Everday Irregular

Maragaret Silverwood – Dear Diary

Everday Irregular

17 September – 7 December 2011

everyday …  of or happening every day, daily; common, usual; appropriate or pertaining to weekdays, not Sunday…irregular not regular; not conforming to rule or to the ordinary rules; disorderly; uneven; unsymmetrical; variable…

Everday irregular brings together the work of eight artists whose work muses on the everyday, be that through their choice of object or subject to draw, photograph, paint or animate, or through sculpture to literally reconfigure an everyday object into something remarkable. These artists encourage us to consider the ‘things’ in the world that surround us, that often we pass by, throw away or resent. In saying this, they are not paying homage to the objects they depict and use to make art but pressing us to consider the massive amount of things required for daily existence and order in our lives; of how numb we are to stillness and to really looking at the detail of our immediate surroundings and that sometimes the most ordinary of objects can actually be, in a particular light, quietly beautiful.

Painter Glenn Burrell takes functional ‘active’ objects, covers them in paint and then painstakingly removes the skins, creating disabled facsimile objects in a spectrum of pastel colours. Burrell’s work is a curious morphing of the ready-made, painting and sculpture. In contrast, sculptures by Rob Cherry mash together found objects in a glorious cacophony of colour, line and absurdity. For Bill Culbert, other people’s unwanted goods offer opportunities for transformation, via the illumination of these objects with fluorescent tubes. When dissected by light, detergent bottles and a 1950s Formica table have never looked so elegant and striking. Jill Kennedy’s animations take us on a journey of domestic confusion, where ants, rats and hypnotic cats rule the roost. Meanwhile, the meticulous drawings of Margaret Silverwood are a commentary on how often our daily existence anaesthetises us to the presence of other species and to indulging our own interior worlds of imagination and memory. Kevin Capon’s photographs elevate everyday objects and events to the realm of the quietly heroic, while at the same time charging them with a simmering suburban tension. A similar tension can be found in the inky blackness of Roberta Thornley’s beautiful photographs of everyday and throw-away objects, each of the images attaining a Cluedo-like quality. The arresting paintings of Jude Rae take the idea of still life into another realm. Here, the objects are assembled as though they are recipes for tension and action: the pressure of gas cylinders, the possibility of a table-top flood, an orange rolling into the gallery space.

If anything, the work featured in this exhibition is testament to the amazing ability of an image or an object to literally stop you in your tracks and allow you to view the world momentarily through someone else’s eyes. Our own everyday becomes irregular.

Greg Donson
Curator/Public Programmes Manager