Colour field

Kirsty Adams, Jill Campbell & Katie Mawson

Preview: Thurs 30th May, 5-7:30pm I Exhibition: 31 May - 6 July 2024

Jill Campbell, Summer Blue, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 80cm

Calling to mind the Colour Field painters Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, artists Kirsty Adams, Jill Campbell & Katie Mawson, capture the spirit of a place through abstraction, colour, and light, working in porcelain, paint, and vintage book cloth.

Colour field is an exhibition of works that powerfully evoke memories of landscapes. Each artists choice of colour, medium and material is carefully considered, creating a captivating mix of sophistication and simplicity.

Kirsty Adams is an award-winning ceramicist whose work retains the spontaneity and delicacy intrinsic to making on the potters’ wheel as well as memories of landscapes from her past and present. Each collection captures an essence of place through her use of colour: her Icelandic collection evokes the dramatic volcanic landscape through onyx black porcelain glazed with copper green or cobalt blue glazes, and white tin dipped rims to symbolise water crashing and foaming, inspired by a research trip to the Skogafoss and Gullfoss Waterfalls in Southern Iceland. Similarly, Kirsty’s Rock Pool collection uses strong colour dips inspired by her local beach King Edward Bay in Tynemouth, and her limited edition Tenmoku tea bowl collection celebrates twenty-five years since training in Japan.

Jill Campbell is a painter based in County Durham inspired by the ancient mining landscape called Cockfield Fell where she walks nearly every day. Jill is captivated by the Fell’s otherworldly quality: early morning shadows framed by big dramatic skies. Its pools, pathways, mounds, dips and curves underlie the composition of Jill’s paintings, to create images that border abstraction, but retain their sense of landscape and seasonal colour and light. Jill has made new work for this exhibition; they are earthy, gold and fresh with green and a sense of morning dew as if the fog has just lifted.

Katie Mawson’s palette is informed by daily wild swims in the Lakes at sunrise and her collection of vintage cloth bound books. Katie Mawson’s eye for colour complemented her successful textile business for many years, and has more recently informed her art practice, which has grown from strength to strength. Katie says of the covers she collects: ‘The array of colours is infinite, many of them faded and marked through time . . . they all have a former life and story.’ Katie deconstructs these worn covers, reconstructing them into arrangements of colour and shape to achieve a sense of balance and tranquillity. Though small these works take on a complexity and depth akin to a Rothko painting, creating a quiet mediative space for contemplation.

This exhibition offers the joy of colour, light and form, and creates spaces to sink into and reflect.