COME SEE COMME CA - Art Gallery - EXHIBITION #002 / 2021

HOPE MILL | 113 POLLARD STREET| M4 7JA | EX DATES: 23.10.21 - 10.01.22

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Going into the winter season, we decided to bring together thirteen artists who have all exhibited with Comme Ca Art at the INNSiDE by Melia Manchester, The Lowry Hotel and the Comme Ca Art Gallery during 2021. The exhibition opened on Saturday 23rd October with a brunch preview, which proved to be highly popular. So much so, we intend to continue our brunch previews in 2022. 

 

With a passion for creating high end artworks at affordable prices, this group of ten artists are producing some of the most exciting art currently being created in Manchester. Each artist has their own unique style and whilst they stand apart from each other they also compliment each other, creating a vision of beauty, colour and light throughout the gallery. 

 

For more information on the artworks in exhibition, please contact Claire Turner, Gallery Director.

 

RACHAEL ADDIS

 

Rachael’s paintings are dynamic, highly tactile, flamboyant, cohesive, and show her remarkable talent for both blending and diversifying colour. She uses a variety of alternative and unconventional materials instead of paint brushes to build up layers of paint, which give a hint, of often spectacular landscapes, seascapes, built up areas, or weather patterns. Indeed, she often uses understated colours to create a sense of calm. 

 

Her teenage life in Asia, particularly in Thailand and Hong Kong is the influence often perceived in her work. Picture her on a Thai beach experimenting mixing paint, sand, fine coral, seaweed, and salt water to develop an extraordinarily colourful canvas. 

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BIG H - HENRY CHAN

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Henry's art is mainly a mixture of graffiti and pop art with popular culture often his subject matter and his art often satirising current issues in society such as celebrity culture, power and commercialism.

With his art Henry wants to arouse the senses and stir the spirit and wants his art to visually stimulate the observer through strong images, colour, patterns and words.

Henry often enjoys the look and feel of tight and accurate geometric lines mixed with strong vibrant colours and bold patterns often surrounding a central figure from the world of popular culture.

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CARL CAMERA

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Comme Ca Art became aware of Carl Camera’s artworks through Instagram. His love of calligraphy, mixed with his street art style of painting executed perfectly on the canvas surface didn’t disappoint when we invited Carl over to the gallery to show us his works. 

 

His unapologetic use of vivid fuchsia and bright yellow colours only adds to the beauty of his calligraphy craftsmanship. Carl is full of ideas of how he can transcend his work from the canvas to other surfaces including furniture, lighting and interior structures. 

 

We are looking forward to seeing how Carl progresses in his art journey. This is definitely one artist to look out for. 

 

PHIL CONSTABLE

 

Artist and printmaker Phil Constable works by layering images via screen print, utilising half-tone photography, symbols, mark making with gold and silver gilding on various surfaces including paper, board, and glass.

 

Documenting industrial sites and spaces, often focusing on trace images created by construction markings and/or graffiti that has often been covered or ‘painted out’ poorly. Phil finds these images and incorporates them as part of a readymade dialogue between the mediums of the mechanically reproduced image and the brush.

 

Multi-layered imagery encourages the viewer to visually explore the surface, the texture, and depth within the work echoing time and memory.

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REBECCA DAVY

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Rebecca Davy’s primary concern when creating her artworks is the act of painting itself. Her focus is on what she describes as “the seductiveness and sensuousness of pushing paint on canvas”. She is particularly attracted to painting the colourful, the ephemeral and the kitsch, constructing paintings with a strong element of light and colour that satisfies both the subject and its medium.

 

For her, sticky and colourful things such as sweets and icing are good subjects for the visceral qualities of paint. Bringing these two elements together produces a new realm between kitsch and the hyper real, paintings that flow into being from the artist’s imagination.

 

JAMIE JONES

 

Jamie Jones is an 80's kid who obsessed over cartoons, toys, skateboarding and hip-hop - you'll probably see that in his work.

 

Jamie has been inspired by countless artists all his life, but his real love of art is nostalgic references - building on the familiar and creating something new.

 

Street art and pop art are big influences, but he has always been fascinated with anatomical illustrations and their incredible details. Looking under the skin gives a surreal insight in to what’s hidden beneath, and this has been a focal point for Jamie’s recent work.

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JO MANBY

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Jo Manby paints imaginary scenes in which flowering plants blossom across subtle, shimmering backgrounds, where birds and butterflies alight on twisting stems and branches. Wild and cultivated flowers are captured in a refined delineation.

 

Different emulsions are used to develop chalky or satiny coloured grounds for intricate paintings inspired in part by nature writing and a renewed interest in noticing the small environmental details all around us. British hedgerow wildflowers and birds like chaffinches and jays are often overlooked or taken for granted, but they have a miraculous beauty of their own. Brought up in the countryside, Jo aims to revisit and celebrate this magical quality in her work. 

 

In her other current paintings, she looks further afield, for example the Eastern bluebirds in cherry blossom or the bewitching Long-tailed Paradise Whydahs in an African desert rose tree. Jo is influenced by the historic chinoiserie style that conflates Chinese and British design, particularly its ornamental flowering trees, intricate curvilinear and arabesque forms and layering of subtle but intense colour.

 

Jo’s hand-painted Wild Rose Screens are an example of how her work fits well into a fashionable interior. Undertaking commissions for mural painting in domestic or commercial settings, and for bespoke items such as multi-panelled screens, the decorative aspects of her approach to painting, inspired by nature, are foregrounded.

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SOPHIE NIXON

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Sophie Nixon's paintings are inspired by her life, the conflict between her busy career and social life in Manchester and the slower pace of the time she gets to paint and travel around Europe, especially Italy where her father lives. These two sides to her are played out in the dramatically different styles of painting; vivid representations of the buildings and people that form her city scapes, capturing the essence of the sulphuric lights and blurred visions of a Manchester night to the sublimely calm, bright sunlight casting shadows on a lone building or figure. 

 

Sophie works from life, spending time drawing and photographing the scene she will paint and prefers the medium of oil paint.

 

Whilst drawing on her life, Sophie is also inspired by other painters, primarily the works of Hopper, Lowry and Rothko and has been more recently introduced to the work of Jock McFadyen and Ben McLaughlin.

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EMILY SEVILLE

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Emily Seville is a visual artist and maker working predominantly in ceramics and watercolour painting. Her work is concerned with our relationship with and connection to the natural world, often focusing on our intrinsic link to the land and the mark we are making upon it. 

 

Emily seeks to find connections to the Earth through her artistic processes. All of her ceramic pieces are hand-built, expressing the tactile nature of clay and the presence of the artist. The incorporation of natural elements, such as leaves, within her process allows her to reference both form and texture through the materiality of her mediums. 

 

Her recent watercolour pieces are inspired by research into the positive impact natural patterns can have on mental wellbeing. Referencing the mandala form within her paintings, she uses repetition of pattern to create visual soothing paintings. Emily’s painting technique allows her to emphasise the materiality of the watercolour, drawing out the tones to create forms that are soft-focused while still having dimension.

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JACQUI SYMONS - SLOW LANE STUDIO

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Created from a desire to be more environmentally-aware, buy and consume fewer products and generate less waste, Jacqui Symons began exploring natural colour and dyes in 2018. She researched and developed the use of plant-based pigments for oil-based printmaking inks and from there expanded into making her own watercolours, pastels, inks, screenprinting pastes and dry powdered pigments from plant sources.

 

In 2019, Jacqui trained under Jenny Dean to learn about the use of natural dyes with textiles and yarns, drawing on Jenny’s 40 years of experience in this field to develop further knowledge and understanding of this increasingly relevant and valuable industry.

 

Jacqui created Slow Lane Studio to provide resources, information, practical advice and workshops focusing on natural dyeing, plant-based pigments and plant-based artist colours. Alongside working on creative projects and commissions, she is developing a pigment garden and a plant pigment library as a reference and resource for other artists.

 

The Dye Plant Series is a set of screenprints showcasing Jacqui’s drawings of dyeplants such as Indigo, Woad and Madder.  The colour in each screenprint is produced directly from the plant shown with the black produced using charcoal from willow grown in the UK.  In Madder (Rubia tinctorum), the red comes from the roots of the plant.  

 

Blues are obtained from the leaves of Indigo (Persicaria tinctoria) and Woad (Isatis tinctoria).  Woad has been grown and used as a dye in the UK for hundreds of years though there are many varieties of Indigo grown all over the world.  In Weld (Reseda luteola) the yellow comes from the plant tops and flowers though a green can also be achieved by adding iron to the mix. Coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria) flowers produce a bright orange and Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) creates strong yellows from both the berries and the bark of the plant. 

 

The screenprinting paste used with the natural pigments to print these pieces is made from wheat starch rather than an acrylic base, which creates tiny particles of plastic in our water-system.

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STEFANIE TROW

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Intense bold colours are pulled and scraped across the canvas, creating an expressive language of their own. Trow’s brushwork gives way to movement. The paint just about holds onto the image, creating an ebb and flow of realism, taken away from us sometimes by abstraction.  Like trying to grasp a memory, parts of the paintings remain vivid, whilst others drip and slide away from us, pooling into a new reality, ready for the viewer to unearth. 

 

Stefanie’s work belongs in numerous private collections, exhibiting across the UK at prestigious galleries such as the Albemarle Gallery, London, Saul Hay Gallery and Comme Ca Gallery, Manchester. She has featured in Baaba Maal’s music video “Gilli Men” and a Boehringer Ingelheim TV advert. Most recently she has been selected for the ING Discerning Eye exhibition at Mall Galleries and elected as an associate member of MAFA (Manchester Academy of Fine Arts). 

 

JACQUELINE TAYLOR

 

Jacqueline Taylor is from Manchester in the UK, where she still works and lives today. Taylor is an emerging artist whose main medium is oil paint. She is a painter who’s interested in realism. Taylor’s work is based around the everyday and leaves the observer of her paintings to decide the narrative of the scenes or people she depicts. She desires to make artwork that creates a feeling within and can be viewed many times over while feeling new each time it is observed. 

 

An example of this is in the painting Woman With Whippet (February 2020) where Taylor took a solitary subject and presented her in a room to be viewed, and for the spectator to catch a glimpse of what could be themselves in the mirror within the space. The reasoning behind why the woman is there, who is gazing at her and her emotional state can be reimagined many times over with a new narrative possible each time. 

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HANNAH WOOLL

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Hannah Wooll’s work has always been concerned with imagery that is slightly off kilter, exaggerated or fabricated. The portraits of women who at first glance are beautiful and uncomplicated then reveal themselves to be anything but, subverted from the magazine pages and old master paintings from which their heritage derives; laying sloth like in dead winter trees which belong in Technicolor film sets, or starkly lit in deliberately contrived and manufactured environments which are oddly dreamlike. 

 

More recently her paintings have been inspired by uncanny museum painted dioramas, figures strategically lit by phosphorescent fish tanks, and reflections in glazed paintings; portraits within portraits, gaze upon gaze. The paint itself is as powerful an enticement as the carefully chosen imagery; a slippery, fallible, distortive tool, rendering limbs and features clumsy and unreal, existing to be just a painted mark, which in itself lends a surreal layer of reference.

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PLEASE CONTACT COMME CA ART DEALERS FOR ANY ENQUIRIES. 

 

CLAIRE TURNER | claire@commecaart.com | T: +44 (0) 161 273 5495

 

CCA GALLERY 5TH FLOOR | HOPE MILL | POLLARD STREET | ANCOATS | MANCHESTER | M4 7JA

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