Adam Ball: Graffiti Love

Start date: Thursday, February 22, 2007
Event is ongoing: Until Saturday, March 17, 2007

This collection of 20 paintings and works on paper represents one year's investigation into the energies found in nature, using the landscape, the sun alignments and Neolithic carvings as inspiration. The work explores ancient patterns and examines how light and childhood memory distorts places visited by the artist. These explorations are merged creating a fusion between the artist's surroundings and another ethereal world of fantasy, magic and pagan sun worship.

By applying thin layers of oil paint and the painstaking, subtle application of glitter and sometimes gold thread, each painting builds up a surface that pays homage to both the time taken to create them and to the ageless subject matter. Like the ancient carvings that were created to align with the sun at certain times of the year and transcend the viewer into a pagan trance, Ball wishes to "slow and steady our gaze, to lure us into the appropriate concentration upon each work."

Ball's use of psalligraphy (the ancient art of paper-cutting), also exhibited, is employed to create a delicate homage to an ephemeral world. White-on-white pieces, made by one sheet of hand cut paper, produce a plane of tranquillity with distilled timelessness, showing little sign of the endeavor involved. "They are labours of love that are slowly killing me."

Information from the gallery's site