Hyperlocal

Ellie Baddick, StevieRay Latham and Stuart Edmundson

19th August - 9th September 2023

Open: Wed-Sat 12:30-5:30pm

Private view: Friday 18th August, 5:30-7:30pm

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'Hyperlocal' brings together three artists at different stages of their careers who have grown up or lived and worked in North Devon as professional artists; drawing parallels between their individual interests whilst celebrating contemporary art coming out of North Devon. Themes range from ideas of personal histories and family archives, abstraction and the making process, and memory and sentimentality, against the backdrop of locality, identity and experience.

 

Stuart Edmundson currently lives and works in North Devon, and has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the UK and Europe. Edmundson works across painting, sculpture and installation, each media displays an obvious dialogue with abstract paintings “grand continuum” and its modernist origins. The effervescent painted compositions that run through all of the mediums present a questioning of the traditional abstract/figurative opposition. His enquiries within the process of making and studio activity are conducted via work that is intuitively composed, joyful, warm and visceral, embodying the theoretical within the practical.

 

StevieRay Latham is a musician and artist who grew up in Braunton, North Devon, and is currently studying for an MA in Painting at the University of the Arts London. Latham’s paintings inhabit a liminal space; somewhere between dream and reality, imagination and memory, the world of the living and the world of the dead. Painting from images found in family photo albums, WhatsApp groups and folk archives, his paintings explore ideas of memory, historicity and trace; simulacra of spectres hidden within the layers of post-internet atemporality. Interested in the disjuncture between memory and history, his practice questions the veracity of the archive by using painting as an interface where the indexical objectivity of photography and subjectivity of oral histories can coalesce; dichotomous mnemonic devices for cultural memory and family lore.

 

Ellie Baddick grew up in Barnstaple, North Devon, and has recently returned after completing a BA in Fine Art at the University of Plymouth. Baddick’s practice focuses on the fusion of creative practice with social, cultural, ecological, and emotional engagement - demonstrating the positive impact that nature and the arts can have on personal and community wellbeing. With core themes of memory, comfort and identity, her work employs a phenomenological standpoint to question and comprehend the relationship between sensory stimuli and the psyche - implementing a heightened level of attentiveness regarding emotional sentiment activated from said stimulus. These prompts spring-board her practice into the realms of mental state observation and well-being, inclusive of coping mechanisms and using memory as a transportive tool.

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