Simon HItchens, whom we announced our representation of in 2023, will soon be exhibiting four works in a group show, 'A Skin Made Porous', 10 Feb - 23 Mar 2024, at Anima Mundi Gallery in St Ives, Cornwall.
"Human skin is porous; the world flows through you. Your senses are large pores that let the world in. By being attuned to the wisdom of your senses, you will never become an exile in your own life, an outsider lost in an external spiritual place that your will and intellect, have constructed"- John O'Donohue
This brief exhibition introduction is bookended by two quotes, which whilst seemingly oppositional, indicate something intrinsic about the nature of our experience, and hint at a condition which feels ever pertinent when viewing our individual and collective exterior and interior placement in the world. This existential dichotomy provides a poetic seed from which this exhibition has grown, and in turn become something other. I hope that it provides viewers with the space and opportunity to contemplate and recognise the guarded self as a solitary entity armoured. Yet our shells are there to be breached, by an evolving process of physical and metaphysical transformation. The disperate emotional effects of the universe we inhabit, allow us the potential to retreat or to transcend towards a greater sense of separation or a wider unity, where we and all become one.
"It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course-for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him." - Carl Jung, 'Aion'
The exhibition includes artworks by (In alphabetical order) : Massimo Angei, Gabriel Tendai Choto, Phoebe Cummings, Luke Frost, Youki Hirakawa, Simon Hitchens, Arthur Lanyon, Sam Lock, Jamie Mills, Malcolm Pate, Jonathan Michael Ray, Marija Rinkevičiūtė, Agnes Treherne, David Kim Whittaker, Joy Wolfenden Brown, Carlos Zapata"
Venue details:
Anima Mundi, Street-an-Pol, St Ives, Cornwall, TR26 2DS
Open Tues-Sat, 10.30am-4.30pm
