Printmaker Dawn Cole and painter Jackie Russell share a fascination with personal memory and photographic archives. Their work embodies the associated truth and deception inherent in both.
Dawn Cole
British artist Dawn Cole is an award winning printmaker who uses archives to explore themes of recollection, memory and memorial. Since 2007 she has been researching and responding to the diary and photographs of her Great Aunt Clarice Spratling, a First World War Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) Nurse.
Dawn’s work develops from extensive research and has a strong narrative thread. She uses printmaking as a means to explore layers of time, history and meaning. Dawn sees the processes she uses as an integral part of the work, researching techniques and materials that are significant to the ideas behind the final work.
In 2011 she won the V&A Prize at the International Print Awards and is currently Artist in Residence at Canterbury Cathedral. She has work in public collections at the V&A Permanent Print Collection and Scarborough Museum Print Archive.
Jackie Russell
It all starts with colour, then form. Jackie Russell’s work is abstract but based on intense observation as she maps the landscape and interiors she loves: the fields around her Kent home and the secret corners and nooks of house and studio. Quiet, peaceful places on the surface, that come to fizzing life with the multiple sensations and perspective involved in minutely noticing and exploring those spaces.
In these new paintings, Jackie has been experimenting with strong, bold colours -colours that take us on a journey from pastoral gardens in spring to the heat of summer and the intense, sensory memories of wandering through hot landscapes -from the summer long border of Great Dixter to the souks of Marrakesh.
