DEBORAH WESTMANCOAT & STEWART GEDDES, ‘Material Fact’

8 April – 1 May

Deborah Westmancoat is a painter based in Somerset and showed as part of Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2014. She has a long term interest in alchemy and the philosophical sciences and how they help us to understand landscape and our place within it. Current works focus on the collection and use of site and weather specific waters (flood, rain, hail, dew, frost and snowmelt) combined with ink and natural elements to record peculiarities and attitudes of place.

Stewart Geddes is a Bristol-based painter and lecturer, and currently Trustee to the Royal West of England Academy. “Cubism and its apprehension of the physical world via temporal/spatial mechanisms continues to have a hold over me, as does its adoption of the Classical building blocks of the cube, the cone and sphere. But in keeping with Ben Nicholson’s tendency to ‘scour’ a surface, or Matisse’s palette knife ‘scrape’, I too am interested in the significance of erasure. I speculate that this connects to the Surrealists assertion that the redundant or defunct object is liberated to hold new, more poetic, less functional meanings, which in turn connect to the idea of the Modern Ruin – ruins that were only recently the last word in newness.”

Material Fact is an exhibition of recent works by both artists.

(Deborah Westmancoat is studio1.1′s LOTTERY SHOW winner 2015,
tickets are now on sale for the draw for next year’s winner
who will be announced during Frieze weekend 2016 and will be given a show in the gallery’s timetable in 2017)