Anne James on an exhibition extolling lunar imagery

Visiting Oxford’s castle complex during the next month will prove most rewarding, for the delightful and innovative O3 Gallery has both commissioned local artist Charlotte Orr to create a large-scale mural and is hosting a Winter Moon exhibition in the gallery itself.

The mural is on bill boarding that is screening units in the process of refurbishment.

Orr, a recent graduate, is better known for her work as an illustrator. This is her first large-scale mural, and she will be working on it throughout December. She has used the mural to re-interpret the castle and its environs in the context of an enchanted forest to tell a series of magic stories, all executed in the greys, blacks and silvers that speak of adventures on moonlit nights.

The Winter Moon exhibition celebrates the beauty of the moon itself and the effects it creates on land, seascapes and imaginations, with the gallery’s split level providing the opportunity to view the work from below as if looking up at the heavens.

There are two themes running through the work: the first takes a literal approach to capturing the iconic imagery of the moon and the second explores the impact of moonlight on Planet Earth and on our imaginations.

Wuon-Gean Ho’s screen print of Beyond the moon provides a portrait of the moon, as if seen through a veil of delicate clouds: clouds which fail, despite best attempts, to dim the moon’s mesmeric ardour.

Nicola Kerslake has produced three large and stunningly sophisticated images of the moon: one of which is reproduced here. Kerslake is a print-maker. She etches onto metal plates which are the means by which she makes her prints. To create the etchings she has employed the most unusual technique of putting her circular plates into the sea and allowing the tides, guided as they are by the moon, to undertake the etching process, the end results being complex, ethereal and singularly lunar orbs.

By contrast Flora McLachlan looks at the impact of the moon and moonlight in her dry-point etchings with watercolours. In each of them she takes the eye into mystical forests and glades. Each of her beautifully executed pieces is redolent with enigmatic symbols and ciphers, with strong references to legend and folk lore. One such is Trees calling the weather, illustrated here. It is a diminutive piece backlit by moonlight, a light that enhances the foreground. Shown alongside McLachlan’s work are prints by Peter Vigors that speak of moonlight as fantastical and at times sinister, as in The deathless spectre, where a small, but commanding cloaked form provides an enigmatic statement made more complex against the backdrop of night skies and its ghost-white antlers.

Morna Rees’ etchings capture land and sea scapes as lit by the moon. In her Last light Cape Cornwall, two powerful blocks of dark appear to be inexorably moving from left to right of the piece and by implicat-ion the silvered sea, St Michael’s Mount and the towering cliffs will soon be no more than shadowy memories. In her Winter Night St Lawrence, the church, lit from within, harbours a diminutive adult and two small children in its entrance, whilst a powerful moon, still in crescent, illuminates the sky and plays light across a range of tombstones giving them the appearance of an audience in awe of the moon’s commanding presence.

Ceramicist Katherine Staples has created a series of pieces with quasi-lunar surfaces. She has been working to replicate the corrosive effect of mould on its host surface, doing this by applying volcanic glazes to her pieces, and then firing them at the highest temperatures, the result being three-dimensional corrupted surfaces with a crystalline overtone that catch and reflect the light, overtones underpinned by a delicate layer of pastel colours. Bowl (volcanic), illustrated here, is an eminently tactile little piece, its tiny proportions being in direct contrast to Lava Flow, one of Staples’ two larger abstract pieces. The same glaze which both dresses and enhances the delicacy of Bowl (volcanic) is also able to make bold statements about Lava Flow’s abstracted and alien form.

The exhibition has a performance element as well. It is accompanied by a carefully constructed medley of music with lunar references that reflect the huge impact the moon has had and continues to have on us, our world and our perception of the world as seen or as imagined.

This is a selling exhibition, so the work on show will change as pieces are sold. This, along with the affordability of much of the work, makes for an exhibition well worth visiting and revisiting.

Winter Moon
O3 Gallery, Oxford Castle Quarter
Tuesday to Sunday, until January 25
Call 01865 246131 or visit o3gallery.co.uk