Thea, Arran and Philip Willcocks were due to exhibit at the museum, but unfortunately their exhibition has been postponed due to the COVID-19 lockdown. 

 

"Through the house we hear footsteps, entrances and exits to which these objects bare witness." 

 

In Echo, mother, father and daughter come together to exhibit recent works of photography, painting and print. This exhibition is an encounter between three very different practices that share a common history and visual identity, a family setting that has been a context for creativity and is reflected in the use of colour and form. 

 

Thea Willcocks completed a BA in Fine Art at Newcastle University in 2005 and an MA in The Visual Language of Performance at UAL in 2007. Her recent work is concerned with marking a transitional period of time in her life. Using photography to represent memories of space, place and time she creates layered works that sit between abstraction and representation. Thea considers each piece to be a secular prayer to the uneasy beauty of the everyday. She views art practice as a form of catharsis or meditation. Her work is directly influenced by her parents who have acted as visual teachers throughout her life, as well the recent experience of becoming a mother herself. The continued value she places on the act of looking closely at our surroundings is most evident in witnessing her daughters exploration of the world through the making of marks and signs. 

 

Arran Willcocks studied Fine Art at Newcastle University between 1968-1972. For recent print works she used intaglio techniques expanded on with interventions. From a series titled ‘passing light’ she has developed a series of new prints worked into with paint to explore the fugitive nature of the subject matter. A chance reunion with photographs taken in a French Botanic garden in the 1970s linked with the theme ‘through the glass house door’. This subsequently became the linear structures which formed the designs for drypoint paper prints. 

 

Philip Willcocks studied Fine Art: Textiles at Newcastle University between 1966-1970. The work for this exhibition combines chance and order in the process of picture making. In the paintings underlying grids and all kinds of devices are incorporated into the work, collage, masks, stencilling combined with the process of layer upon layer of paint falling like dust or rain on to an ever changing surface. Cloud bursts of colour obscure earlier interruptions to the surface which is screened and exposed again to this process as if it is light sensitive paper. The aim is to cultivate accidental happenings but also to bring these chance events under control to make a picture. A picture not conceived at its outset but which seems inevitable as a culmination of the chance process involved in its making.

 

Please do not reproduce images without permission of the artists.