“en route” – an exhibition of mixed media works by Lauriana Glenny

  “en route” is a mixed-media collection of urban and suburban imagery reflecting an intuitively inspired journey into the re-authoring of the artist’s past.

 

After 9 years of running a successful, but incredibly demanding creative design studio, Glenny has returned with passion to re-awaken and explore her call to paint – a calling which fueled and motivated her Diploma in Fine Art 16 years ago.

 

Gone is any decorative, ornamental element to Glenny’s work, replaced instead by a new seriousness, which has firmly anchored her explorations, giving her more focus than ever before. 

Glenny’s paintings are honest reflections of the voices she ‘hears’ and the images she ‘sees’, and these find expression as she seeks to reframe the memories of her past, taking her initial cue from familiar scenes of the area in which she grew up. Her strongly self-reflective works reference  architectural structures, with bridges, doors and windows featuring strongly. They relate in theme by aspects of memory, history, spirituality, time and space, and while the specific occasions of memory are of a personal nature, the themes and imagery have universal appeal.

 

Colours are rich, and the build-up of glazes create a strong depth and intensity that contrast powerfully with the consistent use of light in her work, with collaged elements playing an integral part of the final outcome and adding a multi-layered level of interest, interpretation and present-day significance. Often the objects, such as old letters, postage stamps, bus tickets and used negative strips are buried and barely visible beneath the paint, at other times they create a tangible, tactile accumulation on the canvas surface, with staples, embroidery stitches and french knots looping together to form a Braille-type script across certain areas.

This tactile experience has been a large part of Glenny’s creative journey, and for the viewer who dares to reach out and touch her work and carefully run their hands over the canvas, letting their fingertips explore and feel, they will gain clues to the visual and conceptual language of what lies beyond.

 

For Glenny, the intuitive process has largely been responsible for the direction of her paintings, and it is this process that has been the cathartic catalyst responsible for both the healing of memories, and that also of a much greater degree of physical wholeness after years of battling ME. Whilst chronic fatigue is still a part of her life, a huge part of her therapy has been inextricably bound up in her work.

 

 

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“Land Marks”  - an exhibition of paintings by Dee Donaldson and Grace Kotze

 

Emotional resonances and remembrances are left as one interacts with one's environment. It is inevitable that internal thoughts and emotions are captured in external environments. Durban has been the home of Dee Donaldson and Grace Kotze for most of their adult lives. As a result the city and its surrounds become a visual catchments for internal experiences. While  “Land Marks” often describes vast spaces or grand forms, the artists' personal explorations of the concept are often very intimate.

 

The city's “Land Marks” are not only those found on the land, but markers for internal journeys; a marrying of the emotional with the physical. Durban's dynamic and varied surrounds provide a complex and rich physical language for Donaldson's and Kotze’s emotions and ideas. WHAT IS HAPPENING AT OUR GALLERY IN BERLIN: