Exhibiting Artists'
Eric Bainbridge has been a prominent British Sculptor for over two decades. He is best known for his large-scale fur sculptures that transform household fixtures and fittings such as air fresheners and doorbell chimes into giant monuments to the domestic. In ‘untitled’ Bainbridge deconstructs a Melamine Kitchen unit (including chip fat) and reconstructs it as a simple but instantly more complete architectural form.
Darren Banks works across genres and mediums. Using a cut and paste system he creates sculptures, drawings, installations, and films that both borrow and re-work found material and look again at how it is possible to push the boundaries of the information around us. In his video ‘Interiors’ he has collaged scenes from famous horror movies into and endless building of suspense where nobody is present.
Sally Barker introduces us to existing spaces in all kinds of landscapes and then through low-tech everyday material invites us to fantasise about how buildings might grow if we left them to it. Her strange additions borrow from the landmark architects of recent times such as Norman Foster and Frank Gehry asking a question about what they might do when presented with a more everyday environment.
Cath Campbell’s drawings and architectural models take modernism as a point of departure. Her architectures are constructed either from memory, imagination, or from an encounter with plans of places that are closed off and inaccessible. The works occupy a space both poignantly romantic and pointlessly throwaway representing secret and intimate spaces, into which we may pass through but never question.
Joe Clark’s photographic works take the spaces bordering urban dwellings and industry as their subject. Taken at night on long exposure with a large format camera, Clark spends his time walking away from cities, getting lost in his explorations of places foreign and unknown to him and often returning empty handed. Once photographed Clark’s work is then subjected to a lengthy, filmic, post-production. Perspective and symmetry are subtly altered so the viewer is confronted with a scene, dramatically lit, yet without event. These are works that occupy and explore the memories experienced primarily through the dramatic mode of cinema and film rather than reality.
David Raymond Conroy’s bookshelf delicately balanced in the corner of the room held up with a prop. The books on it carry weight - both literally and metaphorically. Set up ready to fall this most basic of architectures affirms and undermines Post - Minimal works such as Richard Serra’s ‘One Tonne Prop’. If a book where to be removed chaos would ensue.
Charlotte Dawson’s paintings are contemplative studies of scale and light. The works presented here take two perspectives on architecture one from a great distance rendering a huge Le Corbusier style architecture to a modernist grid skewed into perspective; revealing the beauty of its formal structure and the light that falls on it as it sits in the landscape. The other painting is an extreme close up of the wall next to an interior window, the cold white of the wall blends in a steady gradient with the shadow from the surrounding space revealing a core concern in these paintings of how light falls on the spaces and buildings surrounding us.
Leo Fitzmaurice’s work is part of an ongoing research into consumerism, removal and abstraction. By cutting away all text from common packaging materials such as toothpaste or cigarette packets Fitzmaurice liberates their design from the consumer driven mechanisms of mass marketing and moves them towards high abstraction and colour compositions reminiscent of Art Historical movements such as Suprematism or Constructivism. Through the placing of objects in grid formation or configured as fleets, Fitzmaurice plays with the convention of the high formalism of the Modernist grid and the more playful pictorial depiction of car parks or rows of buildings.
John Hall constructs stadium like sculptures from kitchen dish drainers, filing in-trays and other domestic and office equipment. Then taken as photographs from an aerial view, the works are uncanny representations of Football Stadiums, reminiscent of the helicopter view of match night broadcasts. These works, reproduced as small images for this exhibition, have a double take effect on the viewer that leads one back to the simple object from which the work began.
Matthew Houlding’s fantasy architectures are built from salvaged domestic materials such as cardboard tubes, plastic bottles and melamine sheet. Brightly coloured and reminiscent of TV series such as Thunderbirds or Blue Peter, Houlding’s work posits an ideal, a place where we would like to be. By adopting the mode of fantasy and escapism Houlding’s work immediately implies the place from which one is escaping. In this way Houldings work begins to talk meaningfully about reality and the banal and ordinary situations from which we must daydream, and the cultural conditioning that influence the forms with which we construct our ideals.
Joe Hilliers ‘Cloud’ is constructed from laser cut steel plate laminated together to form a solid object in the form of a cloud. Hillier’s object is at odds with its subject observing the often-contradictory nature of form and substance. The seemingly impenetrable citadels of high-stacked cumulus clouds are in contrast with their inherent ethereality of water vapour. Hillier heightens this paradox by constructing his cloud from steel plate exploring the nature of matter and its resistance to our imaginings and conversely our ability to transform any object into an image of reality.
Rachel Lancaster’s paintings take their subject from the world of Film and TV. She extracts cinematic moments from movies through the use of digital photography often taken directly from the screen, which are then taken by Lancaster and then copied into oil on canvas paintings. The images that Lancaster gravitates to are the commonplace unimportant moments of movies, a blurred image of a corridor from ‘Teenwolf’ or a car bonnet from ‘The Sopranos’. The resulting paintings elevate the ordinary towards poignancy, whilst interrogating the cult status of the image, testing whether it holds up when reduced to its most insignificant and our questioning our desire to connect the work with a bigger story.
Camilla Lyon plays with matter and history in this work: a concrete model of a modernist diving board. Placed high in gallery space the work plays humorously with its former function and shifts between status of sculptural notions monument and nonument.
Paul Merrick’s paintings and sculptures are notable for his ongoing investigation of surface and substance through repeat procedure. In previous works the impasto mark is sanded back to an absolute flatness at odds with its own image. Built from sheets of aluminum scavenged from junkyards and riveted together, Merrick’s recent sculpture has taken a darker turn. IKEA tables are sawn into jagged shapes then screwed back together turning a useful household object into an investigation into form and colour, form and function.
Steve Messam’s artwork consists of documentation of a conctrete military pill box sited in an idyllic Cumbrian landscape. Around the architecture is a bubble of inflated polythene. At odds with the military use of the structure inside, the thin membrane of the surrounding bubble questions what is being protected from what? Though ironic the work finds a deeper meaning in its ecological and political context, all to the indifference of the surrounding sheep.
Like many of Thurlow’s works ‘Mitt’ is as much about process as it is product. A complex procedure of careful selection and repositioning. His work asks pertinent questions of our cultural establishments and their relationship to artists.
William Titley’s ‘Glenridding Hybrid Landscape #1’ is a photographic scene mounted on steel with magnetic protagonists and props on its surface. In a subversively understated fashion the artist invites us to reorganise the work creating chaos from the placement, displacement, and reconfiguration of objects and individuals that in some ways reflects a truth about the absurdities of the situations we encounter daily.
UHC Collective make politically engaged work that is heavily influenced by design. Characteristic of their practice is the studied critique offered in ‘The Thin Veneer of Democracy’. The work charts in parquetry and drawings on an oak board-room table the ‘family tree’ of significant Manchester political figures - positing them as complicit in the undermining of democracy. ‘Beacon of Hope’ is a black scaffold tower beacon, with circular mirrors and neon, laid down on its side with ironic significance, signalling a failure of the utopian ideal through utilitarianism and collective effort.
Wolfgang Weileder’s photographic series ‘House’ derives from a growing list of ambitious temporary architectural projects and commissions. In each case a building is simultaneously built, turned on its axis, and removed, the resulting work being a super long exposure of images burnt through a pinhole lens onto film during the duration of the project. Through his practice Weileder challenges us to accept activity and project as photograph, and thus accept photograph as sculpture. Weileders works bleed into each other; documentary and actuality substitute one another. Interrogating architecture and the impulse to build Weileder renders buildings as object, and therefore invests them with the same values, inadequacies, and impermanence’s, revealing the sad truths intrinsic to the spaces which we inhabit.
