Rocks and Weeds | Jessica Potter

ROCKS AND WEEDS presents recent work by the artist Jessica Potter. The title refers to a watercolour by John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock Glenfinlas, 1853. Ruskin considered rocks to have elemental formative power. The exhibition reflects on the integration of writing, teaching and drawing in Ruskin’s work, alongside a deep investigation of the natural world. The show is structured by a consideration of the time and materiality of rocks, bringing together an extended series of photographs made in the Torridon region of the West Highlands of Scotland. This work is presented alongside the video OUTLIER by Simon Pope, which constructs a social life of a glacial erratic rock that can be found on Royal Avenue in Scarborough. GATHERING, A FERNERY, is an installation of ferns within the gallery that breathes life into the space and providing a subject for drawing and reflection.
 
Here is a landscape and I am an observer within it. It is a landscape that knows no frame or limit and, what’s more, my looking cuts no separation, no division.
   Put it like this:
   Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point. The focal point is everywhere, and what’s more, each detail, from the close-up grass to the most distant folds of the land, is as valid as the next. And with no ranking at all, the details cease to be details; for there is nothing larger, nothing we can call ‘all’, from which they are cut. [1]
 
Jessica Potter is an artist who lives and works in Kent. She completed a PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art in 2013 entitled The Photograph as a Site of Writing. She is an Editor at Copy Press and has exhibited widely. She is a visiting Lecturer at the RCA and UCA Canterbury.
 
Simon Pope's work is preoccupied with how humans negotiate social relationships in a more-than-human world. The work is always collective and participatory, and responsive to specific social and material conditions. It grapples with art’s engagement with new materialism, and takes a variety of forms, such as conversational events, film-making, and written correspondence. He represented Wales at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2003).

Private View | Thursday 14 March, 5-8pm
 
ROCKS AND WEEDS presents recent work by the artist Jessica Potter. The title refers to a watercolour by John Ruskin, Study of Gneiss Rock Glenfinlas, 1853. Ruskin considered rocks to have elemental formative power. The exhibition reflects on the integration of writing, teaching and drawing in Ruskin’s work, alongside a deep investigation of the natural world. The show is structured by a consideration of the time and materiality of rocks, bringing together an extended series of photographs made in the Torridon region of the West Highlands of Scotland. This work is presented alongside the video OUTLIER by Simon Pope, which constructs a social life of a glacial erratic rock that can be found on Royal Avenue in Scarborough. GATHERING, A FERNERY, is an installation of ferns within the gallery that breathes life into the space and providing a subject for drawing and reflection.
 
Here is a landscape and I am an observer within it. It is a landscape that knows no frame or limit and, what’s more, my looking cuts no separation, no division.
   Put it like this:
   Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point. The focal point is everywhere, and what’s more, each detail, from the close-up grass to the most distant folds of the land, is as valid as the next. And with no ranking at all, the details cease to be details; for there is nothing larger, nothing we can call ‘all’, from which they are cut. [1]
 
Jessica Potter is an artist who lives and works in Kent. She completed a PhD by practice at the Royal College of Art in 2013 entitled The Photograph as a Site of Writing. She is an Editor at Copy Press and has exhibited widely. She is a visiting Lecturer at the RCA and UCA Canterbury.
 
Simon Pope's work is preoccupied with how humans negotiate social relationships in a more-than-human world. The work is always collective and participatory, and responsive to specific social and material conditions. It grapples with art’s engagement with new materialism, and takes a variety of forms, such as conversational events, film-making, and written correspondence. He represented Wales at their inaugural exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2003).