Works by Digswell Arts fellows Fiona Chaney and Liz Harrington have been selected, from an open call over 16,000 entries, for the 251st Royal Academy Summer Exhibition.

Taking place every year since 1769, the RA Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art show and provides a unique platform for artists at all stages of their career to present recent work. Approximately 1200 works have been selected for display, from painting and printmaking to photography, sculpture, architecture and film. The exhibition runs until 12 August 2019.

“Ah Earth” is from Fiona Chaney’s ‘Earth Series’. The earth, the whirl of the wind, the shifts of water, sand and time imprints on the plate as it passes through surfaces remembering forms in its structure. Each plate for Fiona is an object of poetic power and her whole vision is to capture this poetry within her printmaking. It was shown on BBC2’s Summer Exhibition programme and highlighted by Alexa Chung as one of her favourite images to buy.

Fiona is based at the Forge studios in Digswell. She uses the mediums of painting, printmaking, photography and video and is interested in the articulation of visual space, visual perception and time.

Described by the Royal Academy as having ‘an ethereal presence’, Liz Harrington’s camera-less cyanotype image “Seascape No.5 (Diptych)” captures tidal flow on Zappalar beach in Chile. It forms part of a wider series of cyanotype-based work ‘Ephemeral Landscapes’. (A cyanotype is a historical photographic process that prints in blue, and was invented by Sir John Herschel).

Liz is a photographic artist, based at the Fenners studios in Letchworth Garden City. Her experimental photography predominantly uses analogue, camera-less and historic photographic processes, as well as printmaking. Her work focuses on transience and traces of the past and takes inspiration from Japanese aesthetics and the concept of wabi-sabi.

Both works are exhibited in Gallery V, which has been curated by Barbara Rae RA and Hughie O’Donoghue RA. Here there is an environmental theme – of nature and its inhabitants, and the fragility of living things. The prints can be seen alongside works by Antony Gormley RA, Emma Stibbons RA, Gary Hume RA, Jock McFadyen RA, Jim Dine Hon RA, Dorothy Cross and Sir Richard Long RA.

This year acclaimed British painter, Jock McFadyen RA took over the mantle from Grayson Perry to coordinate the Summer Exhibition. Highlights within the Main Galleries include a ‘menagerie’ in the Central Hall, with works by artists including Polly Morgan, Banksy, Charles Avery and Mat Collishaw. Other artists exhibiting include Jeremy Deller and Marcus Harvey alongside Royal Academicians including Tracey Emin RA, David Nash RA, Wolfgang Tillmans RA and Honorary Royal Academicians, Anselm Kiefer, James Turrell and Wim Wenders.

For further information about the RA Summer Exhibition and visiting the show see here https://www.royalacademy.org.uk