AG Creatives is a group made up of artists and makers, several of whom have been working professionally in their chosen genre for decades, others who are returning to art after time out. For all of the artists, creating art is an urge that just can’t be ignored. Self-taught or formally educated art is what brought the group together, sharing what they create with the public to not only enable them to carry on creating by financing their lives, expressing their passions, but it also helps them to validate their work.
For AG Creatives the idea of exhibiting at Oxmarket was something that would be great to do, something that might give the group a new creative focus. The group run the Artisan Gallery in North Street in Chichester as a cooperative, each member displaying work there usually with no connection to the exhibition next to them. The idea of AG Creatives exhibiting together in a ‘loosely’ themed exhibition was a great challenge, giving many of the group the impetus to design something different.
In Echoes of Earth at Oxmarket there will be work from 21 of AG Creatives core artists and makers each inspired in their own way by the theme. Each piece of art in the exhibition has come about with influence, perhaps quite loosely, of echoes felt from the world. Echoes of Earth could be a call to attune the artists to what the Earth is telling them—through its patterns, silences, and a closer look at the materials gleaned from it. Urging them to listen to that emotion, whether it’s ancestral myths, symbolism or ecological.
On display in the exhbition will be work from four jewellers, Katherine Lawrie, Moira Cooper, Karen Saunders and Sylvia Tomkinson, glass artists Nancy Goodens and Heidi Robinson, ceramicists Mim McCann and Heather Muir, Sculptor Deborah Hochreutener, painters, Min Maude, Frans de Leij, Paula Chuter -Baker, Ellie Philpott, Teresa Poole and Bec Hopkins and artist and Lampshade Designer Marie Monro, Print makers Wendy Middleditch and Mark Maidment, Textile artists Jackie Lowe and Valerie McCallum, Surface Decorator Sarah MacLaughlin each interpreting the title in their own specialist genre or media.
