Sunday, March 12, 2017

Pie Factory Margate POW event Material Matters.

I went to the opening of Material Matters at the Pie Factory Gallery in Margate on Friday.

Open 10th to 21st March 10-5pm Tuesdays to Sundays.  Pie factory website here

The exhibition is part of the women's festival POW and includes five woman who work in a variety of materials. I really enjoyed the exhibition and it is well worth a visit.



Julie Parker is showing work made out of such things as hair and lint. Artists using hair always intrigue me, showing the visceral feeling of something that was attached to our body and associations with ritual and the sacred. Loose Ends, made from such things as bed sheets, wax and wire, is a large sculptural from suspended from the ceiling. The work for me has organic  links with animal and 
human forms.





I am always drawn to light and Flora Gare's piece Castles in the Air seemed playful and explored resin and lights in a sandcastle form. I have been thinking of using resin for a while to cast seaside themed objects and so  it was interesting to see that done well and with the addition of lights.



I also enjoyed looking at I Spy (Night) a circular mono print that evoked the night sky and landscape.



Sally Childs was showing Shibari inspired paintings and soft bodied figures. The paintings were evoking the female body with the sinuous forms of the ropes used in Shibari. Evocative and sometimes unsettling they draw you into the image and forms portrayed. I also loved the calligraphic 
marks of her dancer pieces.


Sally Hayes often works with plastics and in The Little Black Sack  Veolia's Little Black Dress,
a model form was showing a black dress made of woven and shaped plastic strips and pieces, which played on the nature of bin bags and fashion.  Sally's plastic drawings were also playful and I loved the little dragon forms.




The glass in Shirley Eccles work evoked fragility and strength to me, glass though sometimes easily broken can last centuries. In her piece The Roads We Walk,  I saw the glass shapes forming shoe lasts  and echos of feet.  I liked her use of hot glass in drawing, scorching the paper and then threads of glass left on them.