Next week is the last chance for visitors to view a striking and thought provoking exhibition of the work of artist and maker Amanda Randall at Putney Arts Theatre, Ravenna Rd, London.
The display, heralded by one visitor as ‘the best I’ve ever seen here,’ has delighted, startled and intrigued audiences with exhibits assembled from tar, feathers, skulls, fragments of traffic cones and dozens of old keys.
Entitled ‘Objects from a Landscape,’ the exhibition represents a radical departure from the usual offerings of oil paintings and water colours shown at this venue. Assemblages, drawings and sculptural wall works produced by the artist over more than two decades are on show. The exhibition is free to enter and continues until September 28th 2013.
These drawings and bricolages are personal pieces made by a sculptor better known for her public artworks, which include ‘Cone Shaped,’ an installation for the Year of the Artist, incorporating several hundred traffic cones, and the strikingly coloured ‘Five a Day’ in Crawley.
Many of the earlier pieces are unsettling assemblages of found objects, often dramatic and confrontational.
For example, in ‘Brains,’ a tiny but dramatic piece, an animal skull appears to be exploding out of a corroded food can, against a background of incongruous orange diagonals.
Randall worked in post-industrial, depressed North Kent during the 1980s and 90s, as part of the fiercely independent Medway scene, which included ‘backwater visionary’ Billy Childish, environmental artist Stephen Turner and Traci Emin.
Determinedly anti-elitist, influenced by the DIY ethos of punk and the New British Sculpture of the 1980s, her work from this time combines unidentified industrial components, bitumen, and discarded plastics with organic debris like bones, horsehair and feathers to create a kind of punk English pastorale.
Following her move to London in 2005, Randall’s work became more lyrical and introspective. Much of the imagery is derived from the micro-organisms and tiny plants which colonise the city, interpreted in calligraphic and precisely wrought steel and silver.
However, her metalwork has a beautifully patinated and textured surface and an organic quality which is reminiscent of the encrusted, abandoned artefacts that she pulled out of the Medway during her early career.
The charred, distressed wooden backgrounds, pierced, stitched and scuffed surfaces, all suggest processes of decay, growth and regeneration. The subtle gouache ‘Ring,’ appears to float just above the paper surface, the softly spreading paint stains bringing to mind colonies of lichens.
This is a varied and challenging exhibition, guaranteed to provoke a powerful emotional response in the viewer.
For details about the exhibition and venue contact info@putneyartstheatre.org.uk, phone 02087886943 or visit www.putneyartstheatre.org.uk.
For more information about the artist or to contact her please visit www.amandarandalldesign.co.uk.
Based on information supplied by Amanda Randall.
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