TOUCH:STONE

APT Gallery, 19th - 22nd November 2020
Unfortunately the exhibition has been postponed following the announcement of a second lockdown. We will endeavour to put as much online as possible and give more details via Instagram.

To touch stone is to run one’s fingers over the passage of millennia. A seam of quartz in a block of granite is the mark of a sudden influx of superheated rock along a line of weakness in something cooler. A stain of red in a slab of sandstone may be the result of a winter’s flood washing what’s inland out to sea. Events which change the nature of our bedrock.

Margaret Higginson finds her forms by going on a journey into the material she is working in, following its texture, reading its history, allowing its nature to express itself. To find a fossil buried in the stone is a cause for wonder. To catch daylight through fine alabaster is to remember its former use in the windows of medieval churches. Texture is a temporal event.

Patrick Semple’s drawings are like stone – painstakingly slow depositions of image on image, obscuring, granulating, leaving fragments behind. Their form and flow is the result of following the nature of the images, their lines and shadows becoming seams in the surface of the paper. They are often found images, sometimes family, echoes of lives lived and moments passed.

The past six months have caused many people to reflect on their lives and reassess what is important – what makes them themselves. Isolation is an intimate, intimidating and often revelatory experience. In the face of illness and death we experience time with more acuity, we question our motives and those of others and we appreciate small things with greater depth. This exhibition is intended as a reminder of that simplicity and that depth.