3 - 8 June 2008

10am - 5pm

Two disparate disciplines come together and a form a whole for this exhibition of Mei Lim's photography and Joanna Martins' sculpture. 

In her photography Mei explores our relationship with the spaces around us - the public spaces in our cities peppered with colourful graffiti, the wide open spaces in the local landscape, and the secret world of fungi in quiet and barely accessible places.

Mei trained in graphic design, and continues to work in book design and illustration alongside her career as a freelance photographer. Her eye is inevitably drawn to strong divisions in the composition of the landscape, to the subtleties of a transient mist, or to chance discovery of the quirky and incongruous in everyday life.

"I draw my inspiration from no particular source - my aim is to create a good image each time I press the trigger. If my work raises a smile from the viewer, I consider it a job well done."

Mei is a Member of the Devon Guild of Craftsmen, exhibits across Devon, and runs workshops in photography and the use of digital software.

Joanna Martins is well known across the South West for her cold cast bronzes of hares and other wildlife, and she also enjoys the challenge of constructing sculptures in mixed media.

Symbolism and mythology play a significant part in Joanna's creative process - partly a result of the eight years she spent in Africa, where she studied tribal art, cultural icons and the symbolism of rites of passage.

Now settled in South Devon, Joanna has at last had the opportunity to creatively explore the inspiration she found in Africa, and to explore local mythology and symbolism within her work:

"The hare is the sacred animal of Eostre, the Celtic goddess of the spring moon, and evokes echoes of Devon's Celtic heritage. Because of its sacred links to the goddess, in pre-Roman Britain the hare was rarely eaten, but attitudes changed when the Romans introduced the sport of hare coursing. As they displaced the Celts to the fringes of the Empire the Romans also decimated the hare, and its grey shadow slipped into legend. The hare become sacred once again with the coming of Christianity, and the goddess Eostre lent her name to the festival of Easter. The Easter bunny is her totem, the hare."

Joanna's academic background is in geology, and the forces at work in geological processes, also give her a perspective on her art practice:

"I'm fascinated by the process of transmuting clay and wax and cement into into artefacts by the same geological processes that shape our planet: heat, chemical reaction, metamorphism and, above all, time. Time changes, but also preserves."

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