In January 2020 as final year students we had the opportunity to curate our own exhibition at The Courtyard Gallery in Hertford.
I was part of the curatorial team, charged with selecting work and putting together a coherent exhibition showcasing the talent of our year group.
With such a wide range of practices and a small exhibition space, the challenge was to find pieces that would display well given the constraints whilst providing some sort of narrative.
Walking around the studio spaces, there was little in common in terms of underpinning ideas or subject matter, but what became apparent was a commonality in fleshy tones and textures. I pointed this out to the group of curators and that became the basis for our exhibition.
To prevent the exhibition feeling too contrived and ‘fleshy’ we added a structural black metal sculpture by Neofytos Agisilaou which played well against the latex sheet of Mumta Murghur.
Ewelina Wojdylak’s tiled plinth held a glass tank, bursting at the seams with the hefty fleshy weight of its plaster contents creating a tension between fragility and mass.
Isaac Florencio’s Invisible Man added a sense of humour to the proceedings as he stood and gazed presumably at the monotone canvas of Paul Bakewell’s, a piece chosen for its unfinished aesthetic, questioning its completion.
Three small black and white photographs belonging to Sofia Ivanova drew the audience towards their intimacy, their ambiguous images requiring some attention to decipher the subject matter.
We set out to go fossil hunting. Amongst the beautiful geology of the Dorset coast was the devastating damage of discarded nets, ropes and other flotsam. Future fossils that will take millennia to remove.
I was involved in the curation of the Level 5 end of semester exhibition. Here are some of my favourite shots from the show. As a team we made some interesting decisions to create narrative and relationships between certain pieces of work,.
I was invited to join a wood sculpture workshop with Simeon Nelson. The first half drove me absolutely berserk – tools, gravity and chaos were all against me. After. few hours of tussling with forms I was relatively happy with what I made – though it’s description of “jazzy” bothered me!
Spent the day in the installation room with Charlotte, we both brought along objects of interested and played around with ideas and composition. My objects tended towards the masculine, perfectly contracting the more fluid, feminine forms of Charlotte’s. We both share a vision of subtle humour and inside jokes which resulted in these fairly absurd constructions.
During a group critique a huge amount of attention was made to this plug hanging on my wall. I decided to take it for a walk around the studios to see what would happen
Trecartin creates rich, layered videos aimed at the generations who have grown up with social media and constant screen interaction. His work looks at how the internet has changed the way we communicate with each other: the consumption of imagery and the disposable nature of statements made online.
They are brash and trashy, he uses models and amateur actors to chant nonsensical soundbites, there is no real narrative, just a bombardment of colour, symbolism and noise.
Pipilotti Rist is a Swiss video artist whose work looks at issues of the human body, gender and sexuality. Much of her work is richly coloured and joyful, borrowing from the styles of mass media and the MTV generation. She also uses humour is her image making.
She often incorporates her videos into sculpture and installations, projecting films into unexpected spaces, through small holes. The scale can be huge or minute. Domestic settings are used to bring the fiction of screen into personal surroundings.
Pixelwald (Pixelforest), 2016
Enlight My Space [Erleuchte (und klaere) meinen Raum], 2008
Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless In The Bath Of Lava), 2011 is a video of Rist herself, naked and dancing in a projected pool of lava. She shouts up to the viewer “I am a worm and you are a flower”. The video is played through a tiny hole in the floor.
Ginas Mobile, 2007 – projects a close up film of female genitalia onto a mobile balanced with a copper sphere.
Bill Viola is a pioneer of video art, one of the first artists to really exploit the medium. His work is often very spiritual, confronting the big universal ideas of birth, death, love and redemption.
His work is mostly figurative, using simplified scenes to direct attention to the narrative. The lighting is often very focused and water and slow motion recur through his work. As a child he fell from a raft and was submerged underwater, he opened his eyes and witnessed the light shining through the water which has fed his obsession with water and light in his films.
The Raft (2004) explores the collective experience of natural disasters and war. A group of 19 people of varying ages, race and religion are battered by torrents of water. The effect is brutal but not harmful. The water stops and people reach out to one another some embrace. The piece is a metaphor for how lives are suddenly torn apart but continue in one way or another after these horrific events.
Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) (2014) is an installation commissioned by St Pauls Cathedral consisting of four screens, each displaying a person undergoing a form of torture and thus being martyred.
The artists gave “visitors and worshipers a dramatic visual contemplation on life, death, and the afterlife, as well as the human capacity to endure hardship in the name of faith.”
Much of his work is exhibited alone, in bare dark rooms to focus attention on his pieces. He does also incorporate video into installation such as The Sleepers (1992) in which video screens were submerged into metal barrels filled with water.
My large shredded piece of plywood has got me looking out for torn edges wherever I go. Walking around the streets of Paris there are endless palimpsests of torn posters.
I was walking around the streets of Marias trying to find the gallery I’d travelled to Paris for. Having found it it was locked up despite it being advertised as open. Disappointed I wandered along looking for a neighbouring shop who may know when it would reopen.
I came across the Anne de Villepoix gallery to ask if they knew. I was given a nonchalant Parisian shrug. The gallery however was showing the work of this young Tongolese artist which I really liked. His structural forms resonated with my current work and his paintings were full of intriguing texture.
This installation was part of the Actions exhibition at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. The church had been filled with these beautiful hand woven baskets from Cambodia.
I walked around underneath the installation to capture the undulating patterns.
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