Home: A group exhibition exploring ideas of home, displacement and placemaking.
Dawn Cole, Emmy Dijkstra, Christina France, Melissa Hill, Anna Masters, Alex Rennie and Franny Swann.
13 October – 23 October 2021
The past few years have challenged our relationships with the places that we call our homes. What does it mean not to be able to leave your home, and what does it mean not to have the stability of a place to call home? Pandemics, wars and displacement have caused us to call into question what it is that makes a home. Is it the place, the relationships, or the self? Is it a feeling that can be brought with you or constructed? In association with Sevenoaks Welcomes Refugees, seven artists explore what ‘home’ means to them
Private View: Wednesday 13 October 6 – 8
Please join us for the opening preview to Home exhibition. There will be an opportunity to meet and talk to some of the artists exhibiting in the exhibition, as well as to find out more about the role of Sevenoaks Welcomes Refugees in supporting refugee families to find homes.
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A conceptual artist, Dawn’s work takes its starting point from archives. Dawn’s work is developed as a result of extensive research and can be seen as a mixture of history and story-telling, fact and fiction. Much of her work uses printmaking techniques experimenting with the nature of printmaking; repetition, reversal, variation and serendipity to find a process and materials that connect with the ideas behind her work.
https://dawncole.co.uk/
Emmy uses the flexibility offered by drawing to tell stories about what she observes in the world around her, always focussing on people who are searching for their place in this world; the refugees who ask if they can join the nice Swedish campfire, the guy who eventually made it to the jungle after longing for it most of his life and the little girl at the station who wonders where she should go, because there is no one there to tell her that. These personalities populate Emmy’s art works as she picks up her pencil and starts to draw.
www.emmydijkstra.nl
Christina’s contemplative work offers the viewer a refreshing antidote to our fast moving digital world. Her work is concerned with space, rhythm, repetition, geometry and chance. Essentially abstract in nature, an underlying narrative can be discerned in certain pieces. Using soft, layered forms which seems to appear and disappear or sharper contrasting geometries, the circular form is omni present.
http://www.christina-france.com
http://Melissa-Hill.com
Anna creates artworks from found materials, including petals, butterflies, clock parts, optical lenses, bank notes and costume jewellery. The materials allude to personal histories and are often loaded with cultural symbolism. By repurposing and recontextualising these familiar forms, Anna asks us to consider afresh these objects and the stories that are embedded within them.
www.annamasters.com
Alex works predominantly with oil paint and is known for his figurative and textural realist style, trompe l’oeil illusions and the glowing red hue which appears in much of his work. He is particularly interested in his home town of London and the movement of people.
www.alexrennie.co.uk
Franny’s work explores narratives of time and place set against universal themes of memory, memorial and loss. It references archaic traces, fragments and past lives within a conceptual, contemporary format, and is set against the historical loss of a generation of her family to the Holocaust.
https://frannyswann.com/
In Shameful Histories, Melissa talks about her own process of researching uncomfortable questions, how she reconciled herself with the information she found, and how admitting a painful history is a critical part in the practice of restorative justice. Free of charge, no booking required.
Print Workshop with Christina France and Sarah Cliff: Saturday 16 October, 13.00-15.30
Children have the opportunity to learn a range of simple print-making techniques and create their own artworks in response to the exhibition. Children must be accompanied by a well-behaved adult. Please wear clothes that you are happy to get inky or bring an apron. Free of charge, no booking required.
Make Yourself at Home: mixed media workshop with Anna Masters: Wednesday 20 October, 13.30-15.00
Anna will work with you to explore the relationship between the home and personal identity, and use this as a starting point to create an original mixed media artwork. You will have the opportunity to work with collage, drawing and carbon transfer.
Participants are asked to bring a small item with them that represents the idea of home, or the feeling of being at home.
Free of charge. Booking required – please email Anna to register interest: anna@annamasters.comHome
