Derbyshire gallery hosts A Strange Kind of Knowing exhibition of paintings, sculpture, video and installations

Thirteen artists have contributed works on paper, paintings, scultpure, video and installations. Their creations are on display in A Strange Kind of Knowing at the Haarlem Gallery in Wirksworth’s Red Lion Hotel until March 13, 2022.

Emerging from the forced ‘winter’ of the global pandemic, and taking place in the winter season, A Strange Kind of Knowing also investigates phenomena such as the weather, the sea, caves, cloud formations and fire; lost knowledge and civilisations; and natural and psychological cycles of transformation.

Tai Shani’s watercolour painting Outsides and Erotics 13 is inspired by her experience of separation from the world during lockdown.

Eleanor May Watson’s large-scale commission created for the exhibition uses Japanese Hosho paper to portray the transparency of rain, and its cleansing, cathartic and empathetic properties.

Artists, spiritualist and medicine woman Holly Bynoe has created a video work entitled How to Sway on Crick Hill. Made in 2020, the video shows the gentle movement of wild cane fronds at twilight in St James in Barbados, drawing on Holly’s deep interest in the spiritual and healing properties of plants and regenerative agriculture. The work captures the ritual of walking, looking and listening in on a small plot of wilding land, which has since been razed to the ground as part of 40-year development programme.

Verity Birt’s screenprint In Dark Derision, produced last year, collages archival mythological images with ceramic artifacts and is part of her ongoing research into the ancient and contemporary cosmology of Gaia.

Penny McCarthy’s sculpture Moon Egg (2018) is a blown hen’s egg painted with a map of the moon to show its actual elongated form created by the gravitational push and pull of the Earth.

Coral Kindred-Boothby’s display Keys/Conductors are small sculptures made from burr oak threaded with copper wire which conduct electricity from the skin to a receptor in intuitive ‘experiments’ where the objects are comfortable to hold and use.

Kate McMillan’s nine collaged works, entitled My Body is A Cave, are a series of photos capturing the coast of Cornwall looking out towards the Atlantic.

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