“The beach has the power to shape
everything it touches into its own image.”
Terry Setch
The British artist Terry Setch has been using the Welsh
coast as the primary inspiration for his encaustic paintings for the majority
of his career.
As he told fellow artist Michael
Sandle in a 2010 conversation “the
south Wales coastline became the source of my imagery and since 1971 all my
work has been about what I could extract from the Seven Estuary; it’s only a
few minutes’ walk away from my home in Penarth and after forty or so years I’m
still here.”
Growing up in London during the Second
World War his artistic ability was recognized in his early teens and he was
encouraged to attend Saturday art classes at the Sutton School of art. Two
years later he enrolled full time in the school where he was allowed to follow
an independent path.
The beach became a second studio for Setch
and the interaction between land, sea and humanity providing him with metaphors
for contemporary political and social concerns, especially that of pollution.
As he explained “The issues about recycling
and pollution surfaced when I started going to the beach. Cardiff was one of
the most important ports in Britain so everything was industrially charged. I
also started to feel in contact with the movement of the tides and the human
activity going on; the discarded waste, some people’s inability to be in
harmony with nature or to enjoy nature and not ruin it for other people. Rather
than a piece of beautiful landscape it was more like a legacy of my London childhood:
homelessness and bomb-sites, bits of people’s lives being lifted and spread
across that landscape. The tides on that estuary are enormous and they gather in
what’s left on the beach and plant it somewhere else. The moment I saw that
happening I realized I could play a part. I could pick things up and I could
place them somewhere else, which I did, and the tides would come in and knock
them down and then I’d have to rediscover them. That was the start of it. My
work has gone through many Changes since then but on the beach I found a system
that I could build upon.”
And as Martin Holman quoted Setch as saying
in an essay for
Setch’s 2001 retrospective exhibition “I have always been trying to get things
right from a personal angle. I have got to follow my own path: I am not a
‘joiner’ or part of an ‘ism’. I have tried to create an identity that is my
own.”
Setch’s current exhibition Reduced to Rubble is on show at London’s
Flowers’
Cork St Gallery until the 16th of April.
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