Rose Nag: Betwixt and between – work in progress
Thursday 15 April 2010, 6:30pm, Forum
Works on paper and canvas, 2000–2010
Opening of the exhibition
Rose has been teaching at London Met’ and its predecessors, the Polytechnic and then the University of North London, since 1989. Her demand that drawing is an explorative act, both visceral and poetic as well as rigorous and exacting, has introduced generations of students to a perception of space beyond measurement and a school of thinking through drawing.
This has been most explicit in working with foundation and first year students. But Rose has worked with design studios and units, on field-trips and workshops throughout the department, reminding students of the value of standing back and looking again, differently.
Colourspace, one of Rose’s most consistently inspiring teaching programmes, prompted a different output through a combination of colour theory, studies of paintings, buildings and places, articulating students’ spatial imagination and sensitivity to colour and material.
Rose’s visual thinking, her seeing through drawing and painting, is now showing here everywhere in the department, and on show in this exhibition. We see how she sees and can make tenuous, teasing connections to the work that she has done with students over those years. Perhaps too, it marks a transition from teacher back to artist and to many more places and spaces to be revealed.
Andrew Stone
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‘The work in this exhibition represents a sampling of ideas from the last ten years. Transitory moments observed in the spaces of landscape and buildings are recorded in drawings, photographs, sketches and ‘the mind’s eye’.
I am interested in capturing a moment in time and making a piece of work which becomes that experience: the gaze, the perception or glimpse of a fleeting or quiet visual event, and specifically how the non-physical substance of light is constantly changing the identity of things, often bringing inner qualities to the surface.
The images undergo a long process of abstraction in order to eliminate pictorial and literal references. The work strives for autonomy, inviting the eye and finger to contemplate and trace its marks and lines.
Special thanks to Annie McDonald, Frank Connolly and Gwenda Jones whose insights and encouragement enabled the work to be; and to the skills of Rex Henry and Davood Kiani whose skills and expertise enabled the work to be presented. Thanks to my partner Edward Woodman, the photographer who always encourages one to ‘look again’ and also a small dedication to the memory of Katherine Vaughan-Williams, née Shonfield, 22 August 1954 – 2 September 2003.’
Rose Nag
London, March 2010
