Nestling in the folds of the rolling Wiltshire landscape, Rabley Barn, home to Rabley Contemporary Art Gallery and Drawing School is a magical, inspirational place and one of my favourite places to visit. Meryl Ainslie the Director of Rabley gathers around her a collection of wonderful artists and consequently attracts a stream of interesting people who are drawn to the place and the high quality work she shows. Her latest exhibition, as often, a two-in-one, splitting the gallery into two separate but complementary solo shows, contains prints by Nana Shiomi and drawings and sculpture by Royal Academician Ann Christopher.
Christopher’s sculptural drawings are characterised by a severe elegance but underlying this simple purity of form, glimpsed beneath opaque mylor, are scratchy energetic marks. The opacity of the mylor is like dust settling on objects in a long abandoned room, obscuring their surface qualities, and contributing mystery and a dreamy sense of time passing. Combining different materials which could be thought to be unforgiving in their rigidity, stiff glassine-like mylor, sharply cut blackened paper shapes and metal rivets these serene drawings contain surprise in their fluid half hidden marks. The quiet stillness is disrupted by a suggestion of controlled turmoil beneath the surface. To regard them is to hold your breath.
Also on show is the artist’s exquisitely beautiful contemplative sculpture Silent Space which balances on the edge of nothingness, teeters on the edge of thought. It is constructed of cast resin which has the appearance of marble and thin aluminium tapering curves which do not move but shimmer in the light creating the semblance of movement. Here again the apparent perfection is disturbed, the surface ruffled by the deliberately unfinished roughness of the curved marble-like support. It is a strange feat of asymetrical symmetry .
Silent Space Resin and Aluminium 6 x 160 x 27 cm. 2010
The carving up of space in Christopher’s drawings suggests landscape, half seen vistas seen between the slats of fences or the walls of waterways, there is something very watery about some of them, or simply a recording of and a response to the evanescence of shadow light and movement. They are very beautiful.
Drawings
Marks on the Edge of Space 1 – 12
Conte, graphite, mylar and aluminium
46 x 47 cms
Drawing 