4 - 14 November 2023
PV 4 November 2-5pm
The Arborealists and Associates Annual Exhibition
At the Water’s Edge brings together a contemporary response to trees and water by artists who live in urban and rural environments. These painters and printmakers are associated with two contemporary organisations: The Arborealists, which includes artists from the South West, South East, Yorkshire, London, and Wales, France, and Ireland, and the Urban Contemporaries, whose artists live in London.
At the Water’s Edge celebrates their shared love of trees and the vital role they can play in all our lives, in terms of our Well-Being, Identity and Sociability, and our understanding of Ecology and Climatic Change. As the author Hermann Hesse observed: When we have learned how to listen to trees, then our thoughts’ brevity, quickness, and childlike hastiness achieve an incomparable joy.
At a time of international anxiety about the existential threats of the effects of global warming, the role of nature and trees in the United Kingdom has never been more pertinent. It has been estimated that we need to plant two billion trees, in an attempt to avert disaster. This exhibition thus aims, with a political slant, to raise awareness of the importance of trees in all our lives. Themes and issues explored in this exhibition are street architecture; urban decoration; ecological dimensions; wildlife habitats; the mythical, the allegorical, and the symbolic; our psychological equilibrium and well-being; trees in opposition to/in harmony with buildings; depositories of history and bearing witness; unexpected trees in unexpected places; iconic and loved trees/nuisance and unloved trees/diseased trees; and boundary markers/noise excluders/ barriers against pollution. But most importantly trees close to water. Those two elements the sky, and the water are always visually connected to each other with trees.
The second Arborealist Conference will be held in conjunction with the exhibition at Turner Contemporary Art Gallery Margate.
3 November 5-8pm
Speakers:
Philippa Beale - artist/curator Founder member of the Arborealists
Creator of 'A Sense of Place'.
Member of Ecoartspace Artists in action, in galleries, on the land, in urban spaces, and online The Effect and History of The Arborealists
Tim Craven - President and Founder of The Arborealists. Romanticism, Why artists paint trees.
Simon Trapnell - Curator at Nature In Art Museum & Art Gallery, Gloucester.