Project Description

Headhunters was the exhibition at Redwing Gallery, Penzance’s pop-up arts centre in Wood Street in September 2013.

The gallery, known for providing a platform for those who are often excluded from the commercial art world, hunted for primitive and outsider artists working on the theme of masks and faces.

The exhibition included a shrunken head made by Betty Rose Hodgkins, a founder member of the Derbyshire Weavers’ Guild, colourful ceramic masks made by artists from the Drym Valley Centre and paintings by St Agnes artist Becky Leest.

Artist Belinda Landini, who works at the Drym Valley Centre exhibits her magical papier mache sculptures, with titles such as ‘Sleeping Tree’ and ‘Redriding Hood’. Making art, Belinda says, is about finding a voice. ‘Figuration, form and colour allow a leap to a different level of consciousness where anything is possible ? the world of Once Upon A Time ?’

Despite getting a grade 3 GCSE for art Plymouth-based Piers Lockwood generally considers himself as self taught. The pieces are painted straight onto glass with syringes and other improvised tools, using his own recipe of transparent pigments and acrylic goo to create translucent pictures which, when backlit with either the natural light from a window or electric lights create some very hypnotic effects.

Visitors to the exhibition were  able to make their own masks and wear them at an end-of-show masked ball on Saturday 28th September 2013.