This year’s stunning artwork for the festival has been kindly provided by Cambridge based artist and furniture maker, Loukas Morley:

 

www.naturalhabitats.co.uk

 

Morley presents a series of sensual and often romantic encounters with material. Often using found objects, Loukas utilises a wide range of materials in the construction of his work, where wood, resin, paint, paper, cloth and furniture are assembled as individual notes painstakingly built up to create a score that has a calculated precision, disciplined yet playful.

 

He is spare and precise in his work, and his paintings are like traces of a performance that took place in his studio. The materiality of paint and its physical relationship with the body, enable him to choreograph compositions that are the tangible placements of his mark making, and with playful spontaneity that capture energetic moments held fast in translucent resin.

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There is a tipping point for everything within his work, the turning, locating and movement creates a latent energy – sense of intentionality and disruption –that is an orchestrated vitality. He works in a space of uncertainty, encountering the unknown through the process of making.

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Morley’s work is about the exploration of the creative process of an artist. He studied photography and cinematography at college and the multiple layers found, in particular, in his paintings bear reference to the layering of narratives, colour the compilation and framing. His work on resin allows him to edit, sand back and wipe off, the colour palette on each series of work is similar yet not exactly the same, the palette adapted but attributes the work before and after.

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The gloss of the resin is a desirable medium, layered to create depth and distance with the wooden base visible and integral to the composition. These paintings are built up over time through pouring, rubbing, sanding, waiting and watching. To create each work is a physical act of moving, controlled yet spontaneous. They are a contained response , a captured moment  of movement and the paint held static. The history of the process of making a painting is laid bare, nothing is hidden, except the perfectly built structure on which the paint sits. The edges are revealed even on the framed works which allow a gap to see the drips.

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His artwork is about beauty. He is aware of perfection and within the creative process, his mental and emotional response to the materials go beyond vocalisation. His practice recognises the value of not knowing where the creative process is leading him and enjoys it as a space of possibilities, allowing for more scope of the unexpected, fluid and constantly changing nature. This affect enables him to enter a meditative state exploring the capabilities of materials, their versatility as a medium, the process and act of the making art.

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Written by Bridget Cusack

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