From Another Carriage - James Metsoja
I view this collection of work as an excavation of internal landscapes. My interest in these places started before I realised, while looking at 15th century foregrounds the rocks became witnesses. The cutting of boulders from a Cezanne and tidal comings and goings. These static events have always been there and it feels uncanny that these places are places, for what seems close to real, blurring the timeline of a linear me. Within this time I began tracing everything, sketches, paintings by Giotto, my studio wall, and paternal Estonian relatives. It may be that they are places of a thought or a memory of a thought. Sometimes I stand and look at them and see nothing but air and wish I could just, somehow, feel the breeze come from them.
James Metsoja, b. 1984, graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Norwich School Of Art in 2007 and an MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 2015 and was the recipient of the Constance Fairness Foundation Scholarship.
Solo exhibitions include Being in a Swamp, University of Hertfordshire Galleries, Museum of St. Albans and It’s Only Still Life at Outpost Gallery, Norwich. Group shows include ING Discerning Eye, Mall Galleries, selected by Ansel Krut; Provisions, Outpost Studios, Norwich; Life Was Meant To Be Awesome, Charlton Gallery, London; Griffin Art Prize, Shortlisted Artist Show, Griffin Gallery, London; Eastern Pavilions, Bethnal Green Library, London; Marmite Prize for Painting IV, touring exhibition; O Painters! My Painters!, Art Exchange, University of Essex, curated by Kaavous Clayton; Members’ Show, Outpost Gallery, Norwich, selected by Peter Suchin.
James Metsoja is also an associate artist at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts and an art teacher at a secondary school in Norwich.
