Insight Open Studios 2010

Simon studied at Wirral College of Art and Design and Braintree College, Essex. In the early 1980s he worked at several ceramics workshops around the UK before setting up his own studio in 1987.

He taught ceramics at St Helens College of Art and Design and Wirral Metropolitan College and also spent three years at Island Pottery in Bermuda. Returning to the UK in 1997, Simon re-established his workshop and has been a full time maker since, exhibiting in the UK, Greece, Norway and Bequia in the Caribbean.

The work for this show is mainly thrown and distorted: a balance between control and chance.Crank, stoneware and porcelain clays are used predominantly with blue/ green/ purple matt glazes fired to 1200 degrees celsius.

Hull photographer Chris Harland returns to The Ropewalk arts centre in Barton upon Humber with a new exhibition, The Life of Stuff, which opens on Saturday, April 27.

“Just over a year ago since his last exhibition, A Sense of Time, at the Maltkin Road gallery Chris’s latest work encourages us to discover the ‘Life of Stuff’” said Exhibitions Officer Richard Hatfield. (more…)

An exhibition which has been 18 months in the planning has just opened at the Barton upon Humber arts centre, The Ropewalk.

The exhibition “A Sense of Place” has been curated by The Ropewalk’s print tutor Tim Needham and features work by some of this country’s leading printmakers. (more…)

We assemble things. We construct artifices to ‘civilise’ our lives and also we decorate our lives to make us comfortable in our environment. But as soon as we have finished this process a new life begins. Either through use, abandonment, decay or simple accident, new possibilities emerge. Some times this happens immediately or sometimes after the effects of time have left their impression. Nature will fight back and weave patterns where none were intended. Weather will sculpt new forms from precision materials. Sunlight will peel and fade one thing, illuminate another. Mundane objects catch the light and spring to life in another guise. New life is created among the everyday stuff of life.

“Everything in the world, whether it be a tree or a rock, a building or a chair, every object has a life of its own. It is a living thing”. Oliver Gagliani.

I am drawn to these phenomena. They almost make me laugh out loud sometimes. They make me alive. When I am photographing them I am transported, flying, seeing a harmony and rhythm, empowered by a kind of synaesthesia. These feelings continues during my processing and printing, inspiring enhancement or intensification of the original perception in an endeavour to express, through abstract images, the sheer joy of seeing.

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost. Not as in fiction to imagine things that are not really there but just to comprehend the things that are there”. Richard Feynman

Chris Harland

Norman Ackroyd, John Duffin, Paul Hawdon, Clare Halifax, Trevor Price and Hakan Ulusman

This Exhibition, ‘A Sense of Place’, brings together an experienced group of Printmakers.

Their observation of ‘place’ as individuals is unique, although together they reveal their ability to capture the ‘Sense of Place’.

Samuel Palmer stated that the spiritual essence of landscape is elevated when “it has passed through the soul”. Palmer’s theory belongs to the romantic tradition; along with Coleridge, Palmer saw landscape as a conjuring up the ‘inscape’, the inner life of place.

These artists through the medium of print have placed emphasis on the impact of place, shaped by human activity over time; with drama, apprehension, and awe in confronting the sublimation of landscape and its picturesque qualities, whether in the dales, the city or near the sea.

Stand for a while in front of these prints as you might ‘take in a view’, be in the shoes of the artists, and look long and hard.

Tim Needham

The Ropewalk arts centre is supporting Barton upon Humber’s Rotary by being a collection point for items for new born babies in eastern Europe.

A spokesman for the club said they were looking for help with items such as baby powder and soap, feeding bottles, babygrow suits, bibs and clothes.

(more…)