Private View: Thursday 24 August, 2017, 6:30 – 8:30PM

Exhibition: 25 August – 24 September, 2017 

Since meeting in Greece Josephine Callaghan Sarah Cameron have developed work in parallel.  The work in this exhibition exists alongside their conversations, looking at contemporary landscape and traditional notions of the term in relation to their interest in Romantic literature and landscape painting.

Josephine Callaghan studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture (2006) and The Royal College of Art (2014). She works across photography and sculpture to consider the popular interpretation of landscape as romantic. The sculptures in this exhibition are developed around a specific area–the coastal road that links Athens to Cape Sounion. Much of this state protected land has been infiltrated by touristic development. Its panorama is therefore scattered with faded pensions, hotels and villas; a legacy of an assailing building boom of the recent past.

The architecture frames a craggy shoreline that offers respite to the inhabitants of the densely populated city. The faces and figurines on show come from the beaches where nudes gather; where the sensitive body bathes in tactility, luminosity, sonority. Lone swimmers take sun; cruisers walk the bushes; anglers fish from the rocks. It’s at times an uncomfortable space where pleasurable seductions of individualism exist in tandem with the social law of a common coast. Using clay, Josephine works with this spectacle of sea, rock, faces, lusts, drives and libido. The medium’s plasticity evokes this atmosphere, conveying flesh as organ that is both subject and object.

Sarah Cameron studied at Edinburgh College of Art (2003) and The Slade School of Art (2014). In this exhibition she uses material from a 2016 performance from which she generated a series of abstract paintings. The work explores how a ‘free association’ method of making images can be interconnected and differentiated from a socially formed mental image bank. The work operates dialectically between the arbitrary and the understandable and relates to her on-going interest in Romantic landscape painting.

Sarah’s method of working is related to identity formation and how the viewer’s experience of a work can be modified through cropping, framing and display. In this exhibition she is also showing photographic works that are suggestive of image distortion and aspiration.

Sarah and Josephine also work as part of the group ACTIVE BANK.