Following a national call for artists earlier this year, Wingfield Arts near Diss, is proud to present the gallery's second annual winter exhibition. Land and Light plays host to a range of human responses examining our relationship with nature. The works included in the exhibition have been chosen from artists around the country, selected by guest curator Laurence Edwards. "The delicate relationship our planet has with light has been explored, sometimes unwittingly, by artists from John Constable to James Turrell, from the scientist who built Stonehenge to those who built the Hubbell telescope," he said. "Life itself was conceived through light's energy. We calibrate our existence according to it, the length of our days depend on the angle at which we spin through it.
 | | Asteroidea by Britz and McGowan |
"When we ourselves are not in light we see it reflected back to us from other lands 'light years' away. Between land and light there is an incredible place. We hope to explore that place in this exhibition," he added. Out of the 150 submissions, Edwards selected just 14 artists to contribute to the final exhibition. Margie Britz, Liz McGown and David Page all live in Norfolk. "The great thing about open submission shows is the variety of works you have to choose from," said Carl Bayliss, marketing manager at Wingfield. "We were delighted that three of the final 14 works selected by Laurence were by artists based in Norfolk - proving to us all that some of the very best artists in the country are right on our doorstep," he added. From solar panels that energise sounds picked up from beneath our feet to planets made of starfish and light reflecting off a plough-share, the artist hope visitors will be provoked, touched and stimulated by their work. The exhibition includes extracts from the Winter Wheat, Four Fields and Harvest Series by Margie Britz. Now living in Melton Constable, she came to the county 10 years ago. "The quality of the light and the sky was the reason I settled in Norfolk," she said. "My work since then has been a response to the East Anglian landscape: its fieldscapes, seasons, coastlines, skies, its textures and its light.
 | | Winter Wheat Four Fields:Summer (detail) |
"The Harvest Series, to which the two paintings exhibited in this exhibition belong, celebrates growth and change and the ongoing cycle of the seasons. "I make use of an organic geometry to explore the order in the disorder and the disorder in the order of the natural world," she added. Land and Light also includes Snow on Dicky Hill Looking West by David Page from Starston. "I've been painting on the Norfolk/Suffolk border now for more than 30 years," he said. "The countryside is of course not a 'natural' thing, but itself a sprawling art-work deriving from agriculture, its nature determined by a highly organised contemporary industry and acting on a layout inherited from history. "My concern in these paintings is not to romanticise, or to present a bucolic idyll, but to set down a pictorial fact. We are often presented with stereotyped images of landscape: my aim is to say something about the land as it actually is today," he added. Land and Light runs at Wingfield Arts until Sunday 19 December, 2004. For more details call the box office on 01379 384505. | 
