‘Rewilding’ at Jealous Gallery in Crouch End features colourful multi-media works with symbolic illustrations that explore success, failure, and our relationship with nature
David Shillinglaw’s colourful energetic works can be seen at Crouch End’s Jealous Gallery this month.
In ‘Rewilding’ the Margate-based artist comments on the adaptability of nature in a series of multi-media works where symbolic illustrations create a “hyperactive patchwork of information” that is “like a love letter to our new world”.
Shillinglaw’s practice ranges from handmade books to paintings on canvas, large scale murals, theatre sets and album covers, and often meditates on human nature, success and failure.
He says: “Rewilding describes the returning of areas of land to a wild state including the reintroduction of animal and plant species that are no longer naturally found there. This idea has captured my imagination as I find myself observing the precarious and ever changing relationships humans have with nature. We arrogantly take advantage of nature, bend it to our will to suit our growing needs. These works are a cross pollination of ideas and materials, mixing drawing, painting and collage into one hyperactive patchwork of information. Different mediums wrestle for space, colours compete for attention. Amidst this chaos there is an attempt to organise space, discover some peace, draw a line under the abundance and tend to a visual garden.”
Claiming that the works “celebrate failure and a lack of control” he cites a quote from Carl Jung as a source of comfort: ‘In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.’
“For me creating work is a necessary meditation, to join the dots, to compose constellations of personal meaning and search for order within chaos.
“I find myself searching for the poetry in the incidental and discovering great significance and mystery in a single flower. I naively attempt to capture these natural phenomena with pigment and scraps of coloured paper.”
‘Rewilding’ runs until October 25 at Jealous North, 27 Park Road, N8.
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