Heads and Tails explores the interspecies bonds formed between people and animals and how they may look at home, in the workplace or in the wild. Ten artists reveal something of dynamics of freedom, subjugation, and inclusion, between species with corresponding parallels in our society.
From left to right: Tim FitzHigham FRSA, FRGS, Creative Director: Guildhall and Creative Hub, Cultural Officer; Baroness Evans of Bowes Park who opened the exhibition during our Private View on September 8, 2023; Paul Vater and Paul Barratt
© images of Private View by Ian Burt, 2023
CURATED BY PAUL BARRATT AND PAUL VATER, CONTEMPORARY AND COUNTRY
We are very grateful for the technical support of Anna and Sam of This Way Up in helping with the installation. Special thanks to the Borough Council of West Norfolk and King’s Lynn, Tim FitzHigham FRSA, FRGS, Creative Director: Guildhall and Creative Hub, Cultural Officer, Dayna Woolbright, Newman Curator, Lynn Museum, Jenny Caynes, Project Officer, Norfolk Museums Service, Mark Fuller, Principal Project Surveyor, Jenny Caynes, Project Officer, Norfolk Museums Service, Sharon Clifton, Communications Manager at BCWNKL and Jennifer Taverner, Press and Communications for Contemporary and Country. We are also grateful to the volunteer guides within The Guildhall for their support in making every visit to these galleries and the wider King’s Lynn cultural hub a great experience.
Heads and Tails focuses upon depictions of people and animals, by ten contemporary artists based in East Anglia, each with a different approach to their subject.
Included within the exhibition are portraits of people accompanied by animals, these may be domestic pets, working animals in their work setting, wild animals in their natural habitat as well as animals from mythology and folklore. Nine of the artists included are based in Norfolk, one in Suffolk. They have exhibited widely throughout the country. Their work is approachable, showing how animals interact with us and are impacted by human activity. Media includes painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, taxidermy, textile art and clay modelling.
KATAYOUN DOWLATSHAHI has pioneered Carbon Prints that are enormously difficult, time consuming and expensive to make but no other pigment-based process can produce blacks and depth of shadows as dark as the carbon process. Another highly sought-after characteristic of the medium is the depth of the pigmented gelatin layers that render the image with a subtle relief.
“The results are always thoughtprovoking and intellectually rigorous, but they are also emotionally connected, and moving on a human scale. In short, they are beautiful.” Les Buckingham on Katayoun’s photographic works
ROGER HARDY’S sculpture is figurative, made from reclaimed wood, metal and with earth pigment additions, configured to create the human form. The starting point for his creative process begins with natural erosion and seasoning of his wooden component parts, often in the local river, the Alde. As Hardy says: “In recent years I have been collecting wood from our local forests and woodlands. These forms are quite different to those found on the estuaries and shorelines. I am preserving it and giving back life and soul in the form of the human figure. They seem to have a soul/life becoming an icon of humanity. This aspect fascinates me.”
JOHN KIKI has developed a rich figurative language over the past 50 years that encompasses a fluid abstraction alongside a changing cast of characters borrowed from Greek mythology, history genre paintings, and his own observations of how people interact in daily life. His long career has included exhibitions in museums and galleries such as the Royal Academy, Tate, Hayward, Barbican, and Serpentine Galleries in London; OK Harris Gallery in New York, and Galerie Wahrenberger, Zurich. Influences are many and varied – Pollock, Bacon, Matisse, de Kooning, Baselitz, and Picasso.
RACHAEL LONG makes largescale sculpture of animals and birds, using redundant farm machine parts. The alchemical transformation of cold hard metal into a fluid animated creature is what interests Rachael. She graduated in History of Modern Art BA in 1990. An award-winning artist with successful public commissions across the UK including Lifeboat Horse at WellsNext-To-The-Sea, she has work in collections based in France, Austria, New Zealand and the US. Rachael says: “For me stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, meaningful experience. ”
EMILY MAYER spent many years in the UK and the USA learning traditional and ‘cutting edge’ taxidermy techniques that proved to be an unorthodox route into complementing her activities as an artist and model maker. In 1986 Emily attended Norwich School of Art (NUA) studying Sculpture. The disarmingly life-like quality of her taxidermy preceded that of artists like Damien Hirst and Dorothy Cross. She moved the creative potential for taxidermy beyond the baggy and balding specimens in display cases of regional museums, introducing taxidermy to sculptural production. Sadly, Emily passed away in April 2022.
JESSICA PERRY trained at Norwich School of Art (NUA) in Fine Art Painting, 1985, and subsequently worked across East Anglia and London, exhibiting paintings and sculpture in group and solo shows. Focusing on the hidden imaginary worlds of underground creatures has given rise to Jessica’s ‘WeatherMole’: an ongoing, wry visual commentary observed from the perspective of the commonor-garden mole, vole, snail or slug. She designs innovative and functional recycling projects with plastics, metals and textiles which form a key part of her own artwork and her educational input within workshop and community settings.
ROSIE PHILIPS is a self-taught portrait painter, who was featured in an episode of the prestigious Sky Arts Portrait Artist of the Year competition, 2022. Attention to detail and achieving a likeness is really important to her. Time and time again she finds herself inspired by the people and animals around her. This has allowed Rosie to communicate expressions and relationships that feel both specific and universal. She strives to convey a sense of narrative and personal flair. “Some stories I would have never heard if it wasn’t for my paintings. I want to encourage people from all walks of life to see the magic in these ‘inbetween’ moments.”
LOUISE RICHARDSON is a multidisciplinary artist working in mixed media sculpture, textiles and photography. She studied art at NUA, followed by a Fine Art MA (multi-disciplinary) in 1995.Shown nationally and internationally, her work is held in many private and public collections. “I am currently looking at the idea of memory and identity, bringing universal messages to the viewer, through the portrayal of objects in my own memory. The diversity of materials within my work – both found and processed – gives me the opportunity and freedom to invent metaphors which run parallel with the subject matter.”
COLIN SELF was born in Norfolk, studied at Norwich School of Art and attended the Royal College of Art (RCA) in the early 60s. He is one of the leading protagonists of the British Pop Art movement that he helped start. His clever, irreverent drawings have been sort after ever since. He is one of British Pop Art’s finest exponents. He has remained true to his Pop roots and sees potential in the everyday objects that surround us. His work is fresh, immediate, and frequently delivered with a punchline. He calls himself a ‘hunter’, seeking out connections between objects he has selected out from the detritus of mass consumption.
NESSIE STONEBRIDGE’S work draws inspiration from the bucolic, wild and wind-battered Norfolk surrounding her studio. At the heart is a fury of beaks, encircled by fan-like, semi-abstracted wings. The result is an aviary of attack and defence, intimating the basic fightor-flight behaviour of even the most diminutive of birds. The gestural brilliance of her mark-making with paint that is then scored and splattered with a palette knife, brush or by hand – a deliberate and considered structural vortex. Her paintings are routed in the energy of the external world into a painterly lexicon of sharp, curved edges and electric colour.
Contemporary and Country (C&C) present art and handmade objects by emerging as well as established artists and makers from the east of England in nongallery spaces celebrating our rural surroundings.
We work with those who include the natural world in their subject matter or production process. They bring about a closer understanding of the countryside, what makes the east of England landscape so unique. Looking creatively beyond the passing trend they encourage greater consideration for nature, as its appreciation and preservation becomes ever more prescient to our time.
For more contact paulvater@contemporaryandcountry.com
OUR FUTURE PLANS
We are currently drawing together a programme of exhibitions for 2024 and beyond, including:
THE YARE GALLERY, GREAT YARMOUTH STAPLEFORD GRANARY, CAMBRIDGE HOUGHTON HALL STABLES
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At a glance
It comes as something of a comfort in a world driven by novelty and change for changes sake, that contemporary artists are still attracted to people and their animals as subject matter. This may be because humanity’s capacity for self-regard is almost infinite and we see ourselves reflected in animal traits, as much as an animal’s inherent qualities. Their symbolic status in art historical terms often provides a coda or entry into the main subject of a painting, although meaning has altered depending upon when the artist lived.
