Curated by Catherine McCaw-Aldworth
Liz Clifford – Rups Cregeen – Lizzie Lovell – Abi Jones – Julia DaCosta
We tread the earth-hard path; we chatter with the pebbles; we respect the sharp flint and we are entranced by the shine and resolve of shiny jet, black as night, light as day. The quartz sparkles and the crystal touches the divine. And then we come to a rock. A rock? Rock hard, rock solid - and we remember that even a person can be a ‘rock’. There is something wonderfully enduring and robust and unyielding about a rock; indestructible too; and there is something even more basic and fundamental about whatever it is that constitutes the ‘bedrock’: it is as if we can both lie upon and rely upon something primordial and archetypal; it reaches into us and stills the soul. The bedrock is our reassurance - and always the backstop in our hour of need. Just as the shadow archetype reminds us of the perils and deep darkness that may befall us, so the ‘bedrock’ is the stable nucleus around which our being constellates. From its furthest reaches in geological time the bedrock is indispensable to our material and psychological existence: shake it, shatter it, destroy it - as in an earthquake - and we are left helpless and terrified. And as we extend the idea of the bedrock beyond the physical, we lean into the foundations of our culture and society; these rest upon a carefully wrought structure of political and social values that underpin our institutions and form the basis of our conduct. Values - such as freedom of expression and the richness of diversity - constitute the rock upon which our well-being rests and upon which the flourishing of society depends. Moreover, our psychological selves and identities forever depend on the solidity and reliability of something certain, something reliable, something enduring. We need a certain bedrock upon which to ground our lives. We can witness artists aligning themselves in relation to the literal and metaphorical meaning of the ‘bedrock’: Some relate to us through an engagement with the solidity and permanence of substance and matter; others reflect the layering of history and meaning that echo the forms of geology, whist others still, grapple with the surface - the interface - between ‘earth’ and the world of human being and human artefact. Subtly, too some place themselves firmly between a rock and hard place just to show us the liminal mysteries of space and place. In this exhibition, a group of artists working in contrasting media realize their commitment to the integrity of self and world, the physical and the metaphysical, as well as cool thinking and deep passion. They have pleasure in sharing their intimate ways of expressing different aspects of the bedrock at the heart of their cultural lives.
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