Amanda Ansell is showing in Entwined: plants in Contemporary Painting at Huddersfield Art Gallery, West Yorkshire, from Wednesday 9 November 2022 to Saturday 28 January 2023. Entwined is curated by artist-curators Judith Tucker and Barbara Howey with Grant Scanlan (Curator at Huddersfield Art Gallery). The exhibition was supported by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew whose botanists provided another perspective on the artworks in the exhibition.
The exhibition features artwork by leading British painters, including winners of the John Moores and Contemporary British Painting Prizes. The artists are 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.
From the artist-curators Barbara Howey and Judith Tucker:
“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? Of course, there is a provocation to slow down, to give attention to detail and specificity in all the works. This reflects our renewed relation with nature: those places we have come to value so much, where we go to catch our breath and connect to the more-than-human world. Some of the paintings’ beauty belies darker and melancholic attributes, with plants as symptoms of loss, as metaphors for migration, the legacy of colonialism and as a contemporary take on memento-mori. For this invitation to look slowly and 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 visual conversation that this exhibition engenders, with its focus on the up-close world of plants will be in dialogue with earlier scientific, aesthetic and design representations of plants. The works in the show work with and against the rich traditions of the many and various aesthetic traditions 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.”
Amanda Ansell says, “The paintings included in Entwined are minimalist representations of my senses connected to botanical traces found in nature. Close to my riverside studio, I observe the plants and trees at different times of the day, in variable light, and throughout the seasons as they thrive, survive, break down and fade away. The single experience acknowledges many a vision before it, embodying an emotional response to the self-similar, fractal patterns observed in the natural world.”
The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue. Details TBC.
Dates: Wednesday 9 November 2022 to Saturday 28 January 2023
Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 11 am – 4 pm
Address: Huddersfield Art Gallery: Unit 7, The Piazza Shopping Centre, Princess Alexandra Walk, Huddersfield, HD1 2RS
Contact Details/Press Enquiries: Grant Scanlan (Huddersfield Museums Manager) Tel.: 0752 898 8862 Email: grant.scanlan@kirklees.gov.uk