From Ice Cream Hill to Long Rock

Our current show on the magnetic wall is a series of ink drawings by Mary Claire Smith, From Ice Cream Hill to Long Rock. These images are made in response to Mary Claire’s daily walks along the seafront from Whitstable to the nature reserve at Long Rock. These walks inspire a journal of shapes and marks: land forms, patterns on water, cloud formations. Mary Claire has set out to capture the landscape as well as the biodiversity of this special place with its wetlands and shingle banks that attract a variety of flora and fauna. The rewilded slopes are home to a significant population of Hog Fennel which supports the endangered Fisher’s Estuarine moth only found here and the north Essex coast. In addition the shingle banks host a variety of migratory birds, particularly waders, terns and geese.

Mary Claire Smith’s work is rooted in a sense of place within the natural environment, employing abstracted forms and lines reminiscent of botanical life to evoke imagined worlds—below water, above the earth—a return to something ancient and deep, wild and mysterious: of nature and the body.

She studied fine art at Portsmouth Polytechnic and printmaking and illustration at postgraduate level at Central St Martins. She has worked as an editioning printmaker and studio assistant at Paupers Press and Hope Sufferance studios, London. Her work is shown by Frank gallery and Columbia Road Gallery. Recent shows include the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, Lido Stores, and Linden Hall Winter show.

The show continues until July 21. We hope you can make it.

If you are interested in any of the drawings, please email us for details and individual photographs.

Other work by Mary Claire Smith can be seen here

Thanks to Sam Grady for the photographs.