A brush of sculpted talent

The Nature of Things, an exhibition of the works of Meriel Cooper Wallace and Michele Karam, brings together two equally gifted artists in a unique collaborative showcase of their most recent works.

Each woman brings to the show a cohesive body of work informed by her own personal history, her experience of art and her mastery of her medium.

Meriel Cooper Wallace, a watercolourist with a a mischievous streak that she is barely able to suppress, paints birds, flowers, still lifes and landscapes, all meticulously detailed and exploding in rich, vibrant colours.

Michele Karam is a shy ceramicist whose gentle calm pervades the room as soon as she enters. She sculpts beautifully detailed busts with serene expressions, many with just a hint of a smile. Her dog and bear sculptures are frozen mid-romp, blissfully unaware of the scrutiny they are under.

Beyond a passion for their art, what has drawn these two women to each other and cemented their friendship is their intense awe of nature unabashedly celebrated in this upcoming exhibition.

Born in different parts of the world, each has followed a different path to find their way to Bahrain and to their art.

Mrs Cooper Wallace spent her early years in Cornwall. An idyllic childhood spent exploring rock pools with her father during the day and falling asleep tucked in with her cat every night transformed into an adventure when her family moved to start an new life in Africa.

Surrounded by the different sights, sounds, smells, textures and light of her new home only served to hone her keen awareness of her surroundings.

It is that almost obsessive awareness of detail that Mrs Cooper Wallace draws upon today, along with her love of nature's own colour palette, to enrich her paintings, manifesting itself in the mottled leaves of her Canna, the gentle shadows under its petals, and the thin veins on its stem, the brittle chill of her Winter Sky and the serenity of the flamingos underneath it.

Michele Karam's journey to Bahrain was very different, though every bit as rich. As a young anthropology graduate, Mrs Karam did field work in Guatemala, living with the Mayans. Moved by the experience, hints of the Mayans' gentle facial structure surface in her ceramic busts, unbeknownst to her, even today.

In 1986, Mrs Karam moved to Bahrain with her husband and two young sons not realising that four years later, the First Gulf War was to have a transformative impact on her life.

With the outbreak of the war in 1990, she was forced to move back to New York with her sons while her husband continued to work in Bahrain. It was during that time that Karam enrolled in a little school in Manhattan to learn pottery.

Throwing did not come naturally to her, but determination did and the challenge exacerbated her stubborn streak. She was determined to conquer the wheel, which she finally did and found that she had fallen in love with pottery.

Taking every opportunity to learn more, she enrolled at the Camden Arts Centre when they moved to London. By the time they were ready to move back to Bahrain, she brought her kiln and a supply of clay with her.

Mrs Karam's intense fascination with nature is manifested in the fine detail in her clay sculptures: a deer's antler's show the scars of what might have been a fight with another male, the muscles in a girl's leg taught under her skirt; the dancer's robes pushed back by the breeze his twirling has caused around him.

While both women are tremendously talented artists, their true gift is their ability not to lose touch who they are in the rush of what has come to be considered a normal life.

The exhibition opens on Monday, November 22, 2010 at 7pm - 9.30pm at the Bahrain Arts Society. The exhibition continues until December 1. Gallery hours are 8am - 1pm and 4pm - 6pm. The gallery is closed all day Friday and Thursday. afternoons.