Viewing Room
Welcome to the Castle Gallery Viewing Rooms where you will find highlights from our exhibitions - past and present - focussing on key works, inspirational ideas and telling the stories behind the show. Best viewed on a desktop browser.
Veta Gorner
9th June - 1st July 2023
'Out Brief Candle'
40 original lithographs to mark 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio
'Out Brief Candle'
40 original lithographs to mark 400 years since the publication of Shakespeare's First Folio
|
Rolling Restless Stone, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from Henry V) CONCEPT of OUT BRIEF CANDLE
Veta Gorner’s ‘Out Brief Candle’ project is a thought-provoking interplay of words and images. It consists of more than forty hand-printed lithographs created over the past seven years and inspired by the words of William Shakespeare. The central narrative of ‘Out Brief Candle’ encompasses the brevity and unexpected consequences of human life. The Bard’s themes energise and inform Veta’s conceptual designs creating a dialogue between the work of two artists separated by four centuries and a connection between the words of Shakespeare and modern-day sensibilities and technology. |
Veta hopes that through an exploration of the themes of the internal conflict and the complexities of our life that we will learn “to know thyself”. For her, this series of works has been a quest to make sense of her own awareness, the pulls and twist of order and chaos, and perception and change.
|
Skipping Spirit, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from The Merchant of Venice) For Veta, the concept for ‘Out Brief Candle’ was a game-changer as it gave her a chance to re-assess her art in a way that provided a vital connection to the outside world and an engagement with important subjects.
“A great print is both a technical riddle and an aesthetic wonder. It is an evanescent poem shaped into a solid and tangible form"
|
|
|
Life's But a Walking Shadow, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from Macbeth) TIMELINE for OUT BRIEF CANDLE
|
Veta has exhibited this series of lithographs at the Globe Theatre, the Royal Academy and Eames Fine Art in London but this is the first opportunity for her public to view the work at the other end of the country in Inverness.
Circled Waters (from Sir Thomas More) - Sea of Troubles (from Hamlet) - Extremity of Both Ends (from Timon of Athens)
|
Toil and Trouble, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from Macbeth) PRINT TECHNIQUE
Veta Gorner is a highly respected Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers. Each original lithograph from ‘Out Brief Candle’ has been created using a combination of traditional and modern printmaking techniques and has been printed by the artist on Somerset 250 gms cotton paper in an edition of 50. Image size 25 x 25cm. The printing technique used for these prints is unique to Veta and is the result of much trial and error as she combines a lithographic plate with an intaglio etching press (printmaking technologies that are not supposed to work together). |
|
She uses industrial positive lithographical plates because they can provide rich definition and sensitive levels of monochromatic tone. These plates will be phased out in a few years which narrows the time frame for the project and gives it a unique historical time stamp.
|
Veta works with a combination of digital manipulation and traditional printmaking techniques, mixing photography with drawing and then converting collaged and edited images into film transparencies as part of the process that blurs the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. In her works freehand drawing and mechanical algorithms interact creating artworks which are half-way between nature and technology.
|
|
|
Eternal Lines, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from Sonnet 18) “I draw by hand on paper, plate or now on iPad. Then digitally assemble and manipulate drawings and photos. But at the end I create physical artefacts, the print itself. And that is supremely important to me.” |
|
Thinking Makes It So, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from Hamlet) Veta has created a set of physically improbable images working with key concepts of form, light, perception, motion and time to create the depth of space held within a square format which is critical to the whole visual language of the series.
|
|
“I am fascinated by the expressive nature of human motion and its dialogue with space. I construct and engineer my forms instead of drawing directly from life and build suggestions of meaning into my compositions and visual provocations.”
|
Quintessence of Dust, lithograph, 25 x 25cm
(from Hamlet) As well as printmaking Veta paints, draws, sculpts, makes and designs but in the end, she always comes back to print. She loves printmaking; its material and physical limits, open-ended possibilities and messy inks. |
|
ARTIST’S BACKGROUND
Veta Gorner was born in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1974 and now lives and works near Stamford, UK. After receiving her degree in Industrial Design and Architecture, Veta moved from Russia to England where she studied Printmaking at Morley College, London in 2002. Shortly after she was elected Member of the Greenwich Printmakers Association, and has since exhibited in London, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Inverness. |
|