SAW is a informal collective of four contemporary artists who have lived and worked in Norfolk for many years. Elemental, which has been in development over the past three years, will include new multidisciplinary work made by the four members of SAW specifically for this exhibition. Some of the work will reference and engage directly with the history and location of the church, and with other locations in Salthouse parish.

You can contact us by email at: info (at) sawnorfolk (dot) net.

Elemental

Jill Whall

These four artists - Antonia Soto, Imogen Ashwin, Trevor Ashwin and Lynda Williams - demonstrate a profound and passionate engagement with their environment, the elemental nature of the land, its geography, its history, its spirituality, its materiality. The land of Norfolk is the matrix from which they all work. Their art is distinct, each employing a unique language and vocabulary but together their work becomes a conversation, different voices in the landscape, compelling in their difference, more so in their sharedness.

Working within the tradition of the found object, detritus of the worked land forms the basis of Soto's practice. Discarded farm implements, hoes, spades, wheel rims, metal forms at times unrecognizable in their degradation, weathered and distressed from exposure to rain, frost and sun, are transformed into mysterious, totemic forms, epic in their scale and form. The fusion of materials, metal with wool, stone with wood are brought about by means of welding, tying, knotting, stretching, piercing. A desire for symmetry informs much of the work, seen most clearly in the photographic pieces where Soto employs the technique of Rorschach inversion (mirror imaging); a section of groyne covered in seaweed and shreds of plastic becomes a surreal, unearthly landscape reminiscent of Dali's landscapes.

If the visceral materiality of Soto's sculpture takes one by the throat, Trevor Ashwin leads us quietly by the hand into a world of spirituality and prehistory, beneath what Richard Mabey refers to as 'the living skin of the land'. His interest in shamanism leads him to those sites of ancient activity which he imagines as 'hot spots' where there might be a thinness, a breaking-through or a rupturing of that skin. These sites may be round or long barrows, physical holes in the earth's surface such as wells, springs, fissures or trees reaching down into the earth, providing a threshold, a conduit between the physical and spiritual worlds, between the present and the past and between the people of prehistory and ourselves. The vertical, photographic collages and other images are a result of prolonged presence at these sites, providing 'maximum exposure to the atmosphere and spirit of the place'. Some of them are taken with a very long exposure, frequently at night to allow and encourage 'things to happen'. Aside from the spiritual dimension of these pieces, the extreme verticality of many of them resonates powerfully in the seemingly flat, horizontal landscape of Norfolk.

Water, that most mysterious of elements, lies at the heart of Williams large charcoal drawings; she draws on fine watercolour paper, one remove from its watery state. The titles of the works are taken from the names of the particular weight of the papers, the lyrically named Rosa Pina for example. The garden pond, that most domesticated feature of an English suburban garden, acquires in Williams' hands a sinister and dark presence, tightly furled waterlily leaves extruding from a turgid surface, with hints of forms beneath. These are subversive pieces which create a sense of unease in the viewer, calling to mind the aesthetic of the sublime where the horror lies in the unknown. The opening sequence of David Lynch's film Blue Velvet springs to mind. Similarly the stack drawings hint at a menace; these stacks are not the homely thatches of a pastoral idyll, but instead they loom and threaten. The use of charcoal is important for Williams, the slow burning of the willow twigs links her work to Soto's use of fire and welding.

In fact there are so many commonalities in these artists work that an intriguing symbiosis seems to be at work. Guy Debord defines psychogeography as 'the study of ... specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously or not on the emotions and behavior of individuals'.

'Wayfinding', an offshoot of psychogeography, is 'used by travelers over land or sea to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes'. Imogen Ashwin's investigation into rural Norfolk would seem to sit very comfortably within this body of theory. In her video piece she records herself visiting virtually unnoticeable prehistoric barrows or 'hills' on Salthouse Heath and marking and naming these small hitherto unnamed mounds. These namings are extremely personal results of interaction with the site, the singing of a yellowhammer inspires Yellowhammer Hill or the pricking of herself on gorse, names Blood Veil. An offering is then left.

The floor piece, based on a 1797 published map of Norfolk, has as its centre Eve's Hill, a small hill just outside Reepham, Ashwin's home. Just as in the Mappa Mundi the ideological centre of the known medieval Christian world is Jerusalem, so Ashwin's centre is Eve's Hill. She plots every small hill on the map marking it with a resin cast of a cup cake, each one slightly different, further individualized by one of her grandmother's buttons embedded within the resin. Cooking, sewing, making offerings to household gods, naming paths and special places, these are highly personal interactions within a woman's psychological map of herself.

So myth, prehistory, the sublime, alchemy all play a part in the work of these artists. The land itself is at the centre of their art practice, it is honoured and celebrated and perhaps a little feared in its elemental power.