Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

Adelaide Crapsey’s ‘November Night’

Sprout, a new exhibition featuring the work of A Small Art Factory is set to open at Fleurieu Arthouse on Saturday July 1st and 2.00pm.

Sprout is a collaborative exhibition between Warren Pickering and Anna Small. The couple have worked together on their art practice for the last 15 years and their newest works reflect the growth of their style and form.

Plants are a form that Anna and Warren return to again and again in their explorations. 

Anna’s love for trees and Warren’s fascination with leaves and their many incarnations are reflected in the pieces featured in Sprout. Skeletal leaves and silhouetted trees add a distinctly wintery air to many of the pieces in the exhibition, which when viewed together, seem to provoke a certain sort of calmness, evocative of an autumn walk through quiet lanes and crisp fields.

The intricacies and individuality of both leaves and tree forms are something which Anna and Warren have long studied and sought to recreate into wall art which is suitable for hanging both indoors and out.

Over the years, the pair have produced a huge variety of sculptural works in metal but mainly, they choose to work specifically in corten steel.

Corten steel is unique because it is resistant to rain snow, ice and fog.

But Anna and Warren don’t exclusively work with corten steel, they’ve also been known to work with copper, silver and other metals and often, the work is combined with carefully sourced timber pieces for the purpose of display.

You can read more about Anna Small, Warren Pickering and A Small Art Factory here.

Sprout opens on July 1st at 2.00pm at Fleurieu Arthouse, 202 Main Road McLaren Vale