Helen Barff & others @ JGM Gallery

With each of the artists in this show, Surface elicits as much as it demands; it holds a meaning as diverse as the specific methodology it provokes. For painter Sarah Dwyer, surface has a topographical quality; to Dominique Gerolini, surface has more to do with a totality that contains, like skin on the body; for the multidisciplinary artist HelenA Pritchard, surface is an opportunity to transform.
Alice Wilson questions the idea of surface itself though a strategy of inversion; for the sculptor Helen Barff, surface is a boundary: the contact layer; to Ginny Parvy, surface becomes a narrative space to disclose what lies beneath, what is captured and what is lost; to Katharine Beaugie, surface reflects, it directs and aligns light that is captured. The performance artist Echo Morgan is the surface. She uses the surface of her own body to create new bodies of work: her skin as a canvas, her hair a tool to paint, and her voice as colour.
Thus, the surface is the thing, which invites us to look more deeply, and ask questions about how something came to be that way. Rather than the end point, it is the access point. Its double aspect is what attracts but also separates. You can know and even memorise every single aspect of a surface, like a face… except that it shifts, as with your mood, and never fully reveals what lies beneath.