PRESS RELEASE 2009

Ryan Renshaw Gallery is proud to introduce Clare Milledge and Jessica Herrington for the first show of the year. Both artists have the innate sense of interpreting notions of humanity and the everyday. Beautiful and thought evoking these works are not of the wallflower variety. An impressive mixture of ink, oils and found mediums; the combination of the two artists provide an insightful position on interpretations of form, formlessness and humanity. It’s an exhibition not to be missed.

Jessica Herrington provides an interpretation of concepts of humanity and spatial awareness juxtaposed by banalities and awkwardness. She finds subject matter in the awkward experience of putting on a jumper or eating lunch from a paper bag. Subsequently engaging with the ordinary of the everyday and interpreting and conceptualizing these on the canvas. Herrington seeks to show the serious side of art, that there are elements of the humorous within painting and abstraction. Her work speaks of seduction and repulsion, and the discomforted and overlooked.

Clare Milledge investigates the entropic states of humanity thorough her inky sketchings. There are apparent juxtapositions between form and formlessness in her work Helen Lempiere, and a play on self-preservation and annihilation, stating that, ‘Thus, the human form is merely a lasting encounter’. Clare Milledge’s drawings have a sketched naivety, yet the sophisticated techniques are deeply rooted theoretically by notions and ideas of relational aesthetics. Clare also embraces themes of decay and contamination within ideas surrounding the human encounter.