Alchemy celebrates its tenth art exhibition: Alchemy on the Balcony

As the Floor One Gallery is showing an extended Game of Rugby exhibition this year, Alchemy is staging their exhibition on the Floor One Balcony – now renamed +One Gallery – also for an extended period of time, hence the title.

Alchemy has now been in existence for over 11 years. It was conceived as a new, dynamic, forward moving art group, based on participation and equal sharing of workload and benefit - to be informal and modern yet still confident in the commitment of its members to meet regularly to discuss fine art and exhibit collectively. Their experience and skills fuse to create artworks which play with artistic processes; always experimenting; always changing.

Sue says “The best thing about Alchemy is that we all really enjoy seriously discussing art. Also, we share thoughts and ideas (we don’t always agree) and by doing so, we have grown into a very supportive, valuable, cohesive, close-knit group.”

Alchemy presented their first ever exhibition, also called Alchemy, at the Floor One Gallery Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, in October 2014. This included the collaborative sculpture "Magnum Opus", which was publicly unveiled during the Exhibition's Opening Event.

The sculpture was conceived as "Alchemy in Action" and "The Magic is in the Making’ and was very well received by the viewers.

Alchemy is mainly a discussion group, meeting monthly to debate various aspects of Art History. All members give suggestions for discussion topics and these are drawn out of a hat (actually a sock!) each month.

But it’s not all serious! Something else we did was to hold monthly one-hour challenges, usually based on a single word or phrase, such as "Alchemy", "Rhythm", "Fluff', "Recycle", "Upside Down” and "Crown". These days we often have a “Guess the date of the Painting” challenge where we each choose a painting to bring, guess the date it was painted, and discuss.

Most of the members of Alchemy are also members of other Rugby art groups, such as Rugby Artists' Group, Rugby and District Art Society, The Tantalus Project, and Rugby Artists and Makers Network, and also regularly exhibit their work with these groups.

For further details please contact Carol Wheeler on 07752 855538 or [email protected].