Tony Plant
The Shadows from a Disturbed Surface
12 July to 23 August 2024
Opening: Friday 12 July 5 - 8pm
I am for an art that takes into account
the direct effect of the elements as they
exist from day to day apart from representation.
- Robert Smithson
School Gallery is pleased to present The Shadows from a Disturbed Surface, an exhibition by Tony Plant. The exhibition consists of a series of new large scale paintings, reworked found-wood and a large scale beach drawing created and filmed specifically for this exhibition.
Plant has had a lifelong engagement with the ever changing natural landscape in which he maximises the optimum conditions to make work. He follows the sea’s tides and currents using a yacht, a kayak and a inflatable boat. He seeks the secret places where the driftwood rests, he scales cliff faces when tides, light and weather conditions allow to draw across beaches. Plant sees, sketches and experiences the shifting shapes created by natural elements colliding and translates these experiences onto canvases, beaches, and ultimately, found treasures that have dropped out of the tides race. The opening quote by the legendary land artist Robert Smithson is the perfect introduction to Tony Plant’s work as “the direct effect of the elements” is key to every aspect of his excitingly spontaneous practice.
Plant says: "As with the tides and the seasons, my work is cyclical. Lines of swell, generated thousands of miles away by swirling weather patterns sculpt and even change the colour of the surfaces upon which I draw. A 500m whole beach drawing is in fact, made visible by nothing more than the shadows of the disturbed surface created by a rake, they are less than 1cm deep. The huge sandbanks I scratch my way across are ultimately, single grains of sand that have fallen out of the tidal currents between headlands of towering rock, the same rock that the sand came from, the same shapes and movements, balances and colours that appear in my canvases and found objects."
Tony Plant (born 1962) graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 1990.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Circle Contemporary Gallery 2021; Porthmeor Studio 5, St Ives. 2019; Porthole Space. Night Walk Zennor 2019; Heartland Project National Trust, Shropshire Hills AONB Painting exhibition. 2018; Royal Cornwall Museum. Walk. Stop. Walk. 2017.
Selected group exhibitions include: Kaleidoscope, Projects22, 2024; Circle Contemporary Gallery 2021; Trust New Art. Sutton House, London 2020; The Arca Project, Payne Shurvell Gallery, Snape Maltings 2019; Walk Scilly, Commissioned Artist. 2018; Hireth. Changing the Cornish Landscape. Royal Cornwall Museum. 2018; The Arca Project Payne Shurvell Gallery. Suffolk. 2017; Royal West of England Academy. Drawn. 2017; Penwith Gallery, St Ives. Mixed abstract painting show. 2017
He lives and works in Newquay, Cornwall