Michelle Charles
7 June - 27 July 2008
Michelle Charles' subjects are the stuff of everyday domestic life - glasses of milk, medicine bottles, tea towels, pan scrubs and bars of soap. Working in series - in paintings, drawings, photograms or cast glass - she repeats a motif to explore the possibilities of how we might see the same thing in many ways, depending on the fall of light or the attention we give it. Recent series include house flies and the knitting and unraveling of wool.
Michelle Charles writes: 'What concerns me is how painting's fluidity and malleability as a medium is able to translate objects into liquid and translucent states . . . I am particularly interested in the relationship between vision and memory - what is lost, forgotten or retained. The repetition, therefore, becomes a means of holding onto the image, giving back to it a certain attentiveness. In some ways my inspiration comes from being a passenger on a train, or peering through a gap in curtained windows, accessing frozen moments, fragments we store and misremember or forget as they pass into memory.'
This will be the first major exhibition of her work since she returned to London after living and painting in the United States for more than twenty years. The catalogue will include essays by distinguished critics Dore Ashton and Guy Brett.
Michelle Charles' exhibition preparations have been grant-aided by the Arts Council England.