Private View: Anna Dickinson

2024

Profiling the British artist and the materiality of her sculptures for her first solo exhibition in Denmark at von Bartha, Copenhagen

British artist Anna Dickinson has been creating vessel-like objects for more than 45 years, expanding upon the distinct language between light and glass by enabling an unpredictable dialogue to occur through the materiality of her sculptures. As the foundations of Sentient / Forms, her first solo exhibition in Denmark at Copenhagen’s von Bartha gallery, 13 new pieces are dispersed as if alien, conscious beings on a foreign planet, developing sentience and inviting close examination of the interactions between them.

In a short film directed by Catherine Hyland – showing at von Bartha alongside the exhibited works – Dickinson engages with her artistic process and the motivations that power her work. Connected to her dyslexia and medical interventions, fragments from her daily life become quiet inspirations for her creative interventions and the way she views the world, playing with opacity, transparency and distortion to build forms intended to interact with their environment.

“The more I ride, the more I work with glass, I see these similarities. The hours and hours of grinding the glass to make it look perfect.”

Likening the hours spent perfecting her sculptures to the repetitive training she undergoes through her tenacity for riding dressage, from her London studio, Dickinson pours years of expertise and dedicated technical skills into her creations. As the forms evolve from hollow vessels to incorporate complex structures of small tubes, she reflects a fascination with engineering and combining different materials, developing resonant juxtapositions, rooted within her own experience through materiality over sentimentality.

Sentient / Forms is on display at von Bartha in Copenhagen until 19 October 2024