THE next exhibition at the Queen's Hall Gallery, Narberth, is by sculptor Audrey Searle. The title is 'Complicity and Simplexity', looking for simple features arising from complex structures and vice versa. The world of science has stimulated this body of work.
Dr. Gerald Cipriani, a teacher in aesthetics at Birmingham, having seen the work, has the following to say: "Audrey Searle's aesthetic configurations re-arrange real elements, organise them, induce the viewer to observe them, to think of what they may mean, to experience that which is repeated by means of painstaking work. Natural elements and real objects are manipulated... but never in order to constitute certitudes. They are reconfigured to be sensory-experienced, and as such they are aestheticised. They belong therefore to the world of the unverifiable, where knowledge is revealed, evoked and expressed. Of course, we are not dealing here with a naive warning against science. Rather, we are warned against the human, all too human 'scientification' of nature.
"It is the experience of sublimity that will always remind us of our limitations, and of the dangers of being excessively driven by our self-interest. Searle's work as a whole functions both as a powerful and subtle reminder, where preservation and decay are aestheticised to give way to the sublime. This is post-modernity at its best: A message is disclosed by an author whose sense of responsibility remains unaffected by the current self-centred ethos of 'anything goes' in the arts."