Abridged

A major show of works including drawing, sculpture and video ,by acclaimed Academician, Vivienne Roche RHA.

“What does it mean to ‘abridge’? ‘To shorten by omission of words without sacrifice of sense’. This same act of selection and compression applies equally to the non-verbal, to visual meaning, to the works in this show.

For each and every one of us, the range of detail in what we could potentially experience over our lives requires constant abridging. What then happens is that what we leave out ceases to matter, and what we leave in comes to matter most. The result, inevitably and of necessity, is distinctly personal, but nonetheless open to recognition in the shared experience of each of our lives and the times we lived in (Time Dials).

And so it is, in this show which draws from my life and from some of what I have seen and loved. My daughters’ baby teeth become monumental (Baby Teeth in Perspective), the seaweed on my beach is plaited like hair (Plaited Sea), my sense of the vastness of natural and human time (The Wax Age) is fed by the work of the sea, yet the results of its actions lie still and pliant on my studio table inviting me to abridge and transform them (Tidal Time in Studio Time).

Objects and buildings talk to us. My dear, late brother Paul had, like my father, a devotion to the beauty of precision (Found to be Precise i.m. Paul Roche) and I learned of his sudden death as I was admiring the precise beauty of Riddarholmen Spire in Stockholm.

And so it is with the other works in this show. My time studying in Boston in the early 1970s was deeply coloured by the efforts to end the Vietnam War (Light Above, Steel Below: Tabling Vietnam Peace). I later went to Paris to see the negotiating rooms.

Drawing is central to my work, as is appropriate scale.  And, given my fascination, both personal and artistic with ‘time’, I think of drawing as I might think of the layout of a clock face (Flow-print/drawing, Arriving at the iris.) in the temporal life of a work.

The pattern in this diversity in this show just happens to be an abridged version of myself.”

Vivienne Roche RHA, August 2024.