Hugh Alcock – Listen! – Feb 14 – 25

CELL GALLERY

My approach is best described as poetic or lyrical. My drawings, of charcoal and pastels on board or canvas, primarily project a mood, and in this sense are contemplative in nature. A recent work, for instance, ‘Listening’ gets its title from a line in a Seamus Heaney poem ‘Oracle’. In it the poet recounts, as a boy, his first intimate communion with nature, involving his hiding in the cleft of a willow tree while playing hide-and-seek. He speaks of listening to nature, and in an ironical sense that is what I encourage in my own work. Here I urge viewers to open up their senses to the natural world – sight, hearing, smell and touch.

Hugh Alcock, January 2024