Pop-up exhibition of sculptures and painting at Oxmarket Contemporary, Chichester

As Jane says: “The American artist Ad Reinhardt once quipped that ‘sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,’ a remark which captures something of the uneasy relationship between the two forms.” At Oxmarket Contemporary painter Mike and sculptor Jane have put their work together in a way which aims to alter any preconception about how the two might go together.

“We’ll be putting my sculptures much closer to Mike’s paintings than you would normally expect,” explains Jane. “There’s a synchronicity of form between the sculptures and the paintings, a series of echoes, and we wanted viewers to see them simultaneously, so that you might almost forget about the boundaries between two and three dimensions.”

Jane, who has an MFA in Sculpture from West Dean College and was a featured artist at last year’s Doddington Hall Biennial Sculpture Show, hand carves stone, mainly alabaster, soapstone, onyx and slate.

She selects her stones carefully and in working them follows the form of the stone as it has naturally occurred, coaxing shapes and textures from what already exists within and on the surface of the stone.

“This ability to see what’s there in the stone and allow it to exist is what is so exciting for me,” says Mike. “In my paintings I’m always trying to let the forms happen of their own accord, to somehow come into being. That’s why we wanted to put the two together, because it feels as if they arose from the same process.’

Mike, who until recently taught in the fine art department at the University of Chichester and who has exhibited his paintings and prints widely, has for the last five years been making large paintings on unprimed canvas using primarily shades of black and grey. It is a selection of these paintings which will be shown alongside Jane’s sculptures.

“The paintings have a vitality, this real sense of something alive happening in front of your eyes,” Jane said. “I think my sculptures have a similar feeling of things emerging and whether that’s some kind of ancient force, or a figure from Classical mythology, or a physical phenomenon – well, that’s probably up to the viewer.”

Jane Fremantle and Mike Walker can be seen in the Wilson Gallery, Oxmarket Contemporary, between November 22 and December 4. Open Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-4.30pm. Entry is free