Anna Rowbury

Vestige

Bayside Gallery, Brighton Town Hall
16 November - 16 December 2019

Vestige explores the fragmented nature of memory and history through an evocative installation incorporating ceramic objects and painting. (From the catalogue)

Rowbury eloquently presents a series of wall hanging and table-based forms that speak to a passion for particular surface quality. The artist is trained in both painting and ceramics. Her ceramic closed vessels and angular timber boxes express a painterly effect that conjures time aged materials such as frescoes

There is a sense of nostalgic reference to the efforts of human-construction. Cogs, spindles, screws and bolts are conjured from clay into sculptures that defy scale and reference remnant detritus from the industrial revolution. These things acknowledge mechanisation but also the human hand. Rowbury's boxes reference sections of architecture representing a model for a plinth, column or cornice. 

It is no surprise that Rowbury has just returned from Venice; her colour palette could have been washed and buffed by the waters of the Adriatic Sea.