Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is an exhibition of works by artists who address relationships to the natural world through video, sculpture, photography, and drawing. It features artworks that reference psychoactive plants (Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Melanie Bonajo), automated forestry production (Edward Clydesdale Thomson), environments of spiritual nourishment (Veit Laurent Kurz) and morphologies of animal, vegetable, mineral form (Gemma Anderson). These artistic approaches do more than take the natural world as a passive and addressable ‘thing’. Instead, the natural world is understood here as an active ecological system with incorporating powers of its own. Alongside works by contemporary artists are a selection of prints by photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865 - 1932) – close-ups of plant life that simultaneously emphasise the mechanistic structures that exist in nature and the camera’s revolutionary powers of magnification.

The exhibition title is taken from an album by Pavement.

Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain is an exhibition that exists in two versions, at CCA Derry~Londonderry (7 February – 21 March 2015) and at Lismore Castle Arts St Carthage Hall, Co.Waterford (13 February –19 April 2015).

Artists: Gemma Anderson, Karl Blossfeldt, Melanie Bonajo, Ciarán Ó Dochartaigh, Veit Laurent Kurz, Edward Clydesdale Thomson.

To coincide with this exhibition artist Gemma Anderson is running a series of CMADC (Cornwall Morphology and Drawing Centre) workshops at CAST. The project aims to create a space in which to explore artistic and scientific practices as ways of knowing the natural world. Learning will be activated through the shared space of an artists studio and educational practice, focused on sharing rather than teaching. http://projects.falmouth.ac.uk/cmadc/