Never Mind the Bollards

York Street’s moving bollards are now complete, and the street looks less like a building site.  You can stroll around and enjoy the car-free luxury, pop into Toppings bookshop opposite the gallery, and then come and enjoy some paintings, sculpture and ceramics, as well as, of course, admiring the high-tech electrically powered traffic control measures.  We are in the last few days of our current exhibition, so many thanks to everyone who has come along this month to see Nichola Theakston’s archetypal animal sculptures, the landscape paintings, and Lara Scobie’s bright op-arty parian clay pots.

 

 

 

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.

Gregory Orr  Time to Shut Up

As the rain falls outside our resident bronze silverback soberly surveys the sheltering passers-by.
His is a tactile form, extremely pat-able, with his weighty look perfectly suited to the bronze he is cast in.

 

 

Nichola Theakston  Standing Silverback  Bronze, Ed. of 12  59 x 47 x 28 cm. £9,850

Next up in the gallery, opening on 13 May, one of two featured wall artists is Irish artist Comhghall (pronounced ‘Coal’) Casey. Comhghall’s paintings are meticulously observed studies of everyday objects- fruit, toys, flotsam from the beaches near his Dublin home. Comhghall grew up in Omagh and has been featured regularly in the RA summer exhibition, BP Portrait Prize, and the annual Royal Hibernian and Royal Ulster Academy shows respectively.

 

 

 

Comhghall Casey  Red Tonka Tractor   Oil on Canvas 36 x 43 cm.  £2,800

In the bigger bedroom where a fire was lit
on this one evening every year, we played
with all our might, punishing the bright red
two-note concertina, the hard-cheeked doll

whose eyes stared dead ahead or clicked shut
according as she was tilted up or back,
the little yellow van that enclosed so strangely
behind tiny windscreens a real portion of dark.

Near to tears at first, we hummed and revved
and spoke in tongues, so that whoever looked in
at the door would not suspect a thing, would see
only children lost in play, and the good fire.

Tom Duddy  The Disappointment of Toys

And who doesn’t or didn’t at some point, have a collection such as that shown below…?

 

 

The shells are elaborate and curious
Like human though, and yet not thoughts of ours.
A young boy searched them out on an island’s shores
Where shells so perfect are not plentiful,
And in a carton, wrapped in cotton wool,
Sent them through air across the world to us,

Knowing that, settled far inland, we still
Love the sea’s gifts, complex and beautiful.
This fact, this node of facts, in thought (like a shell
In the hand) I hold – the boy on the shore, the sun
On the wings of the mind-powered great machine homing in.
Time yields its patterned shells, none, none identical.

Waking in dark on the flat-lands of the night
To sadness, or space too vast, I light this light:
The boy designing our pleasure; and now, spread out
On a tray, the shells from their journeying. One is a dawn that
pales,
One etched with finest fans on lapping scales,
One whorled; orange and green seem hand-strewn over it.

A Present of Sea Shells by E J Scovell

The opening for Comhghall Casey, Laurie Steen, Mizuyo Yamashita and Jane Sheppard will be on Saturday 13 May 6-8 p.m.  The artists will be in attendance. Come along and have a glass and a peruse. We are absolutely cast-iron guaranteed good weather (as there can’t be much more rain left in the sky after today- that’s how it works, right?)

 

 

 

Click on the links above to access relevant artists’ pages on our website.
For further information please call or email the gallery.

Please call to purchase.  We ship worldwide.

Thanks as always for reading,

Aidan