Lyrical Poesis

Exhibition by Hawke's Bay artists Amy Barclay and Sharleen Gamble.

Amy is a degree graduate at the Eastern Institute of Technology, specializing in oil painting, with future plans to study the Masters’ creative practice in 2020.

She is influenced by 20th-century expressionist painting in the way those artists rendered the figure using highly contrasting colour pallets. Traditional life drawing sessions have driven her creative practice. Painting from life assists Amy to capture the essence of the three-dimensional forms, analysing the volume and size from different viewpoints by being in the room.

Her intention is to achieve images of the nude figure expressed through the materiality of the oil paint while applying a gestural energetic approach to painting allowing the paint to dominate over the subjects. The forms suggest a physical life-sized presence as well as life and movement within the compositions.

Sharleen's disciplinary field is abstract sculpture with a focus on an explorative process and the use of materials that have a history and a story to be told. The research informing my practice explored the idea of the Deleuzian fold. She has worked with wood and steel experimenting with creating folds and open-ended forms that have investigated the possibilities of folding solid materials through space and time.

Alongside this exploration Sharleen has also investigated a sculptural language that embodies and references notions of fluidity and movement. She researched the sculpture of Richard Deacon, specifically his work UW84DC, 2001 which uses an organic, twisting, sweeping curvilinear visual language.

Sharleen's sculptural practice pays attention to structure and form, boundary and edge, shape and surface, interior and exterior, inside and outside with a focus on the interaction between process and materials, testing limits, exposing materials and materiality.