Tell Me What You See
The Festival art exhibition this year features works at the intersection of image and abstraction by photographer John Rux-Burton and artist Martine Wesley-Worrall. The exhibition opens with a Meet the Artists event on Friday 16th October at 6.45pm in the atrium gallery at the Knighton Community Centre – all welcome.
John Rux-Burton
My images begin as photographs — glimpses of the real, briefly caught through my lens. Then I break them, compelling software to misread and rebuild the fragments; forcing it to mimic the attempt at resolution undertaken by both artist and viewer.
I work in the interval between perception and loss, where images hover between mimesis and abstraction. Human interaction dictates outcome. Mono (物) thing → Ma (間) → Mono myth. In this I recognise an affinity with the Japanese movement Mono-ha — the “School of Things” — which sought to reveal the relations between material and void. My work continues that conversation, not by letting things be, but by letting them become through digital and human misreading — misread, perhaps, in an empirical sense, yet in the Mono-ha manner of tobi-ishi (踏み石), a stepping-stone between material and void, they are not misread at all, but become the blur from which the mind reassembles significance.
Each piece begins as record but ends as question: the visible re-imagined through choice, error, chance, choice, question.
This is an aesthetic of discovering and remaking, the play between the fractured and the human desire for significance. That desire is the tracery of wabi-sabi gold that rebuilds form in the viewer’s mind, a form that is endless possibility, endlessly the wabi-sabi of imperfection — the void and meaning held as one.
But though it is transient, it does not dissolve into diffusion. Every glance reasserts the search for meaning. This is not the effacement that is rinne tensei (輪廻転生), it is the assertion that the self, whilst it can still look, will never slip from the pursuit of meaning, even as it sits on the rim of the void. I call this Simulism. A new way for seeing. A new way of feeling. A new aesthetic.
Martine Wesley-Worrall
Martine invites people to see value and reward in engaging with slowness in a world of instant gratification.
She is a mixed media artist inspired by colour, form and texture and is predominantly process led. She likes to find balance within what she chooses to control and where the materials take her.
Martine’s work often explores abstract landscapes, sometimes as a direct response to what she sees around her and sometimes her palette becomes highly saturated and evocative of a purely emotional response.
Martine strives to bring a sense of place, hope and magic to the viewer.
