Victoria Stiff and Carole Staines 

20th – 25th September 2017

• Contemporary still lives on maps and Watercolor Florals

• Carol Staines loves flowers and colour. Putting the two together in her Gloucestershire studio to create watercolour paintings in rich hues is her passion.
  Influenced by some Chinese painters as well as those who have a very fluid style, she is completely self taught and gets inspiration from gardens when travelling around the globe!

• Victoria Stiff makes use archetypes¹ and symbolism in her work to convey meaning. Without context the objects used are neutral. It is in the Juxtapositions² that they become charged with ambiguity, and archetypical meaning begins to surface.  Archetypes become activated when presented in a work of art. For instance an apple on a supermarket shelf is just food. Take that same apple and place it on a teacher’s desk, in the hand of Eve, on the chest of a corpse, or stab it with forks and it becomes charged with meaning relative to its setting.
• Victoria’s works are often self-portraits. She use obsessively collected objects that form a kind of map of her psyche and through default a fragment of the collective subconscious of all humanity. They are struggles to find meaning as well as statements of meaning found.
• Instead of saying this is how it is, she present to the viewer a narrative. She aims to highlight the spectacular in the mundane and give the viewer clues to interpretation. People already have archetypes hard wired into them, she am putting into motion a movement of ideas from the viewer’s subconscious to their conscious. There is a triangle going on of relationship, or lack thereof between herself, the objects and the support.
• She currently work on maps and other interesting supports because they communicate the collective community of humanity. It is an act of taking ownership of the world we all inhabit.  Maps give a sense of place. On a subconscious level we are all linked. There are no borders in the subconscious, nor eternity.

1. Archetype – “An Archetype is a philosophical idea referring to pure form which embodies the fundamental characteristics of a thing”- Carl Jung

2.Juxtapositions – To place close together or side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.

Open daily 10am-5pm

Entry free