return to worldwidereview.com,
the home of critical reviews
From: Ben Zanoe Category: Art Date: 12 December 2009 Time: 01:19 PM Review: Winding along the narrow streets of St.Ives, I'm back in the old fish tainted art colony to see if there's anything to be had apart from gullible tourists and pasty bloated up-country downsizers from retrenched media companies. I'm heading down Fore Street burdened with surfing fashion shops and those dreadful galleries that sell the kitch blue seascapes and nasty studies of pebbles. Glory, then as I discover that Knills House, as well as being the former home of Mr Knill (Nil Desperandum) was until recently a Surf Shop, hooray its a (not a con) temporary gallery among legions of other galleries. The exhibition Nil Desperandum honours Cornishman John Knill b. 1785, curated by Phil Rushworth and Sally Noall and takes a refreshingly alternative route to the well worn paths of glory strung through this town. Artists Oliver Braid, Rita Heck, Anna Howarth, Doug Jones, Huw Locke, Randy Richmond, Charlotte Young, Therese Sunngren, Tom Kersevan, Jurij Pavlica, Sendi Mango, BridA, Annette Haycock and Ally Mellor submit their individual arts to the curatorial skills of messrs Noall and Rushworth who have resurrected John Knills infatuation with folkloric subject matter and created a very unlikely response using stories on video installation, mutated craft-forms that have a strange beauty but that retain the qualities of "craft" in order to instigate this shift from the cliché to the unique. An exhibition that inspires the idea that important art is still being made in St.Ives and not all backward looking at the sun sinking behind the Tate. If you go to Cornwall Go to Nil Desperandum.