SOLID MATTER: Effie Burns, Jill Tate & Katy Cole

Exhibition: 12th May - 24th June, 2023

Preview: Friday 12th May, 5-7.30pm

Katy Cole, *Tethys*, pencil on paper, 29.7cm x 29.7cm, 2023

Solid Matter explores the alchemic premise: as above so below, drawing together three artists, Effie Burns, Jill Tate, and Katy Cole, each of whom show meticulous care and consideration in how they work with materials.

The exhibition suggests a conceptual expanding framework for how we relate to being in the world: through touch and handheld objects, through being enveloped in earthly built environments, and through being aware of our placement within the wider cosmos. The artists also play with the alchemy between the component materials of the universe that they use to make work. For example, the gold in Effie Burns’ sculptures is remnant star dust from neutron star collisions, the silica from enormous exploding stars. Jill Tate uses organic earth pigments such as Burnt Sienna, Orange Ochre, Red Umber and Titanium, a terracotta colour palate that deliberately evokes the literal and metaphysical ground from which everything emerges and returns. Katy Cole’s drawings of star constellations, intrinsically incorporate carbon from the dying stars from which the graphite is made.

Effie Burns, *Big Mushroom*, Gilded with 23.5 carat gold, foraged in Robin Hood’s Bay, Photo credit: Ceri Oakes

Relating to the earth and what is tangible, Effie Burns uses traditional skills such as casting, gilding, and engraving to create contemporary miniature sculptures, inspired by the landscape and objects created in it. Her work shows an impulse to collect and preserve, inspired by childhood memories of living in a museum. By casting ordinary things, like mushrooms, and using coloured transparencies of glass and gold, things become extra-ordinary treasures, almost other-worldly. Burns says: ‘I am drawn to collecting and casting mushrooms because they can be both elusive and wonderful and I am particularly interested in the lace like mycelium structure that connects them.’

Katy Cole & Iris Priest, Seed Packets, various sizes: smallest 2 5/16” x 4 8/16”, largest 3.5” x 5 3/16”, ongoing series

Playing further on the network of ‘being’ within a botanical world, Katy Coles seed packets, created in collaboration with ecofeminist, Iris Priest, are adorned with intricate coloured drawings, connecting the healing properties of plants with the human body parts with which they are associated.

Jill Tate, *Changing Room*, oil on canvas, 51 x 61cm, 2020

Bridging the spheres of the earth and space, Jill Tate’s paintings and prints explore how the architecture we inhabit shapes our sense of being-in-the-world. Each painting begins as a scale model, which Tate lights, photographs, and paints. The decision to use a monochromatic colour palette is based on the premise that all things are fundamentally made of the same stuff: energy temporarily organised and experienced as solid matter. Often showing homely dwelling spaces illuminated by light, these spaces connect us to the earth, and to our context circling the sun. The use of light guides our awareness that there is something beyond, but hidden from view, leaving the works open to interpretation. These spaces can be read as sanctuaries or as prisons, and as Tate says the matter may be metaphorically ‘bricks or brain cells’.

Expanding outwards further, we arrive at Katy Coles drawings, prints and sculptures, both minimal and elaborate, detailing manmade and cosmic explosions and constellations. At times Cole limits these expanding forms within formal shapes, and at others they are left to fade towards the page. There’s almost a perversity at play in the awesome nature of manmade and cosmic beauty and destruction. Cole’s artwork demonstrates both our human abilities and control, and our ultimate insignificance against a magical mind-blowing backdrop of endless matter.

The Late Shows

Saturday 20th May, 7-11pm

As part of the Late Shows this year, our Gallery Manager & Fine Art Lecturer, Rosie Morris, will be teaching drawing from one of Jill Tate’s architectural models. Drop by on Saturday 20th May anytime between 7-11pm. No need to bring materials, we've got charcoal, paper and drawing boards to help you make your very own artwork.

Artist Biography’s

Effie Burns lives and works in Whitby, foraging things on walks along the cliff paths, through parks and woodlands. Effie likes to work seasonally to create small collections of unique botanical sculptures throughout the year: ‘As the seasons unfold, I find myself continually collecting things. I enjoy working with the alchemic and ancient properties of glass to distil nature into something else and to capture a moment in time’.

Effie casts directly from the mushrooms she finds, in a process known as ‘burn out’ or ‘lost organic casting’. Though the mushrooms disintegrate into ash, at times this leaves mineral residue, where the original is imprinted within the glass.

Her work has been exhibited in the UK and internationally. From a collection of cast glass mushrooms in the Armitt Museum to a casket of botanical treasures in a medieval castle in Bavaria.

Jill Tate (b. 1983, UK) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her paintings of simplified architectural scenes are based on scale models she has constructed and photographed. She is interested in our experience of home and its existence at difference scales, such as the mind, the houses we inhabit and our shared planet. Using natural, warm colours and evoking the softened geometry of raw earth buildings, her monochromatic paintings dig down to the underlying unity at the root of all things, contemplating the physical and psychological structures that surround and shape us.

Jill received a 1st Class BA (Hons) in Contemporary Photographic Practice from Northumbria University (2005) and began painting in 2017. In 2021 she was awarded an Arts Council National Lottery Project Grant for Degrees of Freedom, and a DYCP grant for Groundwork in 2022. Longlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2022), Jill has recently exhibited at The Sunday Painter, Unit 1 Gallery, BALTIC, Bloc Projects and Hastings Contemporary. She is enrolled on the Turps Correspondence Course 2022-23 and her work is held in private collections worldwide.

Katy Cole is a visual artist living and working in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Katy’s practice explores the line between the actual and the fantastical. Manipulating scale and imagery, combining science fact and fiction, she examines the human will to explore, inhabit, colonise and capitalise on the unknown. Katy’s practice incorporates drawing, painting, collage and installation and draws ideas from literature, landscape, and found imagery, in order to create visual stories representing potential futures. Some of her most recent work in collaboration with artist Iris Priest has seen the creation of a series of ‘seed packet’ drawings which exhibited in group show ‘Habit, Ability’ at the Newbridge Project, Newcastle in the summer of 2022. This work considers what we can learn from nature's way of adapting, regenerating, healing and surviving.

In 2021 Katy undertook the Abode Air Residency at the Auxilliary, Middlesbrough alongside collaborators Annie O’Donnell and Sarah Tulloch. This culminated in a large-scale installation for MAW (Middlesbrough Art Weekender) in September 2021. Katy has exhibited in London and Italy and undertaken a residency in Venice. She also exhibited at BALTIC centre for contemporary art in group show ‘They used to call it the moon’ in 2014/15, which led to her first solo show a solo exhibition at 36 Lime street, Newcastle in October 2015.

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