Tilt | Belinda Fox & Neville French
Long time friends and collaborators Neville French and Belinda Fox embark on a journey that explores the emotive metaphor of the sea.
Belinda Fox Profile, Artist Profile
Combining their expertise of ceramics (Neville French) and that of printmaking and painting (Belinda Fox), the two artists form a formidable pair engaging and pushing the potential of each medium in order to create works that are charged with emotion and commentary.
With the sea as their metaphor the two artists began discussing the expansive subject and what it evoked for each of them, as French states, “We began our project with discussions about humanity and the plight of refugees that are forced into dangerous situations through circumstance and the lengths people will go to be safe. One of Belinda’s large works depicts waves that ebb and flow and increase over the drawing to evoke a sea, ‘a raging sea, mad, wild, messy, unforgiving, beautiful, powerful, uncompromising – a metaphor for the world we live in.”
Evoking this momentum of emotion Fox expanded, “they ‘hold on, let go, scramble, help, hinder, brave, scared, Humanity in all its guises – survival, cruelty, luck, compassion, desperation, death, life, instinct, humility, harshness, family, fate. We all know this cannot end well – the ship is falling….the world is tipping. The drawing evokes a feeling of imbalance and disquiet and we aim to strengthen this feeling by relating the ceramics vessels.”
Ceramic vessels hold a long history of recording the human experience – joys, fears and beliefs – for people over 15,000 years. And as a result were instrumental for Fox and French to represent the human experience.
An installation of ceramic works, elemental porcelain vessels are used to distil a sense of place and through collaboration they aim to add heightened intensity and breadth to the concept and mood that Fox has conceived.
Working together over the last six years, Tilt promises to be a unified and exciting collaboration for a pair that has such a solid understanding of the other’s practice.
EXHIBITION
TILT: BELINDA FOX AND NEVILLE FRENCH
14 Jul – 3 Sep 2017
Manly Art Gallery & Museum
Courtesy the artists and Manly Art Gallery & Museum.
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