Gallery visit Pippa Blake

Join us for a visit to the gallery of Candida Stevens at Cromwell Place in South Kensington for an evening with artists Pippa Blake.

Pippa, who kindly donated one of her works for our Charitable Grant, is exhibiting with Undercurrents

In Undercurrents, painter Pippa Blake presents a new body of work exploring the calming serenity and hidden dangers of creeks, streams, and rivers. Born from the centrality of voyaging by sea, land, and air to the artist’s life and career, this collection of paintings looks at waterways as routes of travel for humans, non-humans, and elemental forces alike. Many of the works in Undercurrents quietly touch on the sinister side of nature, creating a subtle tension between the beautiful and the unknown encapsulated in the reflective surfaces of apparently tranquil water.

The exhibition employs dual geographies to express both the fluid interconnectivity of all bodies of water and the specific conditions of local ecosystems which are affected in unique ways by the polluting actions of human beings. The places depicted in the paintings are located across the UK and New Zealand, spanning two opposite sides of the world. A small, rare, and increasingly threatened chalk stream local to Blake’s English south coast home provides a poignant counterpoint to a creek in rural New Zealand, first shown to Blake via photographs by her daughter on a long-distance phone call during the coronavirus lockdown. Through her process of capturing a sense of place, Blake’s work also speaks to a soulfulness and melancholy that suggest a widespread human yearning for something beyond the ordinary.

This exhibition will run 18-23 October in Gallery 3, Cromwell Place, London SW7 2JE and 29 October - 11 November at Candida Stevens Gallery, Chichester.

For more information visit: Candida Stevens website

Join us for a visit to see Pippa's work followed by a Q&A.

5 mins walk from South Kensington Underground station.