Exhibition
Flying Through Amber: The Last Wish of
Vladimir Slapeta

Venue
Old Library, University of Derby Green Lane Campus

Dates
2 October 22 October

Times
Monday to Friday,
8am to 9pm

Anne Marie Creamer and Andrew Grassie
An elderly émigré (former child of the kinder-transport) longs to recall images of home. Unable to do so, he looks to his imagination - a hopeless fantasy, in pursuit of a sense of origin. Simultaneously, a woman describes seeing the beseeching ghost of an old man.

In the past the old man commissioned a painter named Andrew to make a painting, based on the memories of his parents' living room, which he had not seen since he was a very young child.

The painter is modeled on contemporary artist Andrew Grassie, who collaborated on this project and appears as a fictional character within the narrative. Grassie's painting, The Squat of Wolfe Lenkovitz, London 2004, is installed simultaneously as a 'real' and fictitious object.

Flying Through Amber subtly combines film and hand-drawn images with an interwoven 'stream-of-consciousness' narration from the old man and the observer. Creamer works to create a fluid journey through the city in order to explorethe transience of memory and identity within a fragmented evocative fantasy. By transforming the original live footage through re-colouring and digitally over-painting she suggests a photographic yet painterly surface that produces images which are both familiar but strangely distant and out of reach

For Flying Through Amber Anne Marie was awarded the Evelyn Williams Drawing Fellowship in 2003-2004, and the Foundation and Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic, International-artist-in-residence award.