College Record 2013

Quite coincidentally, Jon Rowland and Soham De, whose exhibitions closed the
Michaelmas series and opened Hilary’s, were architects; a bold use of colour was
common to both. Painting ‘en plein air’, Jon Rowland drew on a number of locations
– Venice, Scotland, France and Andalucia – that influenced his ideas on abstraction.
Soham De’s work, on the other hand, took as its inspiration the exploration of the
interaction between figurative art and abstract expressionism to show the energy
within the colours themselves and the way that paint behaves when in motion.
The Headington-based Bury Knowle Art Group held their winter exhibition at
Wolfson for the first time. Reviewed by the Oxford Times, it included around 90
works, in a variety of media, spanning a wide range of portraits of animals, people
and buildings, and of land and seascapes. Jonathan Shapley took landscape as the
central theme for the next exhibition, Edgeland, a striking series of paintings and
photographs that paid tribute to ‘the marginal, the unloved and the overlooked’.
Trinity term exhibitions opened with a series of pictures by Oxford-based film
makers Tim Wilson and Necati Zontul inspired by the travels of Edward Lear in
Turkey and the Balkans. It included images of Oxford, the UK, Russia and Paris,
where their use of animated and live action in their film work was reflected in the
works on show.
A stark contrast was provided by Wolfson’s contribution to Oxfordshire Artweeks.
White monks – a life in the shadows was a series of ascetically beautiful black and
white photographs by Francesca Phillips chronicling the everyday life of Spanish
Cistercian monks. Taken over a three-year period, and including a number of
portraits echoing those of the seventeenth-century painter Francisco de Zurburán,
this astonishing exhibition illustrated a collegiate way of life a millennium away
from Wolfson today.
The exhibition year closed with Tricks of Memory, a collection of paintings and
drawings by Cuban artist Sarahy Martinez, who commits to paper the recollection
of long-forgotten objects with fragments of the sung and written word and symbols
which are part of Cuban culture.
The College has benefited from the generosity of some exhibitors, with Jon
Rowland, Jonathan Shapley and Sarahy Martinez donating works. Paintings were
also given by Cairene MacGillivray, mother of Wolfsonian Kirsten Norrie, and by
84