Opening
times: Tue-Fri 12-5pm; Sat & Sun 11am -4pm;
Closed
Monday
Heynes returns to the O3 Gallery this January with
a new body of work entitled 'Shine'. The collection
includes new steel sculptures and a photographic series
of refracted water abstractions.
Wilbur Heynes has evolved
a natural abstract style that flows through all the
branches of his work. The development of this technique
presents each piece reduced to its purest element.
Never seeking to dictate interpretation, every item
engages the active imagination of the viewer to create
a flexible and dynamic relationship.
Having read Classics
at Nottingham University and studied portraiture in
Italy before Fine Art at Guildhall, Heynes then worked
as an assistant to the sculptor Hal Wilson, based in
rural France. This period welded Heynes’ attachment
to steel and its infinite adaptability, and finding
this resonance in the metal brought the central themes
of perception into focus. Here grew the relationship
between the welding arc and the camera.
Over the last
nine years of exhibiting in New York, London, and around
the UK, Heynes has developed themes first perfected
in a portrait studio in Florence, then broadened during
a Fine Art degree in London. His work will always draw
upon the relationship between an object and the imagination
of the person looking at it.
Operating from a workshop outside Oxford, Wilbur maintains
a connection with the land he loves to work. Both this
deep-rooted bond with the land and the rigours of agricultural
labour influence his practice still.
Heynes on his photography:
"In the moment between looking at a thing and seeing
it for what it is, we draw on our memory and experience
to understand. This action occurs in a fraction of
a second, as fast as a camera can expose film to light.
Using
naturally occurring and recognizable shapes provides
the key to unlock both experience and memory. And so
the work collected here creates a point of origin that
opens to a wide variety of interpretations. The principal
imperative of this style requires each item to read
easily.
Similarly the sense of movement is implied in
the photographs of the patterns created by sunlight
and water. Both light and water are essential ingredients
of life; and while these shapes are freely and naturally occurring, the artifice
of the camera opens the patterns to interpretation.
All of these images come from
slide film, and a manually operated medium-format camera.
Each one uses only available light, and no filter,
drawing on the relationship between film and light.
The film is then rendered digitally, so that each image
recreates the appearance of the slide as faithfully as possible."
See the BBC
Interview with Wilbur in the O3 Gallery: Click
Here www.wilburheynes.com |
