Venue: Swansea Museum
Exhibition – Walking in Two Worlds
Jonathan Anderson | Helen Blake | Philippa Brown | Lara Davies | Lucy Donald | Tom Down | Helen Finney | Mark Folds | Steph Goodger | Gareth Griffith | Amy Goldring | Paul Hughes | Hettie Van Kooten | Enzo Marra | James Moore | Sarah Poland | Jonathan Powell | Julian Rowe | Dylan Williams | Richard Williams | Jessica Woodrow
Dates: TBC due to COVID-19 pandemic
“Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage” – Morris West
Walking in Two Worlds is an exhibition curated by Jonathan Powell bringing together a group of artists who share his interests in prehistoric art, the primitive, the shamanistic and the mysterious. His vision of haphazardly-placed painted artefacts littering a gallery space is a latter-day reflection on the thrill of encountering a painted cave for the first time, where long-forgotten animals leap out of the flickering shadows. Perhaps for a brief moment the gallery can become the cave.
The focus of the show is the work of the neglected Dutch-French primitive painter Hetty van Kooten (1908-1958), some of whose paintings are included in the exhibition, together with a small display of texts, images and memorabilia concerning her life and work. Van Kooten, who had no formal training, took her inspiration from the cave paintings at Pech Merle, in Southern France. For a while in the 1950s she was taken up by the circle of Jean Dubuffet, but subsequently sank into obscurity.
Website: www.swanseamuseum.co.uk
Image: Helen Blake