This exhibition will bring together individual practices of three mid-career artists providing opportunities for audiences to consider not only the social positioning of ‘women of a certain age’ but also the inner worlds of those whose lives pivot on the cusp of change, often measured through life altering events.

Having already experienced the physical transformations of motherhood (with consequent scars and debilitations), women’s lives move into further periods of transition. Through such changes, a sense of selfhood is often sacrificed to the more urgent need to nurture the next generation whilst witnessing the deterioration and demise of the previous one. At times physical changes experienced across extended families coincide in a metamorphic collision. This creates a complex terrain characterised by puberty, menopause, illness and death. Such uncertain and under-explored territory can test the strongest of bonds.

With this landscape as the backdrop to their current work these artist/academics have chosen to bring together their varied practices to explore themes and expand the discourse around ‘intergenerationality’ and ‘autoethnography’, examining how these are addressed by contemporary art, literature and thought. In this, the first in a series of exhibitions, each artist has produced new works which reflect not only a diversity of experience, but also different approaches to thinking, making and disseminating art practice.

Clair Chinnery uses methods of taxonomy and analysis to reconsider the physicality of human bodies as they emerge, grow, mature and die. She makes objects and images informed by material residues left behind by such rites of passage. In her film and video works Janice Howard engages with philosophical thinking, translating and embodying complex ideas through poetic juxtaposition using footage and text sourced from differing times, locations and contexts. Lisa Richardson merges found components with a range of materials to make objects that can be ‘activated’ by performance. Sometimes beautiful, often absurd, elements of her work take on playful and—at times—theatrical qualities through which women’s varied attachments across and between generations are referenced and can be enacted.

Artworks in this exhibition include sculpture, photography, film and video.

The private view for this exhibition will be held on the 1st April 2019 at 6 - 8pm.