Studio Eleven Gallery presents third new show of 2024 entitled: Still Life.
The Still – Life subject is a well-known composition within fine art painting. The subject may evoke a mood, demonstrate skill, and remind one of life’s hidden or temporary beauty.
Traditionally, the Still – Life painting evokes a collection of objects that recall a time or place – fruit, game, kitchen paraphernalia. The composition may be a celebration of material pleasures such as food and wine, or often a warning of the ephemerality of these pleasures and of the brevity of human life (memento mori).
Our new exhibition offers a new way of seeing the Still – Life. Esther Cawley, Painter, and Lesley Doe, Ceramicist, have collaborated to offer us this concept both within the real state, and captured on the canvass. They have created new works inspired by the ephemerality this genre, rendered in porcelain, alongside a series of painted compositions of Lesley’s new collection of transformed objects.
The Artists:
Esther Cawley – Painter.
Esther is a visual artist based in Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire. She has a workspace at Juice Studios on Humber Street, Hull. Since graduating from Kingston University, South London, she has completed artist residencies in schools and galleries, producing new artwork and delivering workshops to pupils, teachers, and the public.
From January 2023 – January 2024, she was awarded a bursary to undertake the one – year drawing development course with the prestigious Royal Drawing School, London. This opportunity offered a new developed in her work with a new exploration of Still – Life as a vehicle to explore many of her own theories and teachings. The Still – Life became a poignant exploration of composition, colour, form, and tone.
Esther is currently commissioned to produce creative engagement programmes for art galleries and open community settings. Her practice extends to enabling the community to respond creatively to artist exhibitions, including her own work of Life Drawing, Portraiture, and the Still – Life.
Esther, a long-time admirer of Lesley Doe’s ceramics work, was eager to develop new paintings in collaboration for this exhibition at Studio Eleven. In addition to exploring formal aspects of the genre, Lesley’s work has brought with it a palpable softness (paradoxical to the robust materials she works with). This sense of softness, harmony and balance is something Esther has successfully brought to her own work.
Lesley Doe – Ceramicist
Based at her home – studio in Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire, Lesley is a Ceramic Artist who explores the repetition of form through slip – casting. Drawn to casting the mundane, ‘everyday’ objects that populate our lives. Objects that surround our environment without a great deal of emotional attachment; objects which are considered useful but not beautiful; objects which are often disposable. Lesley’s process is transformative of these ‘found’ objects. By rendering them into porcelain, a material considered to be of high status, and firing them to a high temperature, these otherwise ephemeral items are transmuted into objects of beauty and permanence far removed from their original conditional life. The final pieces subtly question our own relationship with these objects which are comfortably familiar; used and touched every day, but rarely considered.
