Exhibition - ancestry

ancestry

Artists explore the theme of Ancestry each producing images that reflect their own unique backgrounds, histories and perspectives.

Janet Campbell:
Janet will be presenting several paintings exploring her maternal ancestry line through five generations – the mitochondrial line. There will be individual portraits and group scenes inspired by Velasquez’s Las Meninas utilising mixed media (oil, acrylic, pastel, charcoal and collage) on canvas.

Carry Gorney:
Carry is using torn lace and old photographs, fragments salvaged from the vanishing world of her refugee ancestors. She has scorched and singed ghostly faces and created a series of ephemeral images by stitching heat-distressed fabrics to the lace of another time. Materials; lace, photographs, torn papers, inks, Tyvek, synthetics, acrylics, gelli-printing.

Sarah Phillips:
Sarah will be illustrating the threads of creativity that permeated her childhood and inspired a lifelong involvement with art, craft and design. Her maternal great grandfather was a Victorian lace designer in the East End and her great grandmother was a pattern cutter. One of her earliest memories is of her Sunday lace on a rag doll mob cap that her aunt made for her. She will visually embody a nostalgic representation of the desire to collect, horde and recycle that she has inherited from her paternal grandmother who carefully and lovingly preserved buttons, lace, trimmings and unravelled wool.

Chris Demetriou:
Chris will be investigating the areas and specific places of London that have shaped his life, and that of his ancestors and children, utilising a series of photographs.

Veronica Slater:
Veronica Slater manipulates images, taken from old family album photographs. Producing a series of paintings, that probes our process of recognition. These create an unsettling iconography which perhaps reflects the emotional mine field that is family and is ultimately our ancestral legacy.

Litza Jansz:
Litza Jansz uses photo montage to reimagine the ages and relationships of family members over four generations. By playing with time in representing different generations interacting at the same age her work subverts the power relationships within families and the rigid boundaries of the nuclear families within them.