18 March to 27 May 2023
20-21 Visual Arts Centre
Church Square
Scunthorpe
North Lincolnshire
DN15 6TB
Entwined is a major new exhibition featuring leading British painters, including winners of the John Moores and Contemporary British Painting Prize. The paintings in this exhibition invite their viewers to look closely at plants. They do this through the widest of ranges of approaches to paint, the selected painters all delight in our extraordinary vegetive world.
This visual feast explores why painting plants matters now, using approaches from lyrical abstraction through to forensic observation of plants in crisis. How might this deep exploration of plants, through paint, help us understand our place in the world now? What does it mean to understand a locale through an intense study of what is growing close at hand?
Some of the paintings’ beauty belies darker and melancholic attributes, plants as symptom of loss, as metaphor for migration, the legacy of colonialism and as a contemporary take on memento-mori. For this invitation to look slowly and the focus on the specificity and minutiae of plants comes, paradoxically, at a moment of wider global trauma both in terms of the pandemic but also its corollary, global heating and alarming biodiversity loss.
The works in the show work with and against the rich traditions of the many and various aesthetic ways of depicting plants, from botanical illustration, to decoration and design, to a reversal and reworking of ideas of landscape painting as immersive rather than a view, and the focus on the fragility of more-than-human life specifically the endangered nature of plant species, is certainly a memento mori, but not just ours.
Artists in Entwined: Amanda Ansell, Bryony Benge-Abbott, Hannah Brown, Graham Crowley, Sam Douglas, Michele Fletcher, Barbara Howey, Linda Ingham, Juliette Losq, Paula MacArthur, Iain Nicholls, Joe Packer, Julian Perry, Narbi Price, Harvey Taylor, Helen Thomas, Judith Tucker and Joanna Whittle.
Entwined is curated by: Judith Tucker, Barbara Howey and Grant Scanlan
