Changing Room - Stirling's gallery for art

Ladies’ Rock
Katy Dove, Raydale Dower, Keith Farquhar, Mary Redmond
16 November - 21 December 2002

This exhibition brought together work by four artists based in Edinburgh and Glasgow, providing an opportunity to view the varied approaches they employ in responding to the objects and materials they use within their work. Although their work is diverse in terms of its finished form, a constant thread within each practice is a highly personal sense of developed craft.

All four artists are influenced by urban life and their work reflects an interest in cross-overs with fashion and music. Employing humorous and sensitive elements, they retain a strong personal touch or aesthetic. The work in the exhibition centred on three-dimensional objects along with an animation by Katy Dove.

Katy Dove makes instinctive felt-tip pen drawings as the starting point for most of her work. The process of making automatic, abstract drawings allows her imagination to become reality; it gives concrete form to an imaginary concept. The drawings appeared as an end point in themselves, but are also a point from which other ideas and forms can develop. For this exhibition Dove created The Rush, which combined scanned drawings, a soundtrack and video footage of driving through landscape. It reflected her interest in the relationship between sound and moving image, intuition and perception, harmony and disharmony.

Raydale Dower’s work is a response to urban culture, an anarchic approach that often contains a humorous element, and includes sculpture, film and sound. In Ladies’ Rockhe showed a large wall-mounted mixed media collage. Using an almost archaeological process, Dower transported the materials to the gallery from the walls of his kitchen /studio, and recreated it by following detailed photographs of it in its original site.

Keith Farquhar develops a very specific and highly personal use of three dimensional objects and materials in his work, which draws from a number of sources ranging from fine art painting to window displays to work referencing Heart of Midlothian Football Club and Scottish national identity. His work in Ladies’ Rocktouches on the comfort of suburban living, both celebrating and exploding the myth.

Mary Redmond has developed a vivid visual language that derives from her own interests, which include fashion and music. Working with a variety of materials in her three dimensional compositions, she echoes that urban cultures that interest her.

Minerals in the Water catalogue available (£1.50), that accompanied this show and celebrated The Changing Room’s 5^th Anniversary.

See Publications for details on ordering.

Supported by Scottish Arts Council.

ladies' rock