Brask, Berry & White Carpenter in “Processing Change" exhibit
Rachel Brask, Shawndavid Berry, and Laura White Carpenter join art forces once again for this exhibition entitled, “Processing Change.” Change and transformation are major parts of each artists’s artwork, both in the physical materiality of their craft, and in the intangible interior evolutions of each artist in their journeys. Join them at the Gallery at Common Fence Point, in Portsmouth, RI, for the opening reception on Sunday, April 13, 2-4pm. Light refreshments and artists will be present. The exhibition is on view April 8 until May 30, 2025.
Laura White Carpenter is a Providence-based artist who primarily works in hand-built porcelain sculpture and mixed media of found materials (metal, wood, "junk"). She is an accomplished welder and manipulates her found steel, also often adding hand-built ceramics to her sculptures. She has lived on four continents and has been greatly influenced by the seemingly universal imperative of using decorative marks to indicate an object’s or place’s significance. Meanwhile, she has increasingly utilized techniques and supplies that have a lower impact upon the Earth. She has a degree in art therapy and occupational therapy and works daily in the intersection of the healing arts, encouraging hospitalized patients to utilize creative arts in their healing journeys. She has shown her work in galleries and exhibits throughout the United States, gaining recognition and awards for her unique vision of the natural world in distinctive organic forms.
Shawndavid Berry is a sculptor and woodworker and painter who is adept at connecting organic spaces and forms together, manipulating organic forms, causing the viewer to see smaller scenes within scenes, to look for hidden elements within the ‘scape. His use of positive and negative space, and technical explorations with materials is always evolving, as one can see a definite connection between his skillfully crafted woodworks and paintings. Berry works with windfallen wood that he’s harvested, and utilizes bacteria in a process called “spelting” to prepare the wood for carving. The bacteria follow the veining of the wood, as Berry also includes these lining details throughout his paintings in a nod to the connection with the wood.
Instagram: @shawndavidwoodworks
Rachel Brask is an oil painter who has exclusively painted abstracted landscapes alluding to rainy days for the better part of the last decade. In her oil paintings, she transports the viewer to a cozy space imagining the sensory sounds and sights of looking through the glass of a window during intense rainstorms. Her works of color and rain-dripping texture evoke a sense of movement and flow, while also providing insight into spaces beyond, layers of near and far. These windows out to the world also evoke a sense of calm and cocooning that can be necessary and cozy on rainy days, in providing calm and contemplation in the calamity and chaos of an unbridled world.