Visual Intrigue at Artstream Gallery

'Maps and Codes' is a themed exhibition which explores the use of symbols to interpret the landscape. Hidden images are revealed using ultraviolet blacklight and messages are coded using flowers. Poppy seeds recreate the lines of the WW1 trenches, roads, hedges and chromatography patterns.

An artist chooses how to reveal some aspects of the world they see while deliberately obscuring or cryptically encoding others. Some codes and symbols are fairly clear, for example, those appropriated from ordnance survey maps to create abstract landscapes; others may include signs made from details of objects, which might not immediately be clear to a general public, but would be immediately apparent to anyone associated with, say, the woollen industry.

Carole has been mapping the landscapes of West Wales, re-interpreting aspects of its industrial and social past through paintings and original prints. Because her technique shuttles between fine art skills and traditional domestic crafts the works reflect a free-ranging, intuitive quality, as rigorously organised as a quilt design.

Maps and Codes is at Artstream Gallery, Cawdor Hall (under the clock) Newcastle Emlyn. Open Tues-Sat 10-5pm June 23rd-July 4th

On the Map

'A patchwork of little fields'

'On the Map ' opens in Hastings Museum and Art gallery this week with this piece of my work. Composed with fragments of original print and chine colle, each piece representing one field in one particular area near Tregaron. 

More information on previous blogs.

Preview : Friday 9th March at 6.45pm

Maps

Having already delivered one of my map pieces to one gallery I am now working towards the second show exhibiting concurrently on the same theme- they weren't originally meant to clash. Having  preprinted collagraphs, most using chine colle layers or two layers of colour, onto somerset paper then I started cutting out. Each collagraph uses a tiny square of Welsh map as its starting point, with mapping symbols, fields and other features included. Paper ephemera such as guide books, advertisements and pamphlets are included in the prints.

The current map collage will use around 200 precision cut pieces of print reassembled to create a single piece full of textures and many shades of green.

Pieces from this series of work will be shown at:
Hastings Museum and Art Gallery in their exhibition on maps: traditional and contemporary (10 March - 17 June 2012) and
'Journeys'  at the Chapel Gallery in Ormskirk 24th March- 5th May 2012.