Exhibitions
Bottom Drawer
GBS Fine Art are proud to present Bottom Drawer, a collaborative exhibition of recent work by Jemimah Patterson and Rachel Schwalm.
The bottom drawer is a long-established repository for items of value - sentimental or otherwise - to be preserved for some indeterminate form of posterity. Artists Jemimah Patterson and Rachel Schwalm’s Bottom Drawer is a metaphysical one as revealed to us in a new collaborative exhibition in GBS Fine Art’s gallery in Wells. Emotions, shadows and memories are neatly packaged within found vintage boxes, ambrotypes, antiquarian books and entomologist’s drawers. Together they rework these once treasured media adding their own layers and preoccupations to them. The finished pieces have become palimpsests of their past.
Ever present in Patterson’s work is the acknowledgement of her being one of a set of conjoined identical twins now separated. Her paintings make twins of us all through their manipulation of paint on mirrored and reflective surfaces. Her subjects - her chairs, metamorphose on these surfaces to explore human emotions. Sometimes isolated chairs become complete once paired or grouped together. Often an imperfect chair becomes entire once viewed through a reflection.
There’s an overwhelming sense with her work that you are not alone, and in fact part of something else which makes up a whole form.
For Bottom Draw Schwalm uses original framed Victorian Ambrotypes which she embellishes with props. These unnamed persons, photographed in a formulaic seated portrait style, are now actors, the protagonists of fairy tales, myths and legends.
Bottom Draw, the exhibition, runs alongside Head to Head at GBS Fine Art in the gallery in a Georgian townhouse overlooking the Cathedral in Wells in Somerset.
Ever present in Patterson’s work is the acknowledgement of her being one of a set of conjoined identical twins now separated. Her paintings make twins of us all through their manipulation of paint on mirrored and reflective surfaces. Her subjects - her chairs, metamorphose on these surfaces to explore human emotions. Sometimes isolated chairs become complete once paired or grouped together. Often an imperfect chair becomes entire once viewed through a reflection.
There’s an overwhelming sense with her work that you are not alone, and in fact part of something else which makes up a whole form.
For Bottom Draw Schwalm uses original framed Victorian Ambrotypes which she embellishes with props. These unnamed persons, photographed in a formulaic seated portrait style, are now actors, the protagonists of fairy tales, myths and legends.
Bottom Draw, the exhibition, runs alongside Head to Head at GBS Fine Art in the gallery in a Georgian townhouse overlooking the Cathedral in Wells in Somerset.
