Blinking, glare
Bryony Rose
03 February - 17 July 2024
In Blinking, glare Bryony Rose draws on the compounded teenage memory of walking home up the track after school to create a series of sculptural reliefs. Brambles curl around the room, across the recurring football pitch and through the changing evening’s light. Two moths dance together in the harsh beam of their floodlight moon. This journey was made hundreds of times and the memory has no defined edges but wrapped around it all is a sense of nostalgia and of disconnection – an unremarkable coming-of-age.
A rural Scottish teenage-hood informs much of Bryony’s work and these auto-biographical motifs are combined with the pastoral language of British applied arts. The imagery around teenage rites of passage in a small community take on the same cultural weight as more traditional motifs such as nightjars, rooks and moths that, in her work, provide witness to the otherwise empty scenes.
In considering the liminal qualities of dusk we might trace the blurry edges of what is artificial, natural or normal in these landscapes. And in these tracings we can think about wider conversations on how rural landscapes are depicted in culture and politics and to what end.
Bryony Rose studied Painting + Printing at the Glasgow School of Art graduating in 2015 - where she received the W O Hutcheson Prize for Drawing. She is an associate artist of Open School East 2019.
Notable exhibitions include Night Car 2023 (Kiosk, Glasgow) Bathing Nervous Limbs 2021 (Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh) Glass Houses 2020 (McBeans Nursey, Lewes) The Reception Was Brilliant 2019 (Open School East, Margate) digging 2018 (Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh) Say What I am Called 2018 (Glasgow International).
