Samuel Bassett: The Birds

Vigo Gallery is delighted to present The Birds, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Samuel Bassett (b. 1982, St Ives).

 

Living in a small, rural community in Penwith, near Penzance in Cornwall, Bassett’s work is intensely personal. The paintings reflect and document his multi-layered, psychological, and physical experiences within his community, and his journeys across the natural landscapes, often intertwining familial histories, art historical references and reverence for the surrounding environment.

 

In recent years, Bassett’s artworks have begun to invoke, more frequently and vigorously, birds. He’s begun to notice the way Gulls and Kittiwakes carve their passage through the skies, how Cormorants command space with their wingspan, and the sudden sorrow of seeing the ghostly alabaster feathers of dead Gannets interrupting the shoreline. The works made in response to this heightened consciousness around these habitats meld birds and humans, with the landscapes of Penwith as their arena. He is an ever-curious Magpie, unhesitatingly drawing-upon Cornwall’s art history, with deference to those that came before him; the economical silhouettes of Breon O’Casey, the organic abstract forms of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, and the flippancy of Sven Berlin, the latter so disillusioned with St Ives, he came to know it as Cuckoo Town.

 

All of this percolates to the surface in works that are an amalgam of serendipity and confidence; much looser, more assertive, and remarkable in their energies. The upward perspectives of Lanyon and Hepworth, the forceful verticality of the double-headed eagle, the bold declarations of space over land and sea, as performed by Cornwall’s birds, are fused with inseparable personal connections and a fortified sense of home. This is not a body of work seen in culmination, but instead the presentation of a significant ongoing transition. The artist describes these as intuitive, taking him by surprise, finishing themselves, and to encounter The Birds is to be invited to share in this sense of revelation.

 

Samuel Bassett is a British artist living and working in Cornwall, where his family line has long existed as part of the fishing and mining communities.