IN RESIDENCE III

Catalogue Published June 2023

Janet Lines, an English artist who has lived for many years in Athens, also sees herself as permanently between worlds. She has an affinity for the nomad, the refugee. Returning to art school in 2017 after many years teaching, Lines chose through her new work “to look at homelessness, disbelonging”. From sticks of clay, her work developed into volumes – evocative of passage ways or caverns, bags or bodies. What became important was the idea of space contained and space occupied, with the rim becoming the interface between the two. The thin black line round the rim of Lines’ pieces, achieved by burying the vessels in sand and smoking the rim, lifts her work into conversation also with drawing – and the works on paper here by Robert Motherwell, Terry Frost and Bridget Riley. In this they also recall Gordon Baldwin’s work where the ceramic volume becomes a surface for mark-making, an indivisible part of the work’s meaning, and making clear his vessels’ affinity with the modernist experiments of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.