Sue Hancell with 'Mark Making Spring 2024'

The spring tried to defy us this year.

Weather battered the car as we set off determined to ‘feel the day’ ‘get out there and do something’ ‘make it happen’

It rained all the way into the hills. Not kind to artists . Suddenly it stopped and we grabbed a few moments to get something down. But then it came again. Cold too. We held our paper down and covered up our beginnings. Our meagre marks.

When the pale sun slid out and we quickly splashed on more colour. The cloud dropped itself all over our sketches. We pushed them underneath the bushes until it passed.

These unpredictable shifts weather and seasons all within an hour take my breath away. The struggle begins

My obstinate determination to mark-make will never let me give up.

I have returned to exhibit my work again in Castle Park this year.

By Bonnie Hancell

"To tell you the truth, I think that's why they're written.

There's a momentary violence, a shock of red, a shower of texture fragmented against the uncertain grain.

There's also a visceral act of confession; of the self-remembering its body-in-place-and-time, in meadow, in the shadow of a cloud form.

There's a somatic truth in these translations of earth and a hand at the end of every gesture.

It feels as if the artists entire nervous system could be buried here.

These are pages of a journal with handwriting shaped like mountains, and hillsides that become self-portraits.

Landscapes that surrender realism to the act of writing; to remembrances of cold fingers and sodden paper and the sound of rain on car windows."

Meet the artist Open Evening on Friday 9 August 2024 7 - 9 pm.  Everyone Welcome