12 June – 22 July

Launch Sunday 12 June, 11am

Artist talk 12pm

Free entry

Exhibition runs 12 June – 22 July

Liz McGowan

the spirit wraps around me: nature as a second skin

What would it be like to experience a deep sensual immersion in the world around us?

Supposing, instead of walking on a footpath or a beach, we were walking in, or inside an ever changing

kaleidoscope of texture, colour, light and process…

Supposing we were literally cloaked in our surroundings?

Liz McGowan explores these ideas through her creative collaboration with the detail, patterns and processes of landscape, calling attention to a continual multi-sensual exchange with our surroundings. This body of work, exhibited at the Granary, includes cloaks, sculpture and earth works.

Each cloak is made with materials from a specific Norfolk habitat – tideline, reed bed, saltmarsh, river and barley field. ‘Cloak’ is a concept that we usually only apply to our clothes, regarding them as an extension of ourselves. In reality we are constantly immersed in a multi-sensual exchange with our surroundings. McGowan describes the cloak as ‘mediating between the human body and the landscape it emerges from. It’s an invitation to immerse oneself in the more than human world, like plunging into cold water.’

Alongside the cloaks, the exhibition includes several of McGowan’s Chthon earth works. Chthon is one of several Greek words for  ‘earth’ referring specifically to that which is under the earth. In English, ‘chthonic’ describes deities or spirits of the underworld. These works are the result of playing with saltmarsh mud in liquid and solid form, to create patterns and sculptures, exploring what it does and how it moves. McGowan writes: ‘At the same time this activity links in to a chthonic energy – raw, earthy – a planet in crisis meeting an inner, empathetic roar.’