Kettle’s Yard presents Michelle Charles

Saturday, 08 March 2008 01:34

Cambridge, UK - Kettle’s Yard presents Michelle Charles, the first major UK one-person show of this British artist who worked in the United States for more than 20 years, exhibiting with John Weber Gallery  and other New York galleries.  On exhibition 7 June - 27 July, 2008.

Her subjects are commonplace objects such as glasses of milk, medicine bottles and bars of soap. Working in series, in paintings, drawings, photograms or cast glass, she repeats a motif to explore the possibilities of looking at the same thing in many ways, and the difference between what we think we know and what we actually see.

Michelle Charles writes: ‘What concerns me is how painting’s fluidity and malleability as a medium is able to translate objects into liquid and translucent states . . .  Painting and drawing still have a strong emotional capacity to evoke states of absence, presence and loss . . . I am particularly interested in the relationship between vision and memory - what is lost, forgotten or retained. The repetition, therefore, becomes a means of  holding onto the image, giving back to it a certain attentiveness. In some ways my inspiration comes from being a passenger on a train, or peering through a gap in curtained windows. [That sense of] accessing frozen moments, fragments we store and misremember or forget as they pass into memory.

The catalogue will include essays by Dore Ashton and Guy Brett. The gallery is open Tuesday-Sunday 11.30am-5pm. Admission is free.
 
Kettle’s Yard, Castle Street, Cambridge CB3 0AQ, UK
www.kettlesyard.co.uk