Viewing Room: 04: Carolyn Brookes-Davies and Peter Wylie

This is our fourth Viewing Room of the season and gives local artists, collectors and the curious the opportunity to see some of the leading East Anglian artists and makers producing new work in our area. 

This Viewing Room brings together Suffolk born, now London based painter Peter Wylie with a Norfolk based shell artist, Carolyn Brookes-Davies.

Both approach their work with observations and use of materials associated with the East Anglian coast forefront in their minds.

We are showing small paintings by Peter Wylie - his wonderful "North Sea Studies" series - observations off the Suffolk coast. Carolyn Brookes-Davies will be showing a new series of work using the shells from the shorline from further north along the Norfolk coast.

BOOK YOUR VISIT

Peter Wylie talking about his ongoing series North Sea Studies:"To hear people who still sail out there, compliment me on the believability of what I have created in paint is a validation."  

Peter was born in Lowestoft and completed a Foundation there in 1975. He gained a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art from Canterbury College of Art 1978. After several decades pursuing his career, and continuing to paint, he decided to enrol on the MA Fine Art Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art, London (University of the Arts London) 2017.

Peter returned to painting full-time in 2007. The North Sea Study paintings are about a journey Peter often makes several times a year. He often returns to themes that make the most of his Suffolk connections. The Studies are a response to a walk that he frequently makes along the beach from his hometown Lowestoft to Southwold. Born within earshot of the sound of breaking waves, and a son of fisherman, himself a son of a fisherman, from a lineage that looks out to sea, he finds himself gazing out, mesmerised by that constantly changing light and movement. Where once he looked out to the horizon and imagined his father somewhere catching fish, he now looks out and imagines that across the sea, almost empty of boats and ships, at the waters end another land begins, and on that shore the waves will be breaking under ever changing skies just as they do here.

Carolyn Brookes-Davies is inspired by the encounter between the natural and manmade and those forms and processes that shape her surrounding landscape, she explores ideas through the process of making and the intuitive application of a material's inherent qualities.

An early fascination with man’s impact on nature arose from walking as a child with her father along disused railway tracks and reclaimed colliery sites near her home in Manchester. This recurrent theme of the impact of human activity on nature has been present throughout Carolyn’s work. Structure and process, repetitive sequencing and the combination of separate elements to form a whole is central to her work and her use of the recurring patterns in nature generate a dependable, underlying rhythm, consistent in all her pieces.

Carolyn graduated from Goldsmiths College, London University in 1980 with a BA honours degree, followed by an MA at The Royal College of Art graduating in 1982. Carolyn is a multi-media artist and maker who lives and works in North Norfolk. She works using repetitive processes, constructing three dimensional objects by conscious sourcing, gathering, collecting and assembling material.

Using painstaking construction to carry the idea she juxtaposes a diverse range of contrasting materials, fragile with hard, structured with organic, natural with manmade. She aims to utilise the intrinsic qualities of the material and processes to evoke thoughtful, calming and surprising associations. Her chosen medium of shell has led to scrutiny of all that implies and recent works examining protection and susceptibility, enclosure and exposure could not be more poignant in the current environment.