Western Morning News (Saturday)
Paintings of human honesty and evocative sculptures
Frank Ruhrmund enjoys looking round two exhibitions at the Anima Mundi gallery, St Ives
Renowned for the diversity and quality of exhibitions he presents, more than 100 in recent years and many of them concerned with the human predicament, Joseph Clarke, owner and director of Anima Mundi in St Ives, is currently presenting two such exhibitions.
Born in London in 1929, the career in art of the pioneering painter and sculptor Evelyn Williams, whose exhibition Intimate Whispers occupies the ground floor and part of the second floor of the gallery, began early. When only 15 years old, she attended St Martin’s School of Art, London, and then the Royal
College of Art. She wasn’t to know then that in 1961, she would be winner of the John Moores Prize for sculpture.
One who, for one reason or another, never received the acclaim she deserved during her long career, her tender, intimate and emotional works concern the subtleties and complexities of relationships and the human predicament. Very personal paintings, they have followed her through life as child, lover, mother and grandmother. From Mother Singing to The Ritual, they show her facing her own mortality with directness and tenderness. A selection of honest paintings that deal with the intimate connection and profound solitude of existence, as it has been said: “They take the viewer on a journey from womb to tomb.”
Sadly, at 83 years old, Evelyn Williams died in 2012, an artist who enjoyed a retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1972, and whose works now form part of public and private collections from the Victoria and Albert Museum to the National Museum of Wales, she once said: “I paint what I know and not what is here, and since I work from a memory that is unreliable how am I to know what is fact, and at what point does memory stop and invention begin?”
An unanswerable question, but just as this exhibition stands as an epitaph to her undoubted talents, so the last words about it should be those of Evelyn Williams.
“I need the depth and anger of the sea, the restlessness. I need to be engulfed by its vastness. I need the freedom of the wind. I need to be sucked up by it and scattered over all the world. I need love most of all. Like a great sponge I could soak all the love that has ever been. And I should still be thirsty.”
The gallery’s top floor and the remaining part of its second floor, is devoted to Sacred Book, an exhibition by Carlos Zapata. A self-taught artist, whose career in art may be said to have begun when making dolls with his grandmother in Colombia where he was born and bred, Carlos Zapata, who now lives and works near Falmouth, has a considerable reputation for his carved and painted sculptures and installations, mainly of wood, that involve such themes as poverty and conflict, religion and race. While he is influenced by folk and tribal arts from all over the world, but specifically from South America, and many of his sculptures emanate from and relate to his experience of living in a foreign country, and, of course, to Colombia where civil problems continue to bedevil its people, it says much for him that the principal characteristics in his work are empathy and compassion. Talking of his approach to his art, he says: “When I work, I let things flow and I try not to question. I just do it, and see what happens.”
From Bog Man and Old God to Torso and Skull, his sensual and evocative sculptures are as profound and powerful as they are pertinent. Not to be missed, admission is free, and Carlos Zapata’s Sacred Book, along with Evelyn Williams’ Intimate Whispers, can be seen in Anima Mundi, Street-an-Pol, St Ives, until March 31.