Beyond Edges

Text by Amanda Croft

In this elegant and thought-provoking exhibition of paintings, glass artefacts and sculptures crafted in wood and metal, three woman artists have come together to investigate, interrogate and interpret their immediate locale and shared hinterland – a geographical corridor that runs from the ancient fields of Glarryford and its hidden Mesolithic past to the rising hills of Knocklayd, and the townland of Lagavara above the rugged North Antrim coastline.

All three artists, Nicola Nemec, Andrea Spencer and Sharon Adams, respond to the physicality of the land, the impact of man’s intervention on its topography and the effects of changing atmospheric conditions, but they also evoke an essence of place with works that reflect their individual connection to landscape, one tempered by memory, emotional and personal experience, and the potential and constraints of their artistic practice.

Sharon Adams’s relationship with the landscape of Glarryford is familiar and familial – her energetic, spontaneous drawings and resultant abstracted sculptures “focus on the area that falls within the horizon seen from my home/studio” – a reconnection with the fields and vistas around the farm where she grew up and recently returned to after many years living and working in England.

Adams is a maker working with wood and metal, but drawing is integral to her practice. Rapid marks, delineating the edges of old field boundaries, horizon lines, the patterns of hedges and farmyard gates, are made with both immediacy and deliberation. More recent drawings are intuitive responses, abstracted drawings which were then transformed into three dimensional twisted maquettes in copper wire, lit to throw enlarged shadows creating further expanded drawings which in turn formed the basis for her larger three-dimensional steel sculptures set on handmade concrete bases. The strength and energy inherent in these coiled metal pieces is complemented by a more delicate liveliness of line in the smaller versions which play with traces of light and shadow and which have also been the basis for a series of silver brooches and pins.

These three-dimensional drawings require a measure of technical and conceptual problem solving – how to weld and manipulate steel into a fluid delineation of space or, in the case of her wall-based wooden drawings, how to seamlessly splice separate sections of planed wood to create a continuous, sinuous line. The results are playful and confident descriptors of form and space.

For Nicola Nemec, the landscapes she experiences in North Antrim and the West of Ireland are both fixed and fluid. Mountains and clifftops are immutable boundaries but river courses, tree lines, hedges, fences and fields are impermanent features, their edges altered by man and frayed by climatic conditions – flooding, veils of descending mist, shadows cast by looming cloud - land constantly in flux. Often her paintings are of no fixed locations but are an amalgam of places visited and remembered, poetic evocations of place.

Her use of a limited, beautifully modulated tonal palette of silvers and greys, blues and blacks with flashes of greens and purples, is reminiscent of Whistler’s elegiac Nocturnes as well as the fluid watercolours and oils of T.P Flanagan and the later works of Basil Blackshaw, both Northern Irish artists she has cited as inspiration after childhood visits to the Ulster Museum.

Nemec’s practice is measured, slow and reflective, exploring the materiality of her medium by building up layers of paint over a considerable period of time. Yet the fluidity of the painted surface belies such control as in paintings, like The Edge of Shade, where the liquidity of the pigment slowly leaches downwards and softens the border between the trees and their watery reflections. The outlines of hills and escarpments are glimpsed through the changing atmospheric conditions – visible then invisible as light and shade suffuse the scene. Her landscapes seem timeless, liminal and elemental, abstracted representations of her personal, emotional response to the transience of the natural world.

Light permeates the work of all three artists – Adams employs it to ‘draw’ shadows from her coiled, sprung sculptural maquettes; Nemec’s paintings emulate the way light diffuses through the landscape creating ambiguous space and scale and Andrea Spencer exploits the qualities of light as it passes through her elegant glassworks of natural forms.

Spencer’s affinity with landscape and the natural world comes through a marriage between science and craft, of observation, analysis and transformation, and her studio is like a wunderkammer, a cabinet of curiosities, filled with shells and seaweeds, the skull of a gannet, the carcass of a tiny song bird, flower heads, seed pods and egg cases collected from rock pools, walks along local beaches, foraged from hedgerows and gardens.

She has an analytical interest in the interconnections between human, animal and vegetative forms – how they so often share similar structural patterns, how the nervous system in the brain and the blood vessels of the lungs correlate with the network of veins in a leaf or the roots and branches of seaweeds. Drawings of these observations form the basis of Spencer’s delicate glass sculptures which are worked using both traditional and innovative flameworking techniques. Whereas Adams draws in space with steel, Spencer draws uses oxygen fuelled torches to heat and manipulate the molten material into delicate tendrils of liquid glass. Works such as We are Nature illustrate these natural cross-overs and demonstrate how Spencer translates her empirical research into an aesthetic outcome.

Some works are built up by fusing individual pieces of worked glass into complex relationships – a glass gannet’s skull is entangled in a wreath of seaweeds mirroring how the dead bird was found on the beach - others are discrete and stand alone.

The transparency, translucency and opacity of her medium allows Spencer to subtly emphasise light passing through delicate structures, such as the petals of mophead hydrangeas, the seed cases of lupins or the gas bladders of seaweed. Spencer’s works such as these are elegant and refined observations of “the edges where human nature and the natural world fuse”.

Despite having very different practices, by exhibiting together, Adams, Nemec and Spencer have found a seepage, a leaching of ideas and strategy that both unites and challenges, and pushes their work Beyond Edges.

Amanda Croft

October 2021

Beyond Edges

Nicola Nemec : Andrea Spencer : Sharon Adams

Text by Amanda Croft

Amanda Croft

October 2021