COAST Festival 2011
Taking place in Autumn half- term week, Cromer and Sheringham’s Arts Festival extends the season in the last days of October
Review:
“The second annual COAST Festival had a clourful start as Cromer, Shreingham and all the villages in between came alive with art…. Artist Gaia Shaw will also be in the town for the remainder of the festival after setting up home in a beach chalet on the east promenade to create her distinctive “weather prints” on flowing pieces of silk. Her banners, which capture the coast’s weather across the seasons, are also on display in the foyer of the pier’s Pavilion Theatre”
Eastern Daily Press/North Norfolk News
Extract about the work of Gaia Shaw from “How Artists See Nature” Green Pebble Publication 2011
“My work on using the sky uses intaglio and
early photographic techniques to create a print
that undergoes processes from two or three
distinct traditions. In the case of “Light Dust” I made a contact print and built on the
photographic marks with intaglio. The lightsensitive
process of the photograph underlies a
pigmented world of print. Metal leaf adds lustre
to the surface.
Printing with the photographic process in the
garden in order to explore memory and my
personal history, gives me a feeling of ‘growing
my own’. Subjective, drawn lines express my personal reality whilst
the superimposed photographic image can convey imagination,
memory and the ineffable.
Recently my work is detached from image. In Blueprint of the Sky
II, I explore light and weather in a painterly way,
allowing the elements of the weather to work as
my tools on the cloth. The work is about the
intensity of the present.
The works are small adventures, in favourite
and well-remembered localities. I obtain marks
which I cannot predict by exposing my media to
the elements.
These portraits in a particular time and place
are of, and by, the elements, with my direction. I
feel intimately involved in the resultant marks
which become lucid through gazing at them.”
Thanks to John Worrrall from www.anglianimages.co.uk for photography during COAST festival.