2020, Exhibition Archive
‘Remembered Places’
13th June – 11th July 2020
An Exhibition of Paintings by Ann McCay
The work in this exhibition explores how reality becomes entangled with our memory and imagination. Remembered events and emotions cluster around places giving them a depth, richness and meaning.
The places that feature in these paintings are my garden and its shed, Rectory Wood, The Haberdashery Shop, Barbara Hepworth’s shed in her St.Ives garden, a potato house, a derelict cottage, a room in Tangiers and my local riverbank.
All these places evoke memories of childhood when experiences are vivid and free of adult preconceptions. They are seeds around which images from different times and locations gather in a parallel world of reverie.
“Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams those dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.”
From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
Ann McCay
Barbara Hepworth’s Bed
My first visit to Barbara Hepworth’s shed in her St. Ives garden was as an art student studying in Bristol. It seemed to embody something of the determination needed to maintain an independent vision that is quite vulnerable and needs to be protected to survive and is supported by the small building and its closeness to the natural world.
Blue Interior
The garden shed is a retreat into shade and undergrowth that has very little space so contains the bare essentials needed for daydreaming and the creation of ideas.
Boy Reading
Children often seek hidden retreats away from adult intrusions. He’s surrounded by structures, latticeworks of winding growth and delicate boundaries, both protective and defensive.
Inside the Shop
The haberdashery and artists materials shop, a place full of the basic elements needed to make something. The figures are from a cast of characters that inhabit many of my paintings. Each contain ways of being that have been found to be useful, or not.
Looking Towards the Shed
Its twilight in springtime and a young woman is looking confidently towards a shed full of skeps, small domed baskets made to house bees, literally, small hives of industry.
The Woodcutter’s Brother and the Bedstead
The Woodcutter’s brother is the unrecorded relation of his more active sibling. He is an observant, free thinking man of the road.
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