Material Stories

Louise Ritchie + Rosalind Lawless

Collaborative Statement

Playful material inventions that include painting, printmaking and sculpture are at the heart of this collaborative exhibition.  Material Stories is an expression of the individual creative processes from each artist as informed by their ongoing personal practice, but, simultaneously combines, through a continued, focussed conversation, to produce artworks that narrate a response to the perception of places and spaces and the materiality of artforms within the context of ongoing and long-time artistic dialogues between the artists themselves. This loose, ‘exquisite corpse’ approach to material story-telling has given both artists the opportunity to engage with the formal and thoughtful properties of their work, whilst exploring the making process itself as an integral aspect of the final hybrid outcomes.

Louise and Rosalind have shared visual insights and reflected on their parallel working practice since 1996 when they met originally as tutor and student at the former Glasgow College of Building & Printing. In undertaking the exhibition preparation for Material Stories, they have actively used digital platforms to view and respond to each other’s work as a reflective instrument that has allowed a tacit embedding of ideas and visual experimentation. This collaboration, as an enduring exchange, shares a profound attention to colour within 2 and 3 dimensional forms and to the significance of their use of emotive things. These things are discovered both as found-objects and as a consequence of material-making; they propel and compel both artists to continue to examine the physical and intellectual processes within the thinking-through-making stories that are intrinsic and extrinsic to each artwork.

Material Stories combines painting, printmaking, sculpture, collage and laser-cutting, bronze and porcelain casting to engage with the creative curiosity around the nature of why we make what we make; what we choose to use to make that and how we go about it.