King's Lynn gallery announces exciting summer programme
Lynn's GroundWork Gallery will become a hive of activity this month, hosting a new evolving exhibition and introducing five artists in residence.
Extraction: Loss and Restoration will run from July 16 until the end of September and is part of a new consortium in Norfolk.
The gallery in Purfleet Street, which is dedicated to art and the environment, launched its Extraction programme last year in association with hundreds of other galleries and artists globally.
Artists working on the theme of “extraction” have now been selected from an outstanding range of applicants from around the world to spend a period in residence at GroundWork Gallery and its new consortium over this summer.
Supported by a grant from Norfolk Coast Partnership, Anthony Powis and Frankie Turk will explore, through their art projects, a range of highly topical extraction-related themes which are critical for the local environment.
A third artist, Sara Grisewood, joins the residency programme from the University of the Arts London’s prestigious, Art in the Environment residency programme.
Two further artists - Aindreas Scholz and Kathryn McGuire - will take part as associates, thanks to a new GroundWork Gallery residency consortium with the Grange Projects, Great Cressingham and Broomhill Wetlands, Reepham.
Anthony Powis will be there from July 16 to 28 His project proposes thinking with the liquid landscapes of North Norfolk - the Wash, the Fens, the coastland, the North Sea - as a means to draw out interplay between land and water.
“I start from the position that the landscapes surrounding the GroundWork Gallery are spaces of wetness that are intersected by geology—rather than solid landscapes intersected by water.
“I call this liquid form of landscape, in the Norfolk dialect, ‘Rafty Land'”, he says.
Frankie Turk will take over from July 29 to August 10. Co-founder of global youth-led organisation Re-Peat, Frankie aims to explore relationships between the geological strata of hard rock and the equally ancient strata of soft landscapes of peat. Alongside this she explores the building of cultural support networks as a form of regeneration.
Sara Grisewood moves in from August 15 to August 28. For this residency she says: “I am exploring rail freight lines used by quarries, curious about the entangledness evident in these anthropogenic landscapes, where infrastructures like railways intersect with industrial sites. This creates remnants of land, islands of precious biodiversity, which also hide/tell narratives of industrial histories and botanical histories.”
At Grange Projects, from August 8 to 19, Kathryn McGuire intends to research the silica quarry and ancient flint in order to inform her new work about our relationships with minerals. She says: “My primary medium is sculpture and over the last seven years I have researched the locations of minerals and metals and their histories.
“I am fascinated by the elements used in our daily life, by the rocks we carry about and are so dependent on (phones). There is 24.88% silicon in a smartphone. “
The Grange is a former Georgian rectory in ten acres which hosts integrated artistic activity.
At Broomhill, Reepham from August 7-20, Aindreas Scholz uses innovative and ecological photographic techniques. Using a new method of soil chromatography he intends to make a new vivid mapping of soil landscapes.
He says: “I aim both to provide a poetic mapping of soil impoverishment in the Norfolk area and to point forward to how this loss can, to some degree, be redeemed and rectified.
Broomhill is a private designated county wildlife site.
Previous exhibitors at GroundWork have included: Richard Long whose permanent work ‘The Great Ouse River Drawing’, 2016, remains opposite the entrance as part of every exhibition.
