Pip Dickens | Paintings : Brittle Crazie Glasse

BRITTLE CRAZIE GLASSE

Exhibition Launch: Thursday 20th September - 4th November 2012

Curated by Lucy Newman Cleeve – Founder and Director of Man & Eve gallery in London. ‘Brittle Crazie Glasse’ is an exhibition that Lucy has been developing for the past two years, the title for which is taken from George Herbert’s poem ‘The Windows’.

Alistair McClymont, The Limitations of Logic and the Absence of Absolute Certainty, 2008, fans, humidifier, scaffolding, lights 3m x 2.5m x 2m (10' x 8' x 6.5')

George Herbert

THE WINDOWS

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?

He is a brittle crazy glass;

Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford

This glorious and transcendent place,

To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,

Making thy life to shine within

The holy preachers, then the light and glory

More reverend grows, and more doth win;

Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one

When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and awe; but speech alone

Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Usually understood in spiritual terms, the poem also works as a metaphor for how materials are simple ‘brittle crazy glass’ until they are animated by some other agent or phenomena such as light or sound, so that ‘life, colours and light in one/When they combine and mingle, bring/A strong regard and awe.’

Many of the works in this exhibition explore the use of light as an activating agent. Others recreate, describe or subvert natural phenomena. Still others create the appearance of a concrete physical object from the record of a temporal event. Even those works which approach the more traditional media of drawing and painting explore the slippage and boundaries between that which is immanent and that which is transcendent. Artists include: Richard Bevan, James Brooks, Sophie Clements, Mark Dean, Pip Dickens, Pippa Gatty, Alistair McClymont, Simson & Volley, and August Ventimiglia.

There are strong internal dialogues between the selected works concerning the use of video as a sculptural form, the history of photography and film as an artistic medium, the interplay between image and electronic music, and the relationships between science, philosophy, religion and art.