The Doorway Gallery is delighted to host an exhibition by Chris Wilson called ‘Small Islands' on Thursday, November 6th between 6-8pm on 24 South Frederick Street. The exhibition will run until December 4th.

The works in the exhibition “Small Islands”, aim to celebrate “place”. They extract the textures and surfaces of sections of ground, often a coastal rock form, capturing the lines and patterns of the land that one literally stands upon and transforms this intimate space into the idea of a much larger landscape. The paintings are created through painted layers of subtle marks, each layer slightly obscured by the next. In places the layers representing these hidden histories of mark making are more visible. The surface becomes a canvas of lines and borders with shifting patterns of strata suggesting boundaries, but also movement and a landscape of changing and multiple viewpoints.

The small bonzes juxtapose these opposing viewpoints in a single form. Casts of rocks taken from formations along the north Antrim coast where I live, provide the solid structure that supports the small buildings on the surface. The fissures and lines of the rocks are transformed into a mountain side, a valley or headland through the placing of the small buildings. The rock castings and the paintings play with an aerial perspective that is combined with a traditional linear pictorial perspective to create landscapes that explore an attachment to place.