THE FOUND IS MORE POWERFUL THAN THE MADE….
16th June – 29th July 2023
GBS Fine Art are proud to announce the opening of an exhibition of recent work by Steve McPherson and Graham Rich at the gallery in Wells.
The found is more important than the made is a typically playful – and deliberately contentious – assertion made by Rich, some years ago now. That artists are makers, creators, is seemingly self-evident; and yet for this exhibition there was never a blank canvas and tubes of unctuous oil paint, no burnished copper plate, nor even any digital intermediary, for both these artists rely entirely on the found object. What is more, the provenance of that object is invariably the shorelines close to where they live; for Rich, that is usually the southern coast of Devon and Cornwall and for McPherson, the beaches of north-east Kent.
If beach-combing is the common starting point, the intervention which follows is decidedly at variance; and this is where the exhibition becomes, to all intents and purposes, a juxtaposition between two distinctive approaches. McPherson has been collecting plastic debris from those beaches since the mid-90s; categorised by colour, size and shape, they may be incorporated into large vibrant assemblages, that evoke entomological displays, or collated into individual sculptural forms. Simultaneously archaeologist, collector and paradoxical treasure hunter, while it is impossible to ignore the environmental concerns present in his work, he imposes his own aesthetic on the detritus, endowing the apparently mundane with curious resonance.
Rich’s works range from large scale installations to small, constructed scenes, formed from the remnants of boats or other objects he has found walking or sailing along the south-western coasts. His interventions are less to do with the environmental impact of humankind on the oceans but rather a more metaphysical, or even totemic, expression of our relationship with the sea. Often dwarfed against a backdrop of sea-worn paint and the scars left by maritime use or the sea itself, his motifs of small jibbed sailing boats serve as symbols of hope and struggle against tribulation.
It is undeniably strange how a discarded object, which customarily you might be largely oblivious to, is, when appropriated by an artist, suddenly made the focus of active attention, demands closer examination. And as we approach the holiday season and so many head instinctively towards our coasts, it is appropriate perhaps to look again at – to re-evaluate – the found.
