An exhibition of painting and ceramic by Jane Dickins, Tom Norris, Julie Sumner & Lorraine Wake.
Jane Dickins
Jane Dickins is an Australian artist living and working in Deal, Kent. She paints fluid silhouettes of animals and people using gestural lines and brushstrokes. Jane began drawing and painting in 2019 and credits Japan with her understanding of mark-making. While living in Japan she practiced calligraphy with a Japanese Master. It was a formative experience, emphasising economy of line and the potential for meaning to be present in a single brushstroke. Originally trained as an Archaeologist, Jane is inspired by the immediacy of indigenous and folk art traditions. She is drawn to the challenge of distilling a subjects essence into just a few lines and a limited palette of colours.
Tom Norris
For Norris, making vases is a process of remembrance, of summoning, visualising and solidifying memory. Optimism and discipline are foundational aspects of his work. So too are playfulness and poetics. The signs and symbols suspended on the surface of his compositions are a visual language, the arrangement forming something like a verse. Norris strikes a contrast between hard-edged forms and loose gestures, yet there is an ease of movement between them, developed in some sense by the smooth curvature of his vessels.
Julie Sumner
Julie Sumner uses her lifelong relationship with the Kent coast to make paintings from the edge of the sea, drawing on the rhythm of the waves to create a choreography of looping lines dancing across the canvas. Her paintings are meditative, exploring states of harmony through connection with the natural world. Always an artist at heart, Julie filled the fleeting pauses between family life and her nursing career with an ongoing series of quick observational paintings of whatever was nearby inside and outside, creating calm amidst the chaos.
Lorraine Wake
‘I try to work with space and time expressing and dancing my way to a “feeling into” until a point is reached, each mark like a heartbeat, a mantra to life. Rhythm at its best.’
Lorraine Wake trained and worked as a graphic designer for a small Publishing house in London. She then went on to do a degree in Fine Art at Falmouth College of Art, followed by a P.G.C.E at Cornwall College, St Austell. Awarded a three month residency in North Africa, Lorraine lived there for a year teaching part-time at the American School of Marrakech.