The exhibition currently showing was called To the Trees: A Changing of Home by Jennifer Hooper. It was centered on the Bolivian Rainforest; featuring paintings, ink portraits and photography inspired by the area. The artist volunteered with a charity there ten years ago, then returned for a 9 week artists residency. The whole project highlights the fragility of the Bolivian creatures and their home, which is being constantly disturbed by human interaction. A series of large, colourful paintings take up one entire wall of the room, featuring lush green foliage. The paint looks slick and oily against the canvas, and glistens like light shining off waxy leaves. Even though the canvases are large, the scale is quite small and focused.
There was a photo series of black and white images of logging trucks, carrying away chopped tree trunks away from the forest. There were hundreds of similar pictures laid side by side in a grid.
The next series was a selection of inked portraits of little howler monkeys, which were painted in black and white. They were minimalistic and actually quite cute, all square framed on white watercolour paper. They looked striking together and complemented each other very well.
There was another photo series of jaguar cats, taking up another wall of the gallery. There were about half a dozen images in total, all featuring close ups of jaguars in motion, both in colour and in black and white.
My favourite pieces were two studies of butterflies. They were large white portrait size sheets of card with starkly contrasting colourful butterflies in paint and ink. They were striking and stood out beautifully against the photographs and black and white pieces. I picked up a free postcard of one of them too keep as a memento!
