Phil Filby & Rob Root is the first exhibition of 2011 within the Wysing Arts Contemporary series of exhibitions. The reversal of names in the title is reflective of the collaborative aspect of this two person show, on display from 30 April – 5 June. All works in the exhibition are for sale and limited edition artworks by both artists will also be available to purchase, including a new work by Phil Root co-commissioned with Hidde van Seggelen Gallery.

Phil Root explores painting through different mediums to create multi-layered environments that can be viewed as whole or separate entities. The motivation to create an environment rather than a singular work is so that people can have a bodily, as well as intellectual, interaction with the work.

Untitled (Legs) was inspired from a figure in a tarot card and is deliberately medieval. The patterning and bordering are suggestive of card like qualities, bringing out its relationship to image and object. The work is also the basis of the limited edition screen print produced for the show. One of Root’s most striking pieces features ceramic bowls on top of an ice plinth, which will gradually melt over the course of the exhibition leaving the bowls floating in a trough of water. The piece explores the idea of erasure and references works by Francis Picabia such as En faveur de la critique (1945). Root will be exhibiting a range of new work created especially for the exhibition including installation, sculpture, ceramics, paintings and wall drawings.

Rob Filby’s practice is object orientated, but crosses into the two dimensional in the series Mood Boards which imagines future works, and the Work & Co. photographs which document his sculpture in the company of cats. In an exhibition space he fills with musk incense, Filby will be exhibiting a new body of sculptural work including re-conditioned glow-in-the-dark agricultural parts, re-coloured newspaper, and a sausage casing 'necklace'. Filby's practice is interested in the meaning and unmeaning object, and amused by the possibility of communication through such convoluted and obtuse means as art making. His limited edition comprises an insertion into a local paper advertising some of the exhibited works as for sale.

The exhibition opens on 30 April (4-6pm) with a talk by writer David Lillington on the work of Phil Root and Rob Filby and launch of the book on Filby Sculpture, Craft, Magic. Broccoli, Glass, Mariah, Pyramid, Stem by Lillington and the artist, published by Kaavous-Bhoyroo. Plus, the ever popular artist-led family den building in the woods of Wysing returns in the afternoons of 30 April & 1 May. The closure of the exhibition will be marked by a discussion on 5 June (2-4pm) entitled Thinking Around Exhibitions, led by Hugh Pilkington, about some of the commercial aspects of exhibitions and exhibition making.