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'BUILD' Solo Exhibition, Penwith Gallery, St. Ives, Cornwall
'BUILD' Solo Exhibition, Penwith Gallery, St. Ives, Cornwall
Start Date:
26th May 17
End Date:
25th June 17

This year, Traxler tours her most recent body of work ‘BUILD’, responding to a specific heritage site – a former WWII Radar Bunker on the Isle of Wight. The site is where she and her partner – an architect, have built their new home. Holding a great deal of significance to the Island’s heritage community, it was the former Royal Air Force radar station, ideally positioned to monitor the south coast of Britain during WWII. Located in St Lawrence, IW it overlooks the beautiful, open coastline which Traxler’s studio is also based. The Radar Bunker was left to deteriorate and become almost derelict. By protecting and preserving these remnants, Traxler and her partner have allowed the bunker to remain as a memorial site to the radar station that once occupied the site, and will be the final touring venue for this body of work.

In ‘BUILD’, Traxler creates an environmental autobiography – a sense of self and place, intimately connected through enamel and steel sculptures, to ephemeral stitched paper installations alongside her customary textured paintings. Utilising durable materials more commonly used in construction, such as enamel on steel, plays a significant role in Traxler’s response work.

At first glance, the shapes within her steel sculptures look to have been lifted from the blueprints of an architectural design, lightly interlocking and carefully constructed. Scratched and inlaid with colour, they present swatches from the very place where they were conceived, the Bunker, whilst also being influenced by Churchill's Cabinet War Rooms. Titled ‘The Beauty Chorus’, it takes its name from the scrambling system intersecting calls in Churchill's underground headquarters at Whitehall, London. It served as the nerve centre of Britain's war effort during WWII.