This month we will be heading to Wasps studios at Patriothall in Stockbridge to visit artists Jo Barker, Sara Brennan and Eric Cruickshank.
Some may remember Jo Baker from our Zoom session in January 2022, so it will be great for us to meet Jo in person. Her tapestry designs originate from simple gestural brush strokes in paint or ink with smudges of pastels. She is interested in our hands. In the spontaneous mark made by a simple gesture; traces of an event, a fleeting moment. The marks are then captured in the slow considered construction of tapestry weaving.
Sara Brennan‘s work is an unspoken response to landscape, with routes in a sense of place. Sara uses a refined and reduced approach to colour and form. Her work takes two routes, weaving either from her drawings or reacting and responding in smaller works to yarns as they are placed directly next to each other. The yarns are very specific and often unrepeatable.
Taking landscape as an initial starting point, Eric Cruikshank’s paintings are not about literal representation, instead the focus is on the emotive qualities of place. Using an objective palette tied to the Scottish landscape, colour acts as a vehicle to reveal the picture planes underlying points of reference; with the works being grounded in the everyday, the viewer is encouraged to readdress notions of their surroundings, where the familiar is opened up and made full of possibility.
