We are pleased to launch Projects Twenty Two with Kaleidoscope: an exhibition of contemporary art from Cornwall. Eleven artists, who work across a variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and assemblage, are brought together in a bold, visually rich, and layered showcase of all that is exciting and inspirational in Cornish art today. Kaleidoscope is curated by Matt Retallick, and includes work by the following artists:

Bridgette Ashton (Newquay) creates various responses to the histories and stories of specific locations, objects, and artefacts. She questions the value we routinely place on certain materials, and produces tactile artworks that harness surprise, and take divergent and extraordinary forms. Virginia Bounds (near St Ives) works with the unique rhythms and movements of her surroundings. Her paintings are based on the rich and evocative experience of sensory processing, with each retaining a sense of motion, appearing to endlessly oscillate and unfold before the viewer. Alice Ellis-Bray (Lamorna) is an artist with a varied practice across painting, costume, performance, and the written word. Her work explores the properties of nature and the nature of people, human emotions, and the experience of self.

Jethro Jackson (Rock) could be described as a visual excavator. Each of his paintings is approached like a miner hewing a rockface, chipping away at the underpinnings of Cornwall, and unearthing a sense of belonging. This results in bold and empathetic works that splice the ancient and the contemporary to communicate the essence of place. The artist duo Alastair & Fleur Mackie (St Minver) are interested in our relationship with nature and the urgent need for humans to define their roles on our threatened planet. Their mobile-like sculptures use fragments of plastic fishing-floats, that are gathered from the shoreline at Spring low tides, a series that will be completed once the beach is finally clear. Tony Plant (Newquay) is an artist adventurer. His works emanate from direct participation with the landscape, whether walking, canoeing, or sailing, he responds to the routes he makes, the conditions he encounters, and the materials he discovers in the process. The paintings by Iain Robertson (St Ives) are dynamic and spirited journeys in shape and colour. His abstractions are developed via a vast range of reference points, to include the rhythms of music or the contours and weight of natural and manmade forms. Each work is created through diversified mark making, such as the control of the brush or the chance of pouring. Spencer Shakespeare (near Launceston) is a painter whose landscapes are an alchemy of memory and imagination. He captures fleeting moments, real encounters from the edges and boundaries of the land and reimagines these with a dream-like radiance.

For Daniel Turner (Newquay) paintings are vessels, where the act of painting is akin to learning the ropes at sea. In this knowledge, it is unsurprising that his attentions have recently turned to ships, which appear in his work as ghostly representations, as the spectres of experience. Clare Wardman (St Ives) responds to a range of site-specific contexts, often exploring natural landscapes or complex built environments. She researches the impacts and happenstance of surface via approaches to include painting, drawing, weaving, photography and moving image. Nicholas C Williams (Newquay) is a painter who relishes the immediacy of drawing, and the power and energy of the single line. Life drawing is fundamental, but he works against the classical, for example, in allowing models to find their own poses he finds inspiration in the awkward or unfamiliar.

Photos by Paul Mounsey.