Headities

This show brings together artists working across the UK alongside artists who are currently

working, or have historically worked, at the Barrington Farm supported studio in North Norfolk.

These artists have an interest in working with heads, faces, and portraits. These are heads bitten

into by the process of material discovery - brushing, wiping, smearing, stacking, lumping.

Any distortion imposed by the abstracting effects of material play is more obvious when working

with the figure, and specifically here, the head - the smears or heavy layering of paint registers as

a rupture, a lumpen solid form highjacks a given and understood shape. A head is a thing to play

with, a site where physical forces put stress upon the structure.

The head is now a ‘headitie’, to borrow Maria Lassnig’s term to explain what is left after stripping

away of features of a face and thinking of a head as a set of formal units of sensation, leaving us

with ‘’cheek-shields, brow-shields and neck cylinders’’.

These actions dismantle, distort and dissolve the shape of the head, pushing it through a process.

There is sometimes violence in this, or comedy, or poeticism, or a detachment when the face is

reduced to geometric volumes. The small shifts between the distortions, differences or

amplifications, is what makes the works hold emotional power, and speak to what it means to

inhabit a head.

exhibition text and curation: Laura Bygrave & Alex Crocker

opening: Sat 16 Aug 2-6 pm

open weekends 11-4

weekdays by appointment call Emma 07984 376346