Micah Adams
Melanie MacDonald
Amy Swartz
Grimsby Public Art Gallery
Saturday 1 November – Saturday 6 December , 2014
Opening Reception: Sunday 2 November, 2pm – 4pm
Precious Little is about the impact of scale and the power of shifts in scale to present creative and intellectual revelations. We have a long history of fascination with extremes of size; think of Gulliver’s Travels and the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, or the Colossus of Rhodes and ivory miniatures. Either extreme attracts admiration and awe; the simple act of stepping outside natural scale, and particularly ‘human scale’, encourages our minds to make atypical connections. We often associate over- sized objects with power or threat, miniature ones with preciosity. Artists, however, have a tendency to start with the ‘usual assumptions’ and adapt them in a way that guides the viewer to a refreshing new perspective.
Amy Swartz creates personalities in a tiny hybrid society by attaching miniature human or superhero limbs and heads to dead insects. Micah Adams manipulates and recombines an incredibly eclectic selection of materials using his accumulated knowledge of sculptural techniques, meticulously re-scaled to suit the jewellery maker’s realm. Melanie MacDonald paints small ordinary objects, both fabricated and natural, on a grand scale, elevating their impact and importance.
Swartz, Adams and MacDonald each starts with something small and insignificant and imbues it with impact and meaning through the artistic process, stimulating our imaginations into diverse areas of creative speculation.