With Christmas approaching and 2013 coming to an end we thought would have a look back at some of the shows which caught our eye here at the Art Circus. 2013 was a great year for art, not just in the big galleries and museums but also in the degree shows, the tucked away smaller galleries and the newer satellite art fairs, all showing fresh and exciting artwork.

Lets begin with 1. Claire Partington’s elegant and witty ceramics (shown above) in ‘The Islands Across the Sea’ at the Jame Freeman Gallery. Have a read of Claire’s Q&A for the show. Continue reading “Art Circus’ Best of 2013” →

The process of painting overtakes the process of thinking. Spatial figuration leaps over the linearity of reason and encompasses it. A chaos which belongs to the cosmos and patterns of infinite variance, but also contains an essential oneness. It is first a mirror that reflects the dense complexities that inhabit body, mind and soul, and those which surround them; it is then a synthesis and a figuration of some perceivable order, of cause and effect, of tensions and harmonies, of continuity in time and space, of infinite depths and constant transformation.

This body of work first came about as a discovery of a new space; I first found it whilst drawing a space I couldn’t recognize as somewhere I had “visited” before; This drawing sang to me about echoes and a space that is shattered by time. I tend to think of this recent body of work in terms of music- the landscape almost floats in space where light and shadow take on the identity of form, making up a composition of rhythms that reverberate but also diverge and spin out into other dimensions. Light and dark pushed towards the edge of colour tell of the flows of being and becoming, the unfolding narratives of perception and the impossibility of emptiness, stillness or nothingness. Key is the relationship to water, in figuration and imaginative embodiment, its essential presence as a transformative and reflective substance. Continue reading “Art Circus Spotlight
‘Edge of the World’ and ‘Echoes, Rhythms and Deep Flows’
By Dalit Leon” →

‘Remembering the Mountains’, as the name implies, is about remembering a landscape. Remembering, longing for something which may no longer exist. Much of my work takes personal experiences as a starting point, and so do these pieces. My parents are Swedish, but i grew up in Pakistan. I went to boarding school in Murree, at the foothills of the Himalayas, surrounded by mountains. In the summers, we often went walking in Northern Pakistan, getting much closer to them – the Himalayan, Karakorum, and Hindu Kush ranges. I left Pakistan when i was 19, and since then i don’t see many mountains. But when i think of my childhood, they are always there. Much has changed since then, of course. The mountains i have in my memory have changed – glaciers melting, new roads, less forest, more houses. Other things have also changed – greater political and societal unrest, drones and terrorism, water shortages and floods, to name a few.

First, i made the mountains in clay, and then made a mould from them. Then we put the moulds in a kiln, and the RCA glass technician Anthony Harris filled them up with molten glass. Since they are big and solid, we had to wait for one and a half weeks until we could take them out of the kiln, and crack open the moulds. I usually work in ceramics, but i made these in cast glass; clay was too solid and physical. Glass seemed more transient, translucent, intangible – like memories.

See more work by Ester Svensson