Hart Gallery

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Elspeth Owen

OLD HAND

“In you, together with the beginner, is an old hand”

Earlier this year I found at the back of a cupboard some work I had made twenty years ago. I took it out and placed it beside some things I had just finished. As well as being eons apart they gave a happy hint of connection and continuity, of the beginner beginning again. Then I remembered the quotation above, written by Samuel Beckett about the Irish writer Aidan Higgins. 

In putting together this work for The Hart Gallery, I have been considering how the old hand, as well as being accomplished, must still be the one to learn new tricks, tricks of placing and juxtaposing as well as tricks of manu-facture: games of presentation and of making, that allow me and you to disrupt chronology, see old things anew and take the next path into the next future.

So there will be jars and bowls and scoop forms, and there will be wall- mounted pieces and large pinched plates that are entirely new (well, not really!)

And you may occasionally be wrong when you look at my work and consider, which are from my past and which made yesterday.....

Elspeth Owen

The exhibition 'Old Hand' will run from 11th November - 1st December 2010