SWING AND SWIRL - JULIET AND JAMIE GUTCH - THURLE WRIGHT

Undulating leaves of wood cast mesmerising shadows, alongside curled fragments of paper freed from books. Swing and Swirl brings together ethereal mobiles by Juliet and Jamie Gutch and provoking paper cuts by Thurle Wright. The lightness of the elm in the mobiles echoes the swirling pieces of paper, proposing a dialogue between materials, rhythms, movement and forms.

The butterfly effect inspired Juliet and Jamie Gutch’s pieces for the show. The idea of how people and movement in a room affect their mobiles reminded them of the effect of the beating of a butterfly’s wing causing, sometime later, a hurricane on the other side of the world: the idea of chaos and consequence. With their mobiles “you just need to walk past them and they move. If you blow on them they move fast, sometimes jerkily. If you're still, they are still”. The beautiful shapes and forms follow Lorenz Attractors that represent the chaos theory or the butterfly effect. For these works, Juliet and Jamie have also been experimenting with a range of new techniques - using ink to give a wash over the wood and using text on the material.

The different elements of each mobile are in perfect balance, they glance past each other, suggesting an intention to touch, but never doing so. Juliet and Jamie’s work is about balance: “Through our work we want people to wonder about balance and to experience what happens when balance is lost, not found or restricted in some way. We want people to understand the sculptural language of mobiles and its relevance today.”

Juliet and Jamie both studied languages, at Birmingham University and Cambridge University, respectively, developing their artistic style and direction independently, before meeting in 2001. Juliet and Jamie were commissioned to create an ambitious 12-metre mobile in the £35m John Lewis at Stratford for the 2012 London Olympics, which was inspired by larks flying across East End marshes. In 2014they completed A Murmuration of Starlings, a commission for the reception atrium of the new Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital. Juliet and Jamie have been showing at jaggedart since 2010.

Thurle Wright’s intricate paper works are influenced by language, nature, learning, memory, history, and their systematic and structural properties. Thurle patiently folds, morphs, cuts and contorts her various paper sources, in order to distort and deconstruct their original meaning and purpose. She frequently refers to maps and classical works of literature as her source material. In their original form, by reading a map or a book, the reader is taken on a different type of journey, which is paralleled by the complex transformation that these materials go through as she rearranges them searching for a sense of pattern and order and creating a new history or narrative.

For Swing and Swirl, Thurle has been working with circles and triangles, curled up or methodically arranged in wooden loops, old ornamented frames or floating freely on the wall. In Mirror, a cluster of tiny spiral fragments from “Powder and Paint; A History of the English Woman’s Toilet” are enclosed in a Victorian gilded mirror frame, playing on the feminine ritual of looking into a mirror to do your hair and make up, thus language and text reflecting and replacing our (female) identity. Angular and geometric shapes from books on ethics and philosophy form triangular structures, creating a 3dimensional landscape, a new mapping of ideas. A site specific installation made of hundreds of paper stars will invade the gallery wall.

Through Thurle’s repetitive cutting and deconstructing, the books are deprived of their original narrative. However, through the accumulation and combination of those fragments, a new fabric emerges and new stories are told.

Thurle Wright initially studied modern languages and literature before focusing in visual art. She attended Goldsmiths College where she obtained a Degree in Textiles. Thurle has exhibited widely across the UK, including the V&A Museum of Childhood, Royal London Hospital and Canary Wharf. Thurle was born in Zimbabwe and now lives and works in Kent. She has exhibited at jaggedart since 2011.