Southwest shows catch-up

Installing Peter Randall-Page - Photo: Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery

Running around over the past few days to catch up with a number of South West exhibitions before they close later this month.

The Jerwood Drawing Prize 2013 is currently visiting Plymouth College of Art and Plymouth Arts Centre. As in previous years, the show has quite a focus on technical virtuosity, but this time many more of the most beautifully executed drawings also had something to say. I'm particularly haunted by Roy Eastland's gentle and meticulous homage (in delicate silverpoint on gesso) to the victims of the The Great Folkestone Air Raid of May 1917: “They looked like silver birds. The sun was shining on them...” In Plymouth until 9 March 2014, then at the Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury Christ Church University.

Dartmoor-based sculptor Peter Randall-Page has his first major exhibition in the Southwest for 25 years, showing at Peninsula Arts at Plymouth University and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Inspired by the mathematical structures underlying nature, the work consists of a number of heavyweight sculptures in marble and stone alongside more modest (and much more likeable) works on paper. Through pouring, dripping and blotting, the artist has coaxed his ink into symmetrical branching structures that recall the veins of leaves or the branches of evolutionary family trees. Until 29 March 2014.

Outrageous Fortune: Artists Remake the Tarot continues at Exeter Phoenix until 15 March 2014, showcasing works by 78 diverse artists that interpret the famous deck of cards. The story behind the show adds to its impact, so it's a pity more people didn't come to hear curator Andrew Hunt talk about it last Saturday. It's significant that this body of work, focused on prediction and fortune-telling, was commissioned in 2008 at the start of the world economic crisis. Also that its evolution involves a complex and mischevious network of gifts and exchanges.

Steven Paige's A Treatise on Beasts (after Physiologus) continues at the Forum, University of Exeter until 25 March. Featuring both new works and items drawn from personal and historic archives, it presents a collection of beasts - both ancient and modern.
The work was developed during a residency with Exeter's Double Elephant Print Workshop as a response to the Ted Hughes and Leonard Baskin archive, held in the University of Exeter Special Collections.