‘Made In Clay’

28 May -  7 June 2010

Celebrating the culmination of a years ceramic course by 17 adult NFCE graduates from Todmorden Community College this dynamic exhibition is a testament to their shared creative ideas and the development and acquisition of a wide variety techniques in this most versatile medium. The exhibition will be opened by renowned sculptural ceramicist Jim Robison.

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‘Summer Exhibition’

14 July - 14 September 2010

A changing varied exhibition of gallery and invited artists including:  Billy Adams - ceramics, Martin Andrews - glass, Brendan Stuart Burns - painting, Steve Capper painting,  Rosemary Holcroft- assemblage, Mike Holcroft - drawing & painting, Pat Johnson- metal, Daniel Kavanagh - sculptural ceramics, Sara Lloyd-Morris - jewellery, Bianca Padidar - jewellery and Ian Taylor - sculpture & assemblage.

Featuring the fine art ceramics and vessel forms of Daniel Kavanagh winner of the craft and design Newcomer Award  in 2009.

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‘Gallery Artists’

20 September - 14 October 2010

Featuring all our gallery artists - please see Artists web page.

Northern Artist David Archer - continuing in the tradition of classical surrealism, Archer re-energizes this much cliched movement creating intense poetic dreamscapes and personal commentaries.  Some 20 works are exhibited, spanning as many years forming a fine mini-retrospective.

Ross Loveday is a well established landscape artist.  On show are his Limited Edition dry point prints (edition of 10-20).  Capturing the transient light on land and water, on moorland and wetlands,  these brooding landscapes skilfully conveyed deeply felt response to the landscape genre.  Exhibiting widely throughout Britain, this year he successfully exhibited in The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

ART    “....isn’t just for Christmas”  features gallery and invited artists exhibiting small works.

It celebrates and will prove that small works can pack a punch with a dynamic range of artists and works to suit all tastes showing quality painting, sculpture, prints, ceramics, glass and jewellery. Like a short story a small painting, sculpture or print has its own condensed language, often drawing one into depths of lasting and layered meanings of compelling intensity. Furthermore the well chosen work of art often outstrips other forms of investment, and gives lasting pleasure.

Saturday 20th November (Private View) 

Sunday 21st November to Sunday 30th  January.

Opening  Hours  Wednesday to Sunday inclusive 9.30 - 5.30 or by appointment

Featured exhibition  20th November - 30th January

Working with small silk screens made directly from scanned images of leaves, enamel artist Pat Johnson is presenting a group of small panels based on way leaves look when they lie on a damp pavement.  Allowing herself total freedom with colour, she demonstrates a mastery of her craft in this specially commissioned exhibition by the gallery featuring bowls and panels.

Inspiration is triggered and evolves through decorative and freeform enamelling techniques, with characteristic rich and shimmering colourations. 

Built up over many layers and firings the resulting patinas are varied from hard and shinning to smouldering matts. 

She fires enamels with high melting points on to one surface of a bowl, often combining different colours, and when that surface looks right, she then applies enamels with lower melting points to the other side of the bowl. These ‘softer’ enamels will interact with each other and flow down the surface of the bowl,

revealing the colours of the layers below. Wonderful effects that are achieved, but they will only appear once. If the bowl goes back into the kiln, the colours will be lost.

Consideration of the vessels inner and outer form is crucial, as is the nature of the rim; sometimes cut and shaped, suggesting landscaped valleys and gullies, 

though equally powerful as abstract shapes.   In this exhibition Pat also explores the 2D surface with some fine small enamelled panels.

Craft is often as much about touching as looking and Pat’s fine bowls are no exception. Holding, turning, touching, these bowls proves an engaging and wonderful experience.

This fine installation of some 80 ceramic works illuminates a mother’s use of memorabilia to compensate for the passing of childhood. Conceived and created for her degree show, this is the first showing in a gallery environment.

Textile replicas of handmade toys, as well as clothing, are cast in fine bone china. Gold lustre splashes alude to their status as cherished objects.

Individual works can be chosen and purchased

CRAFT GALLERY

New Artists from the 2011 British Craft Trade Show

Melanie Tomlinson - metalwork brooches

Shakspeare Glass - new flotsam glass collection

Jewellery by Sandy Mitchell, Leigh Shepherd,

Adele Taylor & Sara Withers

+ Bianca Padidar new collection

Gift vouchers now available

EXHIBITION 5 NEW ARTISTS

Focusing on Artists New to the Gallery

Clare Booker:  Painting / collage

Richard Wincer:  Woodcuts / pastel works

Julia Breit:  Digital collage lt edition

Ian Gilmour:  Digital lt. edition prints

David Carson Shaw:  Painting

see ARTISTS pages for further images and biographies

5 May - 6 June 2011

EXHIBITION OF MULTI MEDIA WORKS

David Archer, Rowena Beaty,

Julia Breit, Ed Cronshaw, Chris Czainsky,

Paul Czainsky,Ian Gilmore, Rosemary Holcroft,

Mike Holcroft, Sue Holt, Stephen Livingstone,

Ian Taylor,and Christine Williams

This exhibition runs as part of the newly formed Todmorden 2011 Paulinus Way Pilgrim Festival celebrating St. Paulinus a 6th century Monk “God’s Apostle in the North” , who helped bring Christianity to the then pagan North of England and converted and baptized tens of thousands in the local rivers.  In addition to the many different interpretations on the icon theme in this exhibition, we are fortunate in exhibiting two works using sediment collected from the bottom of the sacred pool known as The Lady’s Well - Legend has it that this is where St. Paulinus  baptized the Northumbrian people. We do hope you enjoy this exhibition. Below are some thoughts on the Icon.

At which point does a person or thing escape from the ordinariness of the everyday and enters the realms of the iconic?  Frequently such idolatry is  through conscentual laws and opinion, from religious, devotional imagery to more contemporary stance, broadcasting heroic, the anti-hero and celebrity images as icons.

This exhibition acknowledges both the traditional and the modern icon, sometimes in venerating the spirit, though often taking a swipe at the established mores in a search for meaning and truth, which oscillates from harmony to asking awkward visual questions. 

Traditionally the religious icon was prescriptive and restrictive, intentionally so, working with a prototype.  Deliberate and forbidden absence of earthly references - with no shadows, atmospherics,  or expression.  God is revealed through Christ’s and Mary’s corpus and angels as radiant beings - with gold, and symbolic colours.   Skillfully painted using tempera and gilding (chalk, egg yolk and pigment, and gold leaf - the divine order)  by scribes and monks for church and private devotional settings, originating in the Byzantine heartlands (c.263-339). It is fascinating that from early sacred beginnings all cultures have addressed iconography in their own ways,  the establishment of humanist and individual ways of seeing, laid the foundations and extended the awareness of this tremendously rich and varied genre of fine art.

Leaping forward to the contemporary, obvious biblical imagery gave way to mass media contemporary culture and responses from artists which created new icons, some sacred, most profane. They played with ideas of high and low culture, the personal and political. 

Perhaps THE pivotal work was Duchamp’s ‘urinal’ , and pop art was born such as - Andy Warhol - Marilyn, Jasper Johns - American Flag,  Luciano Fabro - Golden Italy and more recently Chris Ofili - Upper Room (13 paintings biblical ref. to the Last Supper), and Gilbertand George, Sara Lucas, and Damien Hirst, to name a very few. Find us on face book. Please post your comments.

Water Street Gallery    25 Water Street     Todmorden  OL14 5AB

www.waterstreetgallery.co.uk  info@waterstreetgallery.co.uk  01706 839714

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Chance influences the practice of Elspeth Edmondson and Judith Davies, leaving behind its imprint on the surface of the work. These traces, markings and layerings are the result of careful manipulation of processes, both artists have extensive knowledge of their crafts which they employ to bring about a delicate balance and tension between control and the accidental; intention and nature.

Elspeth Edmondson works with experimental printing techniques and manipulates paper; folding, bending and overlapping to produce sculptural forms.

Judith Davies works in porcelain, hand-building work which marries together surface and form. She uses experimental firing techniques to affect the surface and produce layered markings and subtle colour.    More . . .

Judith Davies and Elspeth Emondson

Ceramic vessels and 3D paper works

Solo Exhibition

FLOWERS

...Plants & Other Stories

Paintings & Drawings

The Nature of Healing Through

Visual Perception

A bunch of ransom garlic, and a visual challenge from an 8 year old girl provided the trigger for a dramatic shift of artistic consciousness  and a whole new body of works for artist Mike Holcroft.

This solo exhibition of paintings and drawings ‘Flowers’ ....Plants & Other Stories - is aptly subtitled ‘The Nature of Healing Through Visual Perception’ a culmination of two years blood, sweat and tears through which he re-established, indeed re-invented his natural artistic abilities.  More . . .

FLOWERS... Plants & Other Stories  MIKE HOLCROFT

A joint venture with the West Yorkshire Print Workshop has prompted this current exhibition using the entire galley space showing works by some of the top practicing Fine Art Printmakers from this area and beyond.

Printmakers from the West Yorkshire Print Workshop include Janine Denby, Kathryn Desforges, Andrew Hambleton, Laura Slater, Neil Thomson and Miriam Trent.

Gallery and invited artists exhibiting Shelley Burgoyne, Gordon Cain, Carole Kirk,  Paul Czainski, Ross Loveday,  Sara Philpott, Angela Rogers, Gwen Turner and Richard Wincer. 

It has been carefully devised to show the tremendous diversity of this artistic media defined through the varied processes from woodcut and etching, to screen, collographic and complex digital images making both an informative and  visually exciting exhibition. Brief information about these print processes can be seen in leaflet  PRINT PROCESSES.

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24 August - 25 September 2011

5 February - 27 March 2011

20 November 2010 - 29 January 2011

‘MADE IN CLAY’

‘SUMMER EXHIBITION’