Exquisite Art, Experimental Sculpture & Delicious Crafts

Landscapes and Much More - Group Show (no.170)
A really great show featuring a bunch of really different artists and work, I really enjoyed visiting this venue and I wish I could have spent longer chatting to the artists and soaking in their lovely garden sunshine but the life of a blogger on the last weekend is like Damselfly. Firstly artist Alison Chaplin opens her studio to her more recent ventures into work inspired by our local Epping Forest.

Her paintings are so rich and vivid and have an incredible depth of field. She has really captured that sense of being covered by Epping Forest from all the concrete and smoke of East London. Because it is her open studio, you can also see plenty of her other work such as her portraits and even more commercial and sharp commissions.

Round the back of the garden is a collection of work from artists Beryl Caiger, Paula Caiger and ceramic sculptor Gill Roberts. The work is really cosy and oozes a real warm, crafted glow.

The final artist on show is Rob Lovell, his paintings which he still calls as still developing and expanding are sharp, abstract structures that you can unravel and connect with. They are greatly inspired by the early works of Peter Lanyon as well as to an extent the reproducing of landscape through psychogeography. I really like his style of painting and if he is continuing to develop it I really forward to following!

BGB Presents Sculptures at Cupboardy Mansion (no.134)
Really expressive and physical sculptures that are full presence and process. It is a real mix too and just from having a quick look, I could over hear others each picking out there own personal favourite.

Chapel End Arts & Crafts Association (no.96) 
Photography to weave to the best damn brownies I have ever tasted. The artists and crafters who have their stalls up here are the real place to get some essential Walthamstow gifts, for others and for yourself. My eyes were instantly glued to 'Fish Knits' intricate and skilled ceramic mosaics.

This last Sunday in fact there is a touch of end trail festivities happening here too, from 5pm til 10pm there will be activities for children and a little get together over a drink, some crafts and again I will say, the best brownies I have ever tasted!

Broken Bees, Bugs & Birds. Drawings by Sarah Hardy (no.38)
If you have been to Arts & Crusts you would have seen Sarah's sweet cake of decay in her sugar sculpture of insects and fruit and her wonderful hand drawn wallpaper.

Here she opens her studio space, her individual drawings of death and decay. It is interesting because she was saying how she didn't realize the scale difference between her individual drawings and the scale of those on the wallpaper which is smaller. Somehow smaller, because the intricate detail in her individual pencil drawings are so fine that the wallpaper must have been an incredible task to take out. You can also see alongside her drawings, her collection of dead and withered insects and amphibians that she will be capturing through her pencils. 

Experimental Ceramic Works by Amanda Doidge (no.117)
In these very recent sculptures that are displayed in Amanda's studio space, they walk on a fine line between organic and mechanical. She has been exploring themes of change, metamorphosis, transformation and how these occur whether through force or natural order.  

There are parts where that change is forced and there is a quite aggressive aesthetic, but there are others were tensions are created by natural physics and it looks like it is sprouting organically.

These ceramic sculptures are ones to be looked at for a while and the more you think about it, the more meaning you can conjure up, and this constant transformation of meaning is possibly the sculptures most important success in exploring change.