Materiality and Landscape
Simon Olmetti / Annette Mills / LouLou Morris / Elizabeth Ransom

This exhibition connects each artist’s engagement with the physical landscape, nature and materiality. Various art practices, including contemporary basketry, tapestry, sculpture, performative drawing and alternative photographic techniques, are used as means of researching transitional spaces and identity.

Annette Mills: Baskets and Woven Structures
Annette’s research explores process in art. She interrogates her own practice, contemporary basketry, using journals, sketchbooks and experimental pieces. Annette employs traditional basketry techniques; looping, braiding and twining to develop a personal, tactile language to reveal her own creative process and concepts linked to embodiment and material thinking. Annette works with plants she can grow, harvest and forage: daffodils, iris, grasses, rush and willow which contain within them a sense of place. Her works emphasize transitional spaces, containment and displacement. Each piece acts as a manifestation, indicating changes occurring in her creative process whilst making explicit the intangible nature of basketry.

LouLou Morris: Memorial Pillar
LouLou makes tapestry sculptures exploring the connections between emotional journeys and movement through the landscape; the main focus of her work is weaving as an evocation of loss narratives. This piece, placed to complete a ring of ancient stones in Dorset, speaks of disenfranchised and interrupted grieving.

Simon Olmetti: Cruising the Forest
Simon’s practice-based research focuses on nature and its queering, particularly its liminal spaces like forests, stone circles, and other places connected to spirituality. His aim is to reclaim the land, a space often hostile or denied to queer people, making it at the same time a spiritual endeavour.

Elizabeth Ransom: The Woods
Place Attachment is recognised as a cognitive emotional bond to place. For immigrants this may be places from their homeland, their current place of residence and often times both making the transnational experience a conflicting understanding. Constantly torn between two places, two homes, two existences. The Woods investigates place attachment from an autobiographical perspective. Elizabeth Ransom retraces a walk from her childhood throughout the length of a year collecting soil and plant samples. By returning to this site Ransom documents the space using the light sensitive chromatography process to create a record of her places of attachment.