Materiality
Exhibition Continues: 22nd – 27th July 2014
Xinle Min/Hannah Blight-Anderson/Wen-Hsi (Vicky) Harman/
Emily Furnell/Martin Harman/Kate Bayley
These six artists launch their debut public show as a mixed media group. The threads of interaction between their works are often intertwined but sometimes binary opposites, creating a playful dialogue between the works on show.
This dialogue has been constructed by each artist’s examination of the material qualities of the elements they experiment with. From the scientific to the emotive, and from sharp geometric planes to quirky hand-crafted models, this collective explores novel ways of approaching a particular medium.
In Min’s sculptural models, banal objects are given a sense of authority by being arranged in abstract formations. Archetypal materials, like plastic drinking straws are examined and constructed anew. By understanding how overlooked objects supplement our existence, she discovers unusual and fascinating elements that make them unique from commonality.
This search for uniqueness leads onto Blight-Anderson’s trial and error of understanding the individual. She describes the face as a vessel for human emotion, broadcasting itself through distortion or enhancement. The struggle to truly understand another person through short-lived intervals is explored through raw materials, often wood, where its paleness is empty knowledge.
The tension between knowing and misunderstanding is played out through the emotional concerns in Chen’s ceramic pieces. By using fingerprints to reconstruct objects, each work has a distinctive form and relationship with its maker. Their fragility echoes the space in which she is fostered, between the two divergent cultures of Britain and her homeland, Taiwan.
This transformation and displacement of the familiar is followed by Furnell’s reconstructions of pseudo-scientific experiments. Her interest places weight on how intermolecular interactions between charged particles function, and how she is able to make visible what is imperceptible to us. Achieved by delineating metallic materials from their original form using chemical processes, the resulting work is often ephemeral. Where sculptural forms arise, they become by-products of these procedures.
Harman’s work involves a re-imagining of the built environment around us, exploring the fluidity of form and its constant transmutation through space and time. By constructing geometric forms that are combined together to reveal both interior and exterior spaces, line and colour around these structures enhance his textural, ceramic work.
Similarly, the lines and textures Bayley observes through the everyday are combined to create sweeping organic forms. Using plastic, wood and metal, these materials are manipulated to generate simple geometric structures that relate to a sense of harmony or beauty that can be recognised as patterns in nature.
By examining the discourse between uncertainties in the material of the works, in Materiality, we are invited to explore the individual treatment of these by the artists. Viewers act as reciprocal for the interval of time occupied by the manipulation of material, both in real-time experiments and forms that have arisen through exploration.
by Emily Furnell