Earth Below, Sky Above - Exhibition at the LAKE Gallery

Featuring contemporary landscape paintings by Bridget Greenwood, abstract prints and sculptures by Louisa Boyd and tactile glass pieces by Helen Smith.

The exhibition opens on Thursday 14th August and runs until Saturday 13th September.

Opening times: Thurs – Sat, 10am – 4pm

Bridget GreenwoodBridget Greenwood is a contemporary abstract landscape artist based in Cheshire. Having had a successful career in advertising in London, Bridget returned to painting in 2020 as a result of lockdown. Bridget's paintings explore her fascination with the landscape. She sketches outside to record the moment, but her paintings are completed in the studio where they go through many stages of reducing the landscape to shapes and marks.

Colour has always been Bridget's starting point and is central to her work. For Bridget, colour has the "wonderful ability to express emotion and helps to convey the landscape's ability to heal".

Louisa BoydLouisa Boyd’s work centres around the persistent human desire to belong. She considers environment in her pieces and how we connect with the natural world to navigate and to establish a sense of place. Her abstract prints and sculptures feature celestial symbols, sacred geometry and cartographic imagery.Louisa’s etching prints layer abstract, drawn imagery made with traditional drawing tools with more painterly marks; the map-like outcomes, symbolic of navigation, are a visual fusion of historic and contemporary ideas. Louisa’s prints are then often used alongside marbled papers to create three-dimensional works with structures based on sacred geometry; the elements of mathematics that underpin the fabric of the world we exist within. Central to this body of work is Plato’s idea that the five regular forms, the Platonic solids, connect to the five elements of nature: earth, fire, air, water and aether.

Helen SmithCreated from kiln-formed glass, Helen’s tactile glass pieces are strongly influenced by place. However, rather than depicting the landscape directly her focus is always on a sense of the atmosphere of a place in combination with the interpretation of found textures within the landscape.Each piece is initially worked flat, created by layering up glass powder, glass frit (small chunks) and sheet glass before being fired in the kiln. Once the glass has been fired and sandblasted to clean the surface another layer can be added. The pieces in this collection have all been through this process several times. In the final stage the piece is sandblasted to give the glass its tactile matt surface before being returned to the kiln one last time to be fired again at a lower temperature, either flat or over a former to create a sculptural form.