Sarah Mayhew-Craddock loses herself in Oxford artist Rose-Marie Caldecott’s foray into abstract landscapes

Rose-Marie Caldecott’s exhibition, The Radiance of Being, at Art Jericho in King Street, Oxford, is a beautiful and poetically poignant momento mori.

This exhibition is the first solo show for the young Oxford artist, a recent graduate, and offers the visitor a glimpse into the development of her artistic practice over the past couple of years.

Dedicated to her late father Stratford Caldecott, who used to have an office above Art Jericho, this exhibition is both emotionally charged and carefully considered.

Taking inspiration from fractals (the natural phenomenon of recurring patterns in nature) that were first introduced to the artist by her father, Caldecott’s painterly pictures speak of life cycles, and the human desire to harness nature in an attempt to make sense of life and exercise control.

Caldecott said: “Life reminds us again and again that we are not in control. At these moments come both the greatest rewards and the greatest sacrifices. We spend most of our time creating a web of illusion to cover up life’s flux, in order that we might feel grounded.

“All my work is essentially rooted in the human experience of reconciling ourselves to this surrendering of control. I wish to encourage the viewer to recognise the beauty and meaning that can be born out of letting go.”

Her work possesses a sense of other- worldliness; standing before it viewers lose themselves in an abstract space in which carefully composed oval shapes attempt to contain paint that has been freed and allowed to find its place, squirming like a micro-organism, on the picture plane.

Offering a similar kind of perspective on nature as the great Venetian architect Andrea Palladio and reminding me of the contemporary landscape artist Richard Long, Caldecott uses visual metaphors and motifs such as the greenhouse, paths worn into the landscape and residential streets.

However, it is clearly the garden, a place were the tensions strung between human stubbornness and life’s flux can be fully explored, that captures Caldecott’s imagination most profoundly.

She said: “We often struggle to contain the garden, to align it with a fixed ideal, but the most beautiful gardens can be created when balance is struck between our sense of order and nature’s order, which is beyond our reckoning.”

Reminiscent of an antique serving plate from a formal dinner service, deer stare out at the viewer from one of Caldecott’s wall-based works, as if frozen in time and with fear for what the future might hold.

With other paintings the recurring theme of roofed boxes, homes and dwellings, speak of the simplified compartmentalised existence that the vast majority of us adhere to. Whether it’s the meticulous marbled etching of the works on paper or the quietly sculptural veins carved out by oil paints, all of the works battle between the macro and micro, either catapulting viewersi nto outer space, leaving them swimming, weightless amid a galaxy of the unknown or squeezed into the minutiae of a pin-prick existance.

The stand-out work for me in this contemplative, slightly unnerving exhibition comes in the shape of a transparent, glass cloud of a paperweight, placed in the far corner of the room, squashing life out of the fine rice paper trapped beneath it.

It was interesting to learn that this piece is Caldecott’s sole foray away from two-dimensional work – I hope to see more of it, and look forward to seeing how Rose-Marie Caldecott’s art develops in the future.

The work in this exhibition isn’t obvious, but given a chance, that is what makes it so accessible. Like life itself, it is what you make of it, and I think it’s inspired.

CHECK IT OUT
The Radiance of Being is at Art Jericho, 6 King Street, Oxford, until August 31. See artjericho.com
Open Wednesday to Sunday 12 to 6pm
Free entry

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