Floating Worlds

Latest group show at Frank

Floating Worlds, our latest exhibition, features the work of three British contemporary artists who work across drawing, print and paint (from left to right): Janie George, Matthew Swift and Esmé Clutterbuck.

The title of the show refers to the worlds these diverse artists have created, worlds that are populated by textures and shapes that lie beyond earthly concerns, above the world, untethered to place or time.

Janie George works across printmaking, painting and ceramics. Her work is an intuitive response to the blending of the natural world with human experience. Plants and their lives, their relationship with pollinators, photosynthesis and mineral growth are woven into the visual narrative. The patterning of insects, shells and rock are considered within the layered and imagined space of an image. Colour is important as it sets an emotional temperature. Selected palettes create a sensory climate for the motifs to settle into. Form is developed from ideas about generative processes and set in a moving space of water and air.

Janie’s prints, paintings and drawings have been shown in Britain and internationally. Janie has an MA in Fine Arts from the Slade School, University College London, and is member of the Jamaica St Studios – an independent artists’ collective in Bristol’s Stokes Croft area. An associate lecturer in printmaking at Bath Spa University for fourteen years she is now a lecturer at Bristol School of Art.

Matthew Swift recently re-discovered lithography as a way of investigating the way a sensitised queer body develops strategies to understand and protect itself from the world it moves through. Hairs, like multiple antennae on the skin, alert and inform of potential threats and danger; they can also cluster into fur, enveloping a fearful interior with protective warmth. Drips, stains and poured liquids mimic and resemble physical bleeds, sweats, and spills of the body, they also resonate in parallel with the ebb and flow of emotional forces deep within our skins.

Matthew gained an MFA in studio art from NYU, and has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Melbourne, London and Kent. Shows include ‘Constructure’ at Standpoint Gallery, Hoxton and ‘Dialogue with DeKooning’ at the Royal College of Art. He co-curated ‘24 Hours of Everything’ with Paula Stuttman for the Whitstable Biennale Satellite programme . He set up Ground Collective for which he has curated a series of exhibitions including ‘Ground Work’, at APT Gallery, London. In 2008, he had a residency at the Florence Trust. He was shortlisted for the Chiara Williams SOLO Award, and has recently completed a two month residency at PADA, Barreiro, Portugal. He works from his studio in Whitstable, Kent.

Esmé Clutterbuck works with drawing, photography and print.

Her most recent drawings are made with Bideford Black and other earth pigments sourced in North Devon. Initially they were planned as a series of 100 small drawings, “Working rapidly, in fairly quick succession, allowed me the freedom to follow an initial impulse wherever it went,” she says.

The drawings are reminiscent of fabric designs or the celebration of rituals. There is joy in the purely optical. They also suggest the scientific: cell formations, planets, solar systems, the cycles of life and the female body, generation and growth. “I love the idea that our universe is essentially unstable: that substances are mutable, and that our bodies whilst new in human terms actually contain atoms that are billions of years old.”

Esmé studied Painting at the Royal Academy Schools and Printmaking at Central St Martins, and has a studio in Bristol.

She has been selected for numerous Open Exhibitions including The Royal Academy, The Royal West of England Academy (Open and Photo Open), ‘A Room of Her Own’, Irving Gallery, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, International Print Biennale and The Discerning Eye. She has also been involved in residencies both here and abroad.

During the past year Esmé has taken part in “Common Ground” a 3-person show at Studio KIND, North Devon, The Sustainable Art Open, Atkinson Gallery, Millfield School, an artist-fundraiser for Médecins sans Frontières (for Gaza) and the RWA Open.

The show is up now and continues through March and April. Our opening hours are here. All works are for sale. If there are any pieces you may be interested in that are not online please email us for details.