New Gallery Artists
Sandra Higgins Art is delighted to welcome three new artists to the online gallery, Richard Crooks, Gina Parr and Robin Sewell.
Supported residencies in Bangladesh, Nepal and Japan, together with his experiences working and travelling through South Asia have provided unique visual and conceptual contexts that continue to inform his sculptural and graphic practice. He constructs mixed-media photographic collage and sculpture in response to the built environment.
Architectural forms, graphic and street art are often imbued with diverse styles that may be seen as reliquaries of cultural migration, hybridity and authenticity. These idiosyncratic assimilations provide for a unique set of forms that trace the evolution of cultural, personal and regional identity. Although there is a universality that transcends style, modes of representation are influenced by the cultures that exist in and pass through them. These resultant motifs, forms and structures inform sculpture and collage.
‘When I am in a particular place categories are established and edits made of the photographs that I take whilst cycling and walking through these territories- such as in Tokyo, Kathmandu and Dhaka. Photographs are applied within mixed media collages and reflect a dynamic between homogeneous and hybridised styles of architecture and street art.
Images are cut, woven and pasted on top of and alongside each other onto found objects and handmade paper, utilising an interplay between both the cut image and its surrounding debris during their arrangement.’
.png)
Richard Crooks
.png)
Gina Parr
Gina Parr is a painter and photographer who paints with her camera when traveling.
Nature, memory and identity serve as the cornerstone of Parr’s work. Her childhood spent diversely in Devon’s wide-open spaces with her father, fishing for mackerel, and at home living with her mother's extreme hoarding and mental health issues, inherently informs her practice.
Consequently the work is often imbued with the atmosphere and narrative of both these experiences, utilising a guttural and painterly response to these childhood memories, whilst she explores the space between abstraction and figuration.
Lyrics from songs, things said, current affairs, sexual politics, passages from literature, climate change, presence and absence all play their part, whilst she ultimately, and not surprisingly, longs to find an emotional, spatial and visual balance of order within her work.
.png)
Robin Sewell
I employ a dry powdered compound to make shallow relief drawings that I am able to fix. Many of these drawings become paintings by being priming over and painted over.
My working method is a turbulent and revelatory collaboration with these materials, both aided and hampered by indeterminacy. On occasion some disarmingly simple procedures elicit an apparent chaotic maelstrom, creating a morphogenesis of highly complex imagery in the blink of an eye. While there must be a physical intention for a new work to start, I mentally manoeuvre myself to let go and allow the qualities and the behaviours of the powdered and fluid materials, to have a ‘voice’ – to enable serendipitous occurrences.
Most of my studio tools, instruments and techniques have been designed and made to serve my specific studio practice. These include multi-paint guns, squeegees, combs, small robotic drawing machines, powder fixing devises and viscosity measuring instruments. Often, surprisingly, what emerges onto the panel has significant references to my current intellectual research and physical activities derived from reading, being in the landscape and visiting galleries. Over the years cosmology, landscapes, geology, birth, war, exuberant plant growth, pollution and refugees lost at sea, amongst many others, have influenced the paintings and drawings. It has taken many years to come to understand that I am striving to understand the interface between the conscious and sub-conscious working of the mind and how the latter is immensely powerful if only we can find ways to employ it.