'Crossing The Water' - Rosemary Holcroft - Solo Exhibition

Celebrating her 80th Year Rosemary would like to share works created over many years of involvement in the arts.

‘Crossing The Water’ and ‘Soundings’

The backdrop to these mixed media works are routed in aesthetic investigations manifest in visual form.  Found objects are both exposed and confined though a geometric framework of heavily re-worked surfaces, a ‘searching’ process of time and space.  Akin to visual poetry,

‘Crossing The Water’ series happened through a chance discovery of early medieval woodcuts in the John Rylands Library, Manchester (where Rosemary’s great grandfather Henry Guppy was librarian and an avid collector of bibles.) She was given a portfolio of  facsimiles - St. Christopher, St. Antony and The Annunciation featured in this collection.   These are both a connection with the artist’s past, and a history of image-making itself, fixed in space, and yet transformed.

The ‘Soundings’ collection are again discoveries of discarded ‘found’ objects and materials - glass, lead, copper, wood scraps, texts, are elevated to the status of historic relics which are interwoven with an interplay of painterly technique into a harmonious orchestral whole, full of meaning and lasting appreciation. 

Studies include time spent at the Byam Shaw School of Art and RCA (London), while teaching at the London Museum in part informed historic connectedness with material objects and investigative interpretations.  Awareness of artists such as Joseph Cornell, Rita Donagh, Ben Nicholson, Rebecca Horn and Helen Chadwick informed her own personal language.