Suet Yi Yip at Lakeside Arts Centre

Raindrops- Suet Yi Yip

Since finishing a Decorative Arts course at Nottingham Trent University just last year Suet Yi Yip has been showcasing her work across the country, culminating in this, her first show at the Lakeside Arts Centre.

As a fellow Trent student, the Lakeside’s Djanogly Art Gallery, nestled in the University of Nottingham campus, feels like enemy territory. As it turns out, it’s the perfect place to hold an exhibition by someone who ‘grew up in a city crowded with buildings and people and dreamt of living in a quiet place close to lakes and hills’.

Her work consists of several irregularly-shaped hand-painted plates. Suet’s love of nature is very much evident here, with simplistic designs of birds, trees, dandelions and all things you’d expect to find on a ramble in the countryside. There’s a second theme though of childhood and its innocence and curiosity. The paintings are very playful and sweet. Some of the plates combine the two themes, with one showing a child sitting on a balloon and looking out at the countryside, perhaps showing Suet’s yearning for nature as a child.

 

There are also miniature landscape sculptures which Suet has christened ‘Birdieland’. These feature hand-made and hand-painted minimalist birds and trees. Again, the simplicity of the sculptures evoke the peace, calm and tranquillity of the countryside that inspires her.

The third and final element of Suet’s exhibition is her latest work. ‘Raindrops’ is inspired, as you might have guessed, by precipitation. My passion for rain was lost after a combination of several mind-numbing GCSE Geography lessons about the water cycle and an absolutely enormous storm I was caught up in when I was in the South of France about 5 years ago (I’m still drying out). Thankfully, there are people like Suet around who can see beauty when it’s pissing it down. Each piece is a uniquely egg-shaped affair meant to ‘capture a single moment in the rain’ as our Suet puts it. Again, simplicity is the key, with each raindrop brought to life with small splodges of paint in a pantheon of tones.

All of Suet’s work is selling from £18 to £110. It’s a shame that I’m a poverty-stricken student as some of this stuff would’ve looked lovely on my mantelpiece. And it’s reviews like this that has seen her selected for Lakeside’s Young Meteors at Lustre 2011.

Suet Yi Yip at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre runs until 21 April

All images including Red Birds (top image) appear courtesy of the artist and the Lakeside Arts Centre