Naomi Frears: New Work

Kestle Barton, Helford   14/5/16 - 3/7/16

A series of new works on paper respond obliquely to Naomi Frears' personal relationship to Frenchman's Creek, an atmospheric body of
water located not far from Kestle Barton. Rather than make direct visual reference to a place she knows intimately, she instead draws out delicate, fragmented imagery from literary, cinematic and musical sources that are inspired by this location - most notably the novel of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. While essentially taking the form of a swashbuckling tale of adventure, Frenchman's Creek is notable for being written in a disconcertingly dreamy and languid style - qualities that are shared throughout Naomi Frears' practice to date.Frears' ambitious new moving image work 10 employs a similar sense of considered detachment from the subject. Her study of figures at leisure in a littoral landscape, is distanced by the physical remove of the camera's view through a window. Distanced from our gaze, they are, in turn, separated from each other by the grid of mullions and transoms that form the window's frame, and by the artist's process of painstakingly deconstructing and re-collaging the image. Effectively choreographing her protagonists movements in space and time, Frears reveals both their rhythmic behaviours and their communal isolation as they orientate themselves in relationship to each other and to the formal arrangement of sky, land and sea.
 

Matt Burrows
Curator / Gallery Manager
Exeter Phoenix