` New Hall Art Collection - Exhibitions

  • About exhibition

    The latest series of prints, collectively entitled ‘Light House’, consider the way that multiple narratives and divergent messages emerge between one version of a story or fairytale and another. The visual vocabulary is based around a recurring greenhouse motif that simultaneously represents nurture, protection and suffocation. Archetypal house shapes are subverted structurally and contextually - frail and peculiar structures emit otherworldly light to suggest a mysterious or unexpected presence within the seemingly welcoming and safe space.

    One focus of the work is the emergence and demise of the earliest glass houses, designed and built by Joseph Paxton in the 1800s to house exotic flora and fauna. The immensely ambitious construction and rapid demise of such monumental structures as the Great Stove at Chatsworth House (Derbyshire, UK) and the Crystal Palace (London, UK), illustrates the inherent fragility of these man-made protective edifices. Ultimately, these early cathedrals of the industrial age were extremely vulnerable and were either dismantled or succumbed to the primeval forces of wind and fire.