Christmas Steps Gallery, Bristol, June 2018

Light & Shade was an exhibition of contemporary art featuring 12 artists from Bristol and beyond whose work explores the transformative possibilities of light and the ways in which it can be used to convey or elicit form and feeling.

Artists have experimented with light and shade throughout history, pushing these opposite polarities to their extremes and exploring the power and the subtleties inherent within them. In this exhibition, light’s intrinsic relationship with the natural world was addressed by each of the artists, whether directly, through figurative representation, or indirectly, with abstract works. While some explored the sublime and spectacular nature of the elements or strange and unsettling effects of light on atmosphere, others played with light and shade to articulate ever-changing form and texture or the consumption of light by darkness.

Featuring Louise Beer, Harriet Carter, Mi-Young Choi, Emma Coop, Helen Jones, Marguerite Knight, Hattie Moore, Émilie-Christine P. Newman, Ioanna Sakellaraki, Paul Harvey Scull, Renata Sinclair, and Ruth Wallace.

Image shown: Mi-Young Choi, Bail Out, Oil on linen, 2015

Paul Harvey Scull, ‘Inside Outside I’, etching

Louise Beer, In Saturating Blackness (detail)

Light & Shade, Installation view

Helen Jones, ‘Solo 011’, pastel on tracing paper

Light & Shade, installation view

Installation view, Louse Beer ‘In Saturating Blackness’, Ruth Wallace, ‘Trace VIII’

Emma Coop, ‘Was and Could’, photopolymer etching

Installation view, Ioanna Sakellaraki, ‘ Have you passed through this night?’, Renata Sinclair, ‘Continental Drift’

Ioanna Sakellaraki, ‘ Have you passed through this night?’, colour photograph

Harriet Carter, ’13Al.2′, oil on aluminium

Émilie-Christine P. Newman, ‘Black Mass I’, mixed media

Marguerite Knight, ‘White Texture’, arylic and mixed media on board