Evolutionary Landscapes II - Eve Stockton ­ listings ­ Irish Printmakers

Evolutionary Landscapes II - Eve Stockton

Venue: Wexford Arts Centre

Date: Sat 17-04-2010 to Tue 18-05-2010

The American artist Eve Stockton, whose Evolutionary Landscapes II is currently showing at the Wexford Arts Centre, originally trained as an architect, and there is a strong feeling of order and structure to her coloured woodcuts.
Their subject, though, is the natural rather than the architectural environment. The title work sets the tone: it’s a big, expansive, wide-angled composition in which stems sprout from a mass of circular, pod-like forms in water, mushrooming out into a vegetative canopy above. This much we can tell but not because the plants are familiar – they’re not, in fact they look distinctly sci-fi.

We can read the image, though, because we know how habitats work. Plants grow and compete, colonising their environment as best they can. Beyond the momentary appearance of things, Stockton is interested in the idea of underlying structural patterns in both space and time. That is, the physical structure of the plant, from the macro to the micro scale, and the rhythm of its life cycle. Add all these elements together and you have an open-ended, dynamic process, and this is what the prints set out to reflect.

Her exhibition is a virtual forest extending as far as the eye can see. Other groups of prints evoke the way organisms manage to make the most of the available space, sending out shoots to occupy every square centimetre and producing intricate tangles of stems and leaves, or proliferating as cellular forms or blossoms.

Often the even-tempered, densely patterned compositions recall the playful geometry of MC Escher’s graphics, with a similar interplay between abstraction and representation and a fascination with symmetry. Stockton is very good at layering and combining colours and forms, producing attractive surfaces that charm you into engaging with their underlying ideas.

Source: AIDAN DUNNE irishtimes.com

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