The Unattended Moment was inspired by a little book by Michael Paffard. The title comes from Dry Salvages in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Paffard's book is largely an anthology of writings by people who have had what he describes as “...brief flashes of experience...so out of the ordinary as to seem to belong to a dimension other than the quotidian, to be epiphanies of another order of reality: unattended moments in the sense that they do not seem to fit into our ordinary pattern of experience...”. To quote Eliot,
“For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply ..."
Although frequently brief and always transitory it is the intensity of the unattended moments experienced by those quoted in Paffard’s book which has impelled them to try and capture it in prose or verse.
The exhibiting artists sought to express the essence and experience of the unattended moment through sculpture. New to the gallery this year are Nick Durnan, Kim Francis, Peter Furlonger, Lucianne Lassalle, Denis Di Luca, Matt Maddocks, Alain-Marie Parmentier, Jackie Perkins, Ben Russell and Jilly Sutton MRBS.
Image: Solar (bronze, detail) by Charlotte Mayer FRBS - photo Steve Russell courtesy Gallery Pangolin.