Press Release for Gail Astbury at Cyberia
"Remembered Revived, Re-invented" April 1st - May 6th 1996 at Cyberia, Whitfield Street by Gail Astbury Lobster Elect, one of the striking graphic studies in London artist Gail Astbury's "Remembered, Revived, Re-invented" exhibition at Cyberia, London, has already won an admirer in a remote fishing community in Canada. "I live in a fishing village on the coast of Novia Scotia and lobster is a big part of our village life." said Jillian Speirs, via an e-mail. Speirs was able to view Lobster Elect by visiting Lateral Arts, a World Wide Web art gallery dedicated to bringing young British Contemporary artists, such as Astbury, to an international audience. Astbury, a co-director of Lateral Arts, became involved in the project because of her need to communicate her intensely personal art to a wider audience and her realisation that other British artists need similar opportunities. Lobster Elect was variously inspired by the stunning colour of the lobster, her allegy to seafood and her fascination with the contradictory elements of its form. Natural Forms feature in many of her paintings and drawings as she explains: "A sense of mystery and erotic power surrounds these forms. Their binary growth patterns act, for me, as a metaphor for life and its constant battles. In my desire to create captivating images, I strive to remain receptive to the sights, sounds and sensations that I experience. My choice of imagery focuses upon objects and ideas for which I feel a sense of relish: things remembered, revived, reinvented". Astbury says her store of personal reactions to the natural world are central to her creativity. Feathers, leaves, bones and hands at once animate her compositions and evoke the range of sensory experience felt at the moment of observation. She returns to explore a stock of remembered sensations in cyclical patterns of creativity using the drawn image as a poetic tool to re-capture and describe her experience of the world. "I am encouraged as an artist that the Web has allowed me to communicate my vision of nature in Lobster Elect to someone who might never otherwise have seen this image. I hope other artists will make use of this opportunity to communicate to a larger audience." said Astbury. Rhian Beynon.