Solo exhibition is on display at Charnwood Museum

SOME artwork seems truly deserving of the term ‘elemental’, and so this proves with works by Erica Middleton - gracing her solo exhibition at Charnwood Museum, Loughborough.

Art critics have noted that, in viewing a painting or sculpture, the viewer adds all those factors which they don’t witness: Sounds; tastes; the physical touch of something; or a combination of scents.

Walking into this exhibition is less like seeing walls full of canvases and cabinets full of pots, than experiencing the atmosphere of being by a river at differing times of day and night, or in alternate seasons.

The exhibition catalogue informs the artist uses homeground pigments, glues and quick-drying glazes and these, I think, add to the sense that these works are pieces of nature. Here, colours and textures vary – from deep indigoes and ghosts of moonlight, to paler mists of early morning. Pots seem crusted with salt, rising out of cracked-earth, or rough as seeds or pods.

When observing paintings such as ‘The Trent, Easter’ or ‘Soar Nocturne’ the viewer almost inevitably adds sounds of muffled water birds, or wind rustled willow.

That the artist’s ‘Concertina Sketchbooks’ (often worked on whilst on-board a boat) are often beginnings for paintings completed in the studio, adds to this sense of absorption... of really looking... that many of the finished works contain.

The traveller poet W.H. Davies, writing early in the 20th Century, famously bemoaned the fact ‘we have not time to stand and stare’, adding: ‘ no time to see, in broad daylight/streams full of stars, like skies at night’.

It seems to me that the river paintings in this lyrical exhibition allow the viewer just such space and time.

Erica Middleton’s River Paintings and Ash-Glazed Pots Solo Exhibition is on display at Charnwood Museum from now until February 22, 2020.

By Deborah Tyler-Bennett.