AirSpace Gallery Graduate Residents - Alice Walter and Naomi Harwin

The gallery's newest members arrived this week - Alice Walter and Naomi Harwin were selected from a large list for the AirSpace Gallery 2014 Graduate residency programme.

Over the course of the next 6 months, they will have free studio space, regular support meetings and mentoring sessions with Gallery directorate and artist professionals, hand-picked to suit their needs. AND two exhibitions - an interim Window exhibition, halfway through their residency and a Solo Show in January.

It's great to have them both here with us - and here's your chance to meet them.


Alice Walter

I am interested in that of the quiet and the in-between, of things which are independent from strict definition and singular meaning but no less pronounced in their sense of purpose and significance. Each depicted form in my work strives to possess pronounced but ambiguous connotations that echo as amalgamations and regurgitations of past observations, experiences and feelings, but made sensible in some way. Within the composition they attempt to weave themselves into alignment along the periphery of language, like a thought forming, or a weird dream; forms and figures take on a symbolic sense of culmination and importance, despite their vague connotations instead of exact labels and their often quiet scale, tonal range or minimalism. Their vague suggestions and hazy realism in colour— despite nothing to figuratively realise— act as an initial anchors into each painting.

These gateways in attempt to make way for a different perspective where they in themselves become irrelevant; instead it is hoped that a more independent way of understanding and seeing can be reached, that does not rely on a system of a language or outside dictating force. It enters onto a curious, communally personal world, where understanding doesn’t need to be reduced to the monosyllabic in order to be relevant, and that it can be far more so if it isn’t.

Paints stickiness and flatness marks the paradoxical nature of language, where a painting is at once an illusionistic image and an over familiar object, and I find this an ideal metaphor for the restrictions we find our limitless psychologies bound within.

Naomi Harwin

At the core of Naomi Harwin’s practice is a desire to explore and understand the relationship between one’s self, the objects that surround us and the environments we occupy. Most recently, she has been focusing particularly on the processing of visual stimuli, striking up a dialogue between a form and its represented image.

Through playing with materials and employing the aesthetic qualities she finds herself drawn to, the attention of her studies has become the forms of her own construction. Using processes associated with mapping she is able to both generate and assess the forms, her traceries acting as records of her findings from explorations of the surfaces. Amongst these discussions Harwin also considers different methods of displaying her work to create a dynamic and engaging experience of the facets and features of these objects.