CELESTITE

 

Annie Mackin, Georgina Mascolo & Zakee Shariff

 

PALM TREE GALLERY, LONDON

 15th OCTOBER - 25TH NOVEMBER 2015

 

Celestite is the first exhibition to be held in Palm Tree Gallery, a new space coined as a ‘canopy of creativity’ where emerging talents in fine art and design will be nurtured and a diverse program of innovative projects will take place. This inaugural exhibition brings together three artists whose mixed media work relates to the mystical and often intangible marvels of our world. There appears to be an awakened awareness in our current society as it shifts its communal consciousness to a more primal understanding of what it is to be human and each of the featured artists expresses this with her own vision.

 

Georgina Mascolo will be exhibiting an installation made up of her recent series of aura photographs taken using the Aura Cam 600 designed by Guy Coggins in the 1970’s. She is one of a handful of people in the UK using this technology which allows you to see how happy or healthy a person is through the colours of the energy field surrounding their body; their aura. Visitors to the exhibition will have the chance to have their aura photo taken by the artist and purchase their own unique picture.

Mascolo’s images can be used as a reading to know whether and where one is in need of healing whilst Zakee Shariff’s work for this exhibition mostly depicts crystals, one of the earth’s natural restorers. A selection of her bright ink drawings show the abstract energies created by and the direct portrayals of various versions of these precious and potent stones, whilst larger screen-prints give an authoritative yet encouraging nod to the powers that they can possess. Shariff has trained in and been fascinated by the gift of healing, honoring the personal shadow as well as the light that comes with it and this series is paying tribute to that ongoing journey.

Annie Mackin’s oil paintings are abstract visions of reality and fantasy colliding in a spectacular revelation of colours and patterns. They question the notion of the outer being and the self, both the conscious and unconscious properties of our souls. In the painting ‘Naked Eye’, Mackin’s base markings are referencing one of the first ever versions of a moon map created by the physicist and philosopher William Gilbert in the 1500’s. From viewing the moon with his naked eye, he believed that he could see rivers and marshland and assumed there was life similar to ours surviving there. In modern times we speculate in the same way about life forms on far away planets with what little information we are able to gather with our most advanced developments in science and the artist captures this essence of distance in time in her surreal paintings. In Mackin’s works on paper we see energetic emotional explosions that can be read as insights to the soul. As Gilbert proclaimed, “The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body.”

 

As with the properties of the mineral celestite, the union of the works by these three inquisitive and spiritual women create a prism of magnetic force that will leave the viewer feeling uplifted, energised, empowered and inspired.