Natural (Re)Sources with Daniel Freyne

Natural (Re)Sources looks at the origin of the artist’s chosen materials. This doesn’t mean that the finished work looks as if it has just been collected from a forest floor, or dug from the ground without intervention, but rather that the material basis for the work is ‘of the earth’ in various forms.

Here we see the results of makers efforts to embrace the bounty that the earth proffers, working harmoniously with their chosen materials. Wycliffe Stutchbury takes the spoils of fallen trees or abandoned timber pallets and meticulously moulds and shapes beautiful meanderings of wooden shingles. Annie Slack carves her selected seasoned wooden bounty into sensuously formed spoons. Geoffrey Fisher coppices wood from his local area – a time honoured tradition that keeps woodland healthy – and works with the green wood to craft his range of brushes and newly completed crates. Jane Ponsford and Gizella K Warburton take further the refining of wood to produce their quietly considered paper and mixed fibre creations.

QEST William Parker Scholar and blacksmith Daniel Freyne has collected iron laden stones from the beaches of Scandinavia, broken them down, smelted and then raised the resulting iron ore to form his eloquent vessels. Objects that are an ode to the rudimentary beginnings and fundamental awareness of our earth’s resources.

Shannon Clegg, Alice Fox and Julie Rignell all share a passion for plant materials and create pieces attuned to their origins, with little or no intervention from anything other than their hands. Environmental concerns are at the centre of Daisy Imogen Buckle’s practice. Using plant and other natural fibres she harnesses her talent for yarn and fabric manipulation with recycled, repurposed fabric and hand-woven pieces, making use of paper, woollen and cotton threads. Laura Ellen Bacon uses willow as the basis of her extraordinary abstract creations, that can feel strangely similar to organic growth and natural phenomena. Linen is Claire Benn’s canvas, to which she applies natural earth pigments bound with soya milk, together with hand-stitched natural fibre threads, to tell stories of the earth’s resources and current predicaments.

Earth itself, clay, rounds off the selection of earthly riches, with works by ceramicists Lise Herud Braten and Amanda-Sue Rope. We see how their differing approaches to the manipulation of clays and contrasts in their inspiration and visual language, result in two very different outcomes, although sharing the same fundamental methodologies and process that a fired and finished ceramic demands.

All fourteen artist-makers excel in their fields; producing works that are a testament to using our Earth’s Natural (Re)Sources for the benefit of us, the people that come to view and appreciate their talents.