An exhibition featuring paintings on plastic shopping bags and withdrawn library books opens this Saturday at Kettle’s Yard.

This is the first major UK show for London artist Michelle Charles, who was based in New York for twenty years.

Michelle Charles' paintings and drawings explore how we look at things and the relationship between what we see and what we remember.

Her subjects include glasses of milk, bars of soap, scrubbing brushes and plastic shopping bags.

She works in series. In repeating a motif she explores the possibility of how we might see the same thing in many ways – the way the light falls, the angle we see the object from, how much attention we pay.

Recent series include drawings of flies and the knitting and unraveling of wool.

In the exhibition catalogue, New York art critic Dore Ashton says: “It requires great skill, great craft, to reduce an object to its essence in just a few swift strokes of the brush. Charles succeeds – again and again and again and again.”

Works in the exhibition will be for sale. Her work is included major private collections and the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum USA and the National Museum of Art, DC, USA.

Michelle Charles has been supported by Arts Council England in her preparation for this exhibition.

The exhibition runs until July 27.

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