Installation - Art Road

Are we losing touch with the art of making in this age of advancing technology?

Posted on 26/03/201826/03/2018 by zabihi40@gmail.com

THE PALISADES, Aluminium, acrylic spray paint, plastic coated wire & wire, 82x40x18cm, 2017, Detail

Name: Polly du Cros

DOB: April 1969

Place of birth: Lancashire, United Kingdom

Occupation: Artist

Polly works in sculpture/installation with an emphasis on making and materiality. Her spontaneous and instinctual process of being physically involved with the material means that the matter selected is exploited without controlling the experiment, to maintain an element of naivety. Current materials include metal, foam, polystyrene, plastic and scrap, along with paint. Working within the liminal space between the expanded field and sculpture works are developed within the space. She is interested in the way an object exists and is seen in a space and in the psychology of the response to it.

Polly’s rationale for being an artist is to ask are we losing touch with the art of making in this age of advancing technology.

Is it possible for me to make a body of work that questions the possibility of creating sculpture as a unifying experience which has as its cognate a parallel narrative in multiple digital sources or ‘feeds’. Is it possible for me to produce work that has a sense of unity.

Underpinning my sculpture and installations are a fundamental search for something through action, grappling with materials and manipulating until a kind of truth or realisation is released during the process, allowing the intrinsic properties of the material to arise. The work avoids obvious connotations and is non-representational, it is, ‘about sculpture’. I enter into a mental dialogue with the material as to what is required and the process allows me to move beyond metaphor and into something more directly experienced. I am in a place of ‘flow’ and completely absorbed in the making of the work.

Influenced by the human body and how it leaves a memory of its action on the material, the work is physical and confrontational. I both isolate and absorb myself in the making process to allow the materials to dictate their form. I am keen to find out about the materials and what they need on one hand, whilst controlling them on the other; this balance is central and sought.

In my day-to-day studio practice I have perceived an unexpected correlate for this period of total ‘flow’ with the data streams of information I receive.

TWILL HOOKED, Aluminium & calico, 40x30x50cm, 2016

The frenetic lives we lead are in part due to the digital communication that takes place. We are constantly bombarded with information via technology and many different components are acting upon us at any one time. How does this translate within the work that is being made and can we separate ourselves from these influences or does every piece of information become stored on a cellular level in our bodies and therefore affect the work in progress.

TRIDENT PROP, Aluminium, acrylic spray paint, plastic tubing and tape, 220x160x180cm, 2017

Walter Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction continues to play a role in understanding how technology contributes to a de-aestheticization of art in the modern world.

Artist Helen Marten creates work that is multi-faceted and currently we seem unable to establish if there is a master narrative or unity to her work. I intend to contribute to the debate by making sculpture and questioning if unity is possible or if technology is responsible for the disparate nature.

TRACERY RUNGS, Wood, moss and copper thread, 246x50x75cm, 2017

I am concerned with the expansion of taste. Taste in terms of what can be accepted in the making process, and what cannot. Within these concerns is an awareness of the potential space for creativity, the heightened idea of potentiality through the process of making. When is the mark or the action encouraged, nurtured and honed, and when is it eradicated or altered? Such a potential space is paramount in the work and occupies a place where language and communication occur.

APOGEE, Aluminium & cotton thread, 27x23x30cm, 2016

I graduated from St. Helens College (part of Chester University) in 2011 where I achieved a first class honours degree in Fine Art (Painting). In 2014 I undertook an MFA in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University which was successfully completed in October 2016.

Methods:

The central objective is to continue to make a work within a practice-based methodology. As such original investigation will be undertaken to gain new knowledge, partly by means of practice and partly by the outcomes of that practice. The objectives and methodologies are therefore intrinsically linked as the practice is evolutionary.

References:

W. Benjamin, 1936, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; Broderson XV

Berger, John, 2008, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Modern Classics

Cooke, Lynne, 2011, Agnes Martin, Dia Art Foundation, New York

Elkins, James, 1996, The Object Stares Back, Harvest, Inc. New York

Csikszentmihalyi, M, 1996, Creativity, New York, Harper Collins

Exhibitions

COMPETITIONS, AWARDS

2017, 3D Prize, West Lancs Open, UK

2015, Blooom Award by Warsteiner , shortlisted

Residencies

2018, Abingdon Studios, Blackpool, UK

2017, The Great Medical Disaster, Manchester, UK

TWO MAN SHOWS

2018 with Paul Bramley, The Abingdon Experiment, Abingdon Studios, Blackpool, UK

2017 with Paul Bramley, Recent Works, Studio 24, Leeds, UK

2017 Jenny Eden & Polly Tomlinson, Cornerstone Gallery, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Group Shows

2017 Transfuse, The Great Medical Disaster, Manchester, UK

2017 West Lancs Open, Chapel Gallery, Ormskirk, UK

2016 MFA Show Grosvenor Gallery, Manchester School of Art, UK

2015 MA Show Grosvenor Gallery, Manchester School of Art, UK

2015 Electric Open Electric Picture House, Congleton, UK

2014, West Lancashire Open Exhibition, Chapel Gallery, Ormskirk, UK

2014 Degree Show St. Helens College, UK

2013 8BA2 Show St. Marys Market, St. Helens, UK

2013 St. Helen’s Open, World of Glass, St. Helens, UK

Feel Comfortable To Touch This Work

Posted on 29/11/201629/11/2016 by zabihi40@gmail.com

Name: Chloe Beecham

DOB: September 1994

Place of Birth: Lincolnshire, United Kingdom

Occupation: Trainee teacher

I am a textile artist and a recent graduate from Manchester School of Art. I specialise in mixed media, with a focus on embroidery techniques. Concept and process are of equal importance to me, and I often use one to convey the other. I find inspiration in the way things make me feel and am drawn to details that are often overlooked.

As an artist, I am interested in pursuing ideas concerning motherhood, and specifically, the dynamic that surrounds the mother/daughter relationship.

Recent work is sculptural in its outcome and is site-specific in both its design and articulation. Embroidery techniques such as the buttonhole rouleaux fastening are utilized and then pushed to epic proportions. Soft cloth is utilized to form heavy sculptural line qualities that sweep and soar through the air or hang limp and lifeless. This cloth based line has its origination in drawings made on paper; ink, gouache and pencil that moves at different speeds as it is pushed and teased around a sheet of paper. Cloth enables this line to escape the two-dimensionality of the paper and to literally become ‘drawn’ within an actual three-dimensional space. The scale of the work directly aims to engage the viewer; but it is not particularly embracing. It shields, it dissects but it is also black and monolithic. There is much discomfort here.

I respond primarily to spaces. I am fascinated by the way people use spaces, particularly public spaces, and find it interesting to consider the way I could change the way people respond. I am enthusiastic about showing my work in non-traditional gallery spaces. The way in which a person behaves in a space is really interesting to me. It is something that is often dictated by social norms. For example in traditional art galleries, members of the public are more than likely forbidden from touching and interacting with the work. This is an idea that I aim to challenge within my work. It is important to me that people engage with my work, and feel comfortable to touch and manipulate what they see.

Textiles in Practice

Detail (rubber binding)

My practice is very process led. My textiles background has encouraged me to be very tactile. This has coloured my view of my own practice, and has led me to create work that people are drawn to interact with. I’m interested in texture and line, and the use of scale to engage the audience. I am mostly inspired by space- particularly the idea of using space as a canvas. I enjoy the notion of using “dead spaces” and voids to create something where there was once nothing.

I’m currently studying to become a Higher Education lecturer and my aims for the future are to teach alongside continuing my practice. I would also like to undertake an MA in Fine Art in the near future.

Natural Light, Blue Light Room

Posted on 31/10/201631/10/2016 by zabihi40@gmail.com

Now on Blain Southern, London

Natural Light, Blue Light Room is one of a number of environment made by Bruce Nauman between 1969 and 1974 that transforms a traditional galley from a room of discrete objects into a space that provokes a perceptual experience in the viewer the environments also served to change the viewer from a passive beholder to an active performer within the artwork.

In the late 1960s, Nauman made a number of videos that showed the artist performing absurd or mundane activities in his studio space, such as Stamping in the Studio or Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (both1968).

In January 1972, about a month after Natural Light, Blue Light Room was exhibited, Nauman was asked about this transition from artist as subject and performer in the videos, to the architectural installations, where the viewer takes on these roles. ‘ I began thinking about how to present this without making a performance,’ he said, ‘so that somebody else would have the same experience, instead of just having to watch me have that experience.’

Natural Light, Blue Light Room emerged amid these concerns with space, performance, the movement of the body and perceptual experience.

When you enter the space, you might be struck by its emptiness: instead of a gallery with objects, you have an open space with a silver of natural light along the lower side of one wall and, on the other, a peculiar blue light. The gallery has been altered to discombobulate you, the viewer, who has now become the performer within the space. While the natural light changes according to the time of the day and climactic conditions, the blue light offers a constant glow. You might experience elation, confusion, even annoyance: but the room will always induce a certain kind of awareness.

Each viewer will, of curse, respond differently to the space, and each performance within it will be distinct. Part of the artwork, then, is to observe others in the space, measure their responses, and to experience the strange awareness of not only your state of mind under certain conditions, but of others in the gallery.

Notes from Blain Southern.