Art Exhibition at Devizes Museum - The Past is Another Country

Winter Exhibition at the Devizes Museum

The Past is Another Country: an Exhibition by the Elementals Art Group

Artwork inspired by the pre-history of Wiltshire.

The Elementals art group brings together the ideas and inspirations of six different artists under a central theme - Jenny Ford, Jan Knight, Julia Leyden, Christine Shorney, Josephine Sumner, plus guest artist Charlotte Sainsbury. Julia Leyden particularly has been inspired by the collections at the Wiltshire Heritage Museum. The project has been as much about the process of an idea, as the finished works of art.

The group studied archival maps and diagrams, artefacts in museums and photographic aerial views of the landscape - and walked and looked, and looked and walked! Rather than recreating the past they have distilled their own personal and emotional responses to the creations of the Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples of Wessex. Inevitably this involved straying outside Wiltshire to look at and compare sites and artefacts from other places.

Each artist has an individual ‘take’ on the project and this is reflected in the finished works themselves; which includes paintings, printmaking and mixed media, plus a twelve verse illustrated poem in book form and as a wall hanging. Exhibition will be on show in the Museum's Art Gallery from 5 November 2011 to 2 January 2012 at 41 Long Street, Devizes, Wiltshire. SN10 1NS