and shapes. Many of the objects are personal and reminiscent of people and events; others are ones she has made. Reflections and shadows further describe both objects and the space they inhabit.
35 North Contemporary Fine Art
35 North Road, Brighton, BN1 1YB
