Lightwaves

Coral Churchill & Caroline Mackenzie - Lightwaves

Lightwaves is an exhibition of new paintings, sculptures and a collaborative installation by Coral Churchill and Caroline Mackenzie. Both artists explore the transparency, fragility, and vulnerability of humans in the world today. Together they have created a personal ecosystem fuelled by fantasy, wonder and seduction, a space of togetherness that acts as a panacea for the turbulence of the world.

Churchill’s watercolours of imagined land and seascapes are effervescent with colour and offer a hyper saturated reality. At her hand nature is intoxicating, at once alluring and repellent, abstract and alien. Her molecular approach to looking breaks down the depicted surfaces, creating mind-expanding representations of the world.

Mackenzie presents three specially produced wave sculptures that are half nautical capstan, half domestic water vessel. Their form is shaped using the digital graphs of healthcare, vaccinations and coronavirus cases, summoning the multiplicity of language and the current intensity of the notion of a ‘wave’. Light dances through the water as the viewer can peer down the telescope-esque peep hole - perhaps a glimpse into another world.

The exhibition culminates in a collaborative installation, an organic ecosystem in which nature and the synthetic, science and the surreal intertwine. Energy enters the system through Churchill’s use of colour and pattern which is incorporated directly into the walls of the space, flooding the viewers retina. Reminiscent of a psychedelic release, the abstract forms are synchronised with a soundscape featuring an amalgamation of sonic healing techniques, amongst waves of electronica. The push and pull rhythm of the sea can be felt through the installation, with the aim to transport the viewer intrinsic feeling of solidarity and shared experience.

Coral Churchill was born and lives in London. She studied a BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. She was an artist in resident at the Muse gallery with a solo show in 2013 and has exhibited twice at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with work in public and private collections Coral Churchill’s paintings takes inspiration from natural forms reflecting cloud, land and seascapes and merging biomorphic structures and forms. The horizon is a connecting and repeating point, with prismatic light a central focus to create otherworldly spaces. Images are interlinked, sampling different references from natural forms, photography and botanical illustration. The paintings focus colour into chromatic gradients, echoing the refracted light that rounds each day in sunrises and sunsets. Her work is centred in studies of nature, from the iridescence of jewel-like insects to deep sea creatures and their strange neon bioluminescent lights.

Caroline Mackenzie explores the conceptual aesthetic of suspension through sculpture, installation, moving image & sound. This is investigated through a physical play of gravity, as well as the metaphorical notion of creating a suspended disbelief within her audience. The work can take on a live and ephemeral performative presence, sitting in-between fact (science) and fiction (cinema), often manifesting as contained ethereal environments. Physics makes way for trickery, as these otherworldly objects are often recognisable from the language of product design or derived from film or theatre sets. Light play often typifies the work, as investigations of transparency through materials attempt to evoke sensory immersion. Mackenzie was born in London and is now based in Margate. She studied for a BA in Fine Art Sculpture at Central Saint Martins and an MA Sculpture at The Royal College of Art. Mackenzie has exhibited nationally at South London Gallery and Camden Arts Centre and internationally through Art Core at Baroda’s Art Centre, India.