Getting some Perspective

Great little collection on show at the Museum of the History of Science, Perspective: an English View.  A rare opportunity to see a selection of 18th and 19th Century English instruments for drawing in perspective. The exhibition includes a portable drawing machine by James Watt (see image).


The James Watt device was mounted on three legs, and consisted of a box which opened out to form a flat surface, with an adjustable arm holding an eye-piece.


Jointed parallel rulers mounted beneath the board held both a brass point and a pencil, used to trace and sketch the object to be reproduced. The whole device could all be folded up.


The exhibition also includes a copy of Thomas Malton's A compleat treatise on perspective... who's frontis piece displays a fascinatingly surreal engraving of eighteenth century gents wandering around large dodecagon objects.

Graham Sutherland, An Unfinished World at Modern Art Oxford

I finally got the chance to go and see the fantastic collection of works on paper by Graham Sutherland at Modern Art Oxford. Among these rarely seen watercolour and ink studies are some stunning small topographical images.



Curated by 2011 Turner Prize nominee, George Shaw, An Unfinished World is a reflective exploration of the lesser-known work of one of the most compelling artists of his generation.
The exhibition concentrates on Sutherland’s early Welsh landscapes from the 1930s, works created during his time as official WWII war artist, and after his return to Pembrokeshire in the 1970s.


Far from traditional studies of landscape and environment, these works not only depict but also exude a world that is as dark as it is magical, as elusive as it is recognisable. Strangely bereft of human life, the works navigate the real and imagined; where country lanes loop into each other, horizon lines fold into foregrounds, and nothing is as it seems.


George Shaw presents these works through the lens of a contemporary painter, describing them as ‘a lament to the passing and changing landscape, a monument to the earth itself’. He adds, ‘the exhibition shows us Sutherland as an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him – a world forever unfinished’. 


An Unfinished World brings together for the first time over eighty rarely seen works on paper from public and private collections across the UK. 

Plus 1 Exhibition Review - Hannah Newell

Plus 1, Installation view

The selection of artists for a group show can be based on various things; a theme, a medium, a style or a location, for example. In the case of Plus 1 currently showing at the Arts at The Old Fire Station Gallery in Oxford, the selection of artists is defined by relationships.

Launch Collaborative, the collective that curated the show, are an initiative that aims to connect and promote emerging artists’ work by providing a platform to exhibit and work collaboratively. The organizing principle of Plus 1 exemplifies this ambition by celebrating existing relationships and creating the possibility of new ones; an appropriate theme for the first show of the year in a new and exciting arts centre.

The six exhibiting artists are made up of three pairs. Each pair includes one artist selected by Launch Collaborative and their nominated 'plus one’. An element of control having been removed from the organisers, one might worry that the strong connections between the pairs of artists could lead to a discordant whole. However, this is not the case. The nature of the risk is in harmony with the ethos of the show to create new links between practices and provide a space for a reflexive reading of the work.

Exhibited together in an intimately sized space, the mind naturally begins to construct a web of relationships between the works. The expansive mechanism of the plus one invitation is emulated by an exploration of the works in relationship to each other, drawing a spider diagram of thoughts and ideas: ‘we perceive that the familiar world assumes the new relief of a dazzling cosmic miniature, we did not know that the familiar world was so large.’

This poetic description of the concept of the miniature by Gaston Bachelard aptly describes the conceptual and visual flip between the microscopic and the vast observable in several works. In the case of both Jaya Mansberger’s paintings and Matt Blackler’s process pieces it is often hard to tell how wide or narrow one’s focus is. The detailed abstraction of Mansberger’s works could signify a nebula of stars or conversely, material under a microscope. Side by side Heavenly bodies and Just Blushing pivot between expansion and contraction. The elements of Jetsam could be infinitely large or tiny, or indeed both, as Blackler’s A Day at the Frontier implies.

Blackler’s practice turns processes inside out to the point of absurdity. Whilst 200 fruit boxes Part 1 and 2 run a manufacturing procedure backwards to create intricately layered wooden logs from fruit crates, Stargazer looks out through a series of lenses, stretching its reach to a gap in the stars. At the same time, the addition of each lens limits the amount of light able to pass through to a smaller and smaller degree. This wry inversion inspires an unexpected sense of wonder in the three photo etchings displayed alongside Stargazer; dust, nothingness and the stars. Vastness contained in a tiny dark square.

Jaya Mansberger, Heavenly Bodies. Oil on Canvas

This romanticism coupled with humour extends through the exhibition from Chloe Le Tissiers ambiguous landscapes and out of place wild animals, to Toni Le Busque’s self deprecating and outrageously honest prints. A compilation of words, statements, symbols and characters, Le Busque’s pieces are disarming; brutally direct but with a likable self knowledge. A hopeful celebration of the everyday, constructing meaning out of human details, experiences and obsessions, is also to be found in the work of Wayne Adams. In Lewis Hamilton, a rotating speaker plays a recording of the artist emulating the noise of race car driver Lewis Hamilton making his fastest lap at Silverstone in 2011. The sound is instantly recognisable (we’ve all made that sound before) and the piece has a similar wryness to Blackler’s work, pushing absurdity to the edge of beauty: as the continuous loop is broken down it signifies individual events of importance within it.

Despite an approachable lightness in the aura of the works exhibited in Plus 1, they all ask for a keen attention to detail, whether it be the intricacies of Blackler’s concepts, the flowing combination of abstraction and representation hiding ethereal forms in Le Tissier’s paintings, or the subtleness of the racing car sleekness in the nude wooden casing of Adam’s construction. Processes are filtered, elements broken down and recombined, each part a significant piece of the whole, much like Amy Waters’ overlapping block letters; each a constituent part, separate and yet fading into one another. Plus 1 brings together an eclectic combination of artists for an expansive dialogue in a small space, whilst retaining a enjoyable coherence. However, if 'attention to detail is an enlarging glass’, then there is an almost infinite amount to take in.

Hannah Newell 

Quotes from ‘The Poetics of Space’ by Gaston Bachelard and his writing on the Miniature.

Exhibition Open

Plus 1 exhibition is open. Head on down to the gallery at the Old Fire Station on Gloucester Green to view the amazing work of Wayne Adams, Matt Blackler, Toni Le Busque, Amy Waters, Jaya Mansberger and Chloe Le Tissier.

Plus 1 - Amy Waters

The final artist to be announced for our Plus 1 exhibition is by invitation of Toni Le Busque - Amy Waters 

"The written word is the most beautiful form of Art." Amy Waters' work blurs the boundaries of text, landscape and graphics . Her recent work Do Not Inform Me Of Any New Countries painstakingly recreates a silhouette map of the globe with the name of each individual country written over and over by hand. This is one of a series of drawings that are a natural extension from her paintings of isolated characters of the English alphabet written large and lonely across canvas, as shown here.

Plus 1 - Toni Le Busque

Toni Le Busque, Enough. Ink on paper. 70x100cm

Our final invitation to exhibit in our Plus 1 exhibition went to  Toni Le Busque who in turn has offered her Plus 1 to fellow studio artist Amy Waters

Toni Le Busque

The essential truth of Toni's doodles is the failure of fifteen years of established psychotherapy techniques. Her art is testament to this and is therefore a celebration of uniqueness, a carnival of carnality, a festival of low-brow, a social function of anti-socialism.

Isolated anatomical components and rude words, snatches of gossip, prints of the dead, suicide, cancer and a spoonful of self indulgence form the basis of her work.

Plus 1 - Wayne Adams

The Third of our artists to feature in the
 Plus 1 exhibition starting on the 10th January.


Through the construction and deconstruction of loops and methods of interaction Adams offers an engaging way of examining our aspirations, the current social obsession with the notion of ‘the celebrity’ and the nature of how this social phenomena occurs. His aim is not to offer an explanation of these ideas, but to offer up an idea for the audience to explore.