The Signature of Small Things: An exhibition of painting by Daisy Cook & ceramic by Olivia Horley
The Signature of Small Things, An exhibition of painting by Daisy Cook & ceramic by Olivia Horley

‘...every walk is a sort of crusade’ (Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’)

Daisy and Olivia both keep a daily practice of walking, share the experience of walking as gateway to creativity, the genius of walking as a tool for serious noticing, when a walk is undertaken with a mindset of presence more than productivity.

‘...attention is prayer’ (Simone Weil)

This daily practice leaves a groove across the passage of time, like a signature. The discipline of attention, hard won in our day of distraction, is also an invitation to open to the footprint of the incidental, the chance of what the day’s walk brings. Both Daisy and Olivia bring this dual ethos to easel and wheel, trying to distill the essential in a drive towards beauty, listening to the signature inside.

‘...We cannot cage the minute’ (Louis MacNeice, ‘The Sunlight in the Garden’)

Materials have their own signature, a will towards particular expression. Daisy might follow the impetus in a spill of paint, or accidental mark as spur; Olivia throws each pot not in strict repetition but with a sensitivity to the burgeoning moment and fluctuating form. Listening to these subtle prompts is a way of listening to the call of things.

In a ‘disfeatured world’, which daily witnesses a ‘winking out here, a tiny extinction there,’ the signature of small things begs to be noticed.

 

 


DAISY COOK

 

Daisy Cook is a British painter of landscape and still life.
 
Cook creates abstracted paintings that take landscape and still life their subject without being explicitly topographical.There is a subtlety of surface and depth, texture and light. Her landscapes are quiet and contemplative interpretations of natural environments and her interiors are equally as experiential, created by dragging, dripping and pouring oil paint that is rich in earth pigments. In all her work, Cook looks for new methods to build tensions between shapes, with the paintings made slowly and revealing themselves over time. Some areas are ambiguous and veiled, others clear and sharp.
 
'Through a suggestion of silvery clouds and mudflat she evokes a littoral: not a specific view or portrait of a place, but a larger statement about this type of country as a habitat for the spirit, a place where the imagination may soar. Photographs are used as reference, but the key energy of these paintings resides in Cook's singular ability to recognize and identify the extraordinary in the ordinary. Her particular quality of recognition breathes through her images, animating them. Intuition and chance play their part, but they would be inert without the guiding principle of the artist's vision.’
Andrew Lambirth (excerpt)
 
Cook's works are in the collection of the Bank of England, Heckfield Place; La Caixa Bank; Majorca One Aldwych; Manhattan Loft Corporation; The Great Eastern Hotel; Hoffman Investment Management; and the Royal Free Hospital, London. Her work has been shown at the Royal Academy, Mall Galleries, Pump House Gallery, Beaux Art London, Sladers Yard,Bridport ,Sibyl Colefax and John Fowler and Berkeley Square.
 
 
OLIVIA HORLEY
 

“They arrest from a hectic world something that is held and stilled. They express the breadth of our humanity,” she says, “from daily grind to ritual and feast. They are humbly our most essential artefact, carrying water, quietly there first thing in the morning, last thing at night.”

She has always wanted to make quiet, beautiful pots that could be used daily and bring comfort.

 

Horley grew up around pottery. A French studio potter lived on her family’s farm, and she would watch him throw from a young age. Handmade pottery was part of daily life: the Mexican Pueblo ware from her mother’s childhood, Danish pieces collected by her parents, Limoges from her grandfather. Her grandparents were artists, and at the Steiner school she attended, making by hand – something the Steiner movement believes connects us to humanity – was taken very seriously. After art school and studying painting, she worked in the art world for many years before a degree in ceramics beckoned, followed by an apprenticeship with Edmund de Waal.

 

Stillness, serenity, the shaping of silence found in the slowness of things made by hand, are key to Horley’s practice. So, too, is the idea of opposite forces meeting: stillness and gesture, the industrial and the handcrafted, softness and precision.

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