Art - Michele Findlay

I look with some confusion at the work of Michele Findlay, the Chalk Gallery’s featured artists for the first three weeks of the month. She’s used a variety of media, from fabrics attached to canvases and painted white, to ramshackle little white boxes with tiny porcelain fragments hanging inside on which are printed faded old photographs of little girls. There are sculptures of torsos with small heads. Everything looks spindly and delicate and white. “My work comes from inside me, the images that populate my mind are reflections of the emotions and desires of a woman,” reads her artist’s statement, printed on the back of a pretty square card. “…I want my work to reflect the complexity of women”. ‘No wonder I’ve always struggled to understand them,’ I think.

The rest of the exhibition is a collection of the work of the other 20 artists in the group. I walk round, to the sound of ‘That’s Amore’ playing on the hi-fi. Peter Cheek has done three stylised pub scenes, of uncertain era, that are cropped like photos. David Eva has done four landscapes painted in thick brush strokes which show moody skies dominating simple man-made buildings. Gus Harrison has done a series of faceless female nudes. These I get. I return back to Michele Findlay’s work, and her statement. ‘I want my work… to make other people question their own spirituality, gender, role and path in this time and place,” it concludes. Puzzled, I leave the building, figuring that in some way, she’d succeeded. DL