Terra Tremula - Curated by Lee Maelzer

Terra Tremula, loosely translated as shaky ground or the opposite of Terra Firma, is an exhibition concerned with precariousness. Pertaining to geology, property, ecology, physicality or surface, it is an examination of instability and tenuous balance. Each artist in her or his own way makes work that deals with the moments before things fall or come apart.

Through sculptural language Beatriz Acevedo explores the liminal spaces of the body, where subject meets object, the whole and the part, the collision of gender. Bringing together formalist elements and the sensuality of everyday materials the work plays with a tension of possibility and potentiality, a moment in time, a heightened sense of expectancy.

Jake Clark creates eerily cinematic paintings of suburban European seaside architecture: its houses, people and details. The scale is often confusing, like looking at a model village. His palette captures faded and sun bleached colours, mixing different styles and speeds of painting and textures. Clarke combines collaged linoleum as both a source of pattern and a reference to architectural periods, the scale of linoleum patterns being often at loggerheads with the painted image on top.

Juliette Losq's watercolour and ink scenes offer new levels of depth into unremarkable semi-urban spaces. She plays upon the unsettling tranquillity of an abandoned place, navigating between serenity and a sense of unease.

Lee Maelzer's imagery usually originates from photographs which are extensively tampered with or physically broken down by chemicals before she begins working from them. She is particularly interested in exploring redundant sites and discarded objects and finding visually poetic meaning in them. With the sites specifically, the signature trace of rituals and a ‘ghost’ of the human presence is especially powerful to Maelzer, who finds herself constantly drawn to the idea of the melancholic and its location in the discarded.

Paul Manners makes paintings that explore a relationship between the transformative painterly and pictorial space and the corporeal surface. His work questions many of their values, embracing or rejecting them, placing the work between both surface and presence.

Elli Sou is a sculptor, whose forms are often grounded in mathematical concepts, such as Brownian Motion and Chaos Theory. Her objects, often made in series, map a creative struggle between the rigidity of theory and the uncertainty of material.