Natalie Dower & Harriet Mena Hill: the elegance of order

Please note: this event has been CANCELLED

Sun 9 November 2014 - Sat 13 December 2014

Murray Edwards College

Visually the work of Natalie Dower and Harriet Mena Hill is very different and yet they have discovered many common threads. Both use drawing as an integral element in developing ideas for paintings and both have used grids extensively as part of their formal vocabulary - Dower from a mathematical perspective, and Hill from a more metaphysical standpoint. In conversations over the last ten years they have discovered other affinities. A significant link between their works is that the outcome of each painting or drawing is controlled by rules applied to the process of making it, with an end result that is not always predictable. Both artists are absorbed by the idea of 'order with endless variety'.

Natalie Dower was trained as a figurative painter at Camberwell and the Slade but by 1960 had begun to work within the systems-based, constructivist discipline, which she feels to be her own language.

What I know of the strange facts of physics, science and mathematics fascinates me. From these facts I derive not only pleasure but stimulation for the ideas that I use in my work. (N.D. 2012)

Harriet Mena Hill's architectonic images also employ pre-determined factors, in which proportion and ratio govern the outcome of an image. Once the first square of the grid is laid down the outcome of the picture has been determined.

By implementing rules from the outset both artists mediate personal input in favour of that which will be determined by process - a journey of discovery rather than choice. The only element left open to spontaneous judgement is colour, which both artists use instinctively rather than as a result of systems or rules.

Cost: free