Spring News: Exhibitions, Conversations, Community

After a month filled with community art projects, the leap into Spring heralds a flurry of new exhibitions. I’m delighted to be featuring in these forthcoming shows:

Incendiary, a multi-site exhibition in Corsham curated by Patricia O’Brien, 19 March - 18 April. I’ve been making a new piece Pyre (image above) for the show - a response to the catastrophic Amazon and Australian wildfires.  It’s made from collected found objects (some I’ve treasured for many years), wrapped and charred as grief bundles, commemorations of lives lost.

Materiality, with Kate McConnell, Kelly O’Brien, Nicola Turner and Matthew Dibble, Walcot Chapel, Bath, 26-29 March, open 12-6pm. Preview, Wed 25 March, 6-8pm. 

About Trees, Heritage Courtyard Gallery, 6 Heritage Courtyard, Sadler St, Wells BA5 2RR, 21 March - 14 April. Private View Fri 20 March, 6.30-8pm.

You are warmly invited to these Private Views - or visit when you can!

Last chance to catch these exhibitions ending soon:

Fifty Bees 4, Black Swan Arts, Frome continues until 14 March, when we have a Wrap Party with Artist Talks. My sculptural installation Path of Pollination is sited in 2 parts - the ground floor hallway (amazing how many people miss it when they walk past) and up the stairs to the Long Gallery.  The piece incorporates radically different unorthodox materials: old washing up sponges, dusters, mustard powder, tumeric, wax, plastic netting, steel, copper, violet oil essence…  Researching the Welted Mason bee’s path of pollination I got hooked on pollen as matter (see previous post for further info).  

Gilbert Bayes Award Winners 2019 Exhibition: I took part in a Sculpture Slam at Royal Society of Sculptors (Dora House, London SW7 3RA), as part of our Gilbert Bayes exhibition. Each artist gave a short talk about our work - it was great to glean more about each other’s practice.  If you haven’t yet visited, it runs until 20 March 2020, then tours to Grizedale Sculpture, Cumbria. I’ll be invigilating on Tuesday 10 March, 1.45-5pm; if you’re in the area pop by.

Window Wanderland commission, Tesco Shepton Mallet

I was commissioned to create a window wanderland display for Tesco Shepton Mallet by Make the Sun Shine and The Rubbish Art Project.  I like placing art in unexpected places. An opportunity to use recycled materials as part of the message, the work includes a collection of found objects, recycled plastic netting, plastic bags, bottletops, twine, copper wire, wax, steel springs and coloured tissue paper, all united by my re-purposed copper wire sculpture Tendril.

After several days gathering and making various elements for 2 large windows, I spent all night at Tesco installing (‘til 5.45am - a surreal experience!). With so many enormous windows and other distractions at the superstore, it’s been challenging making it dynamic. The brief was to incorporate some of the local community projects they support through bags of help: Snowdrop Festival, Happy Landings, (close to my heart), Sugar for the Bees, Book Table,  Community Food Donation, Knit and Chat. Delicately papered 3-d wire snowdrops sprout, tails embrace, bees buzz and giant books fly.  The knitters kindly created 2 pieces, which sets it off. The work changes depending on times of day - both sides have different qualities. For the real 3-d experience go for a shop in Tesco Shepton Mallet!

I’m glad Tesco has made the first steps to reduce some of their plastic wrapping and hope this increases.

Window Wonderland in Shepton runs 5-8 March with a launch at the Anglo Trading Estate, today 5 March, 7-9pm.

I ran some Climate Emergency workshops and gave a talk via Somerset Council and Somerset Art Works.

Held as part of the Somerset Council Climate Emergency Events, my drop-in workshops in Bridgwater, Shepton Mallet, and Yeovil offered people of all ages an opportunity to create sculptural artworks inspired by flora and fauna, highlighting waste and the importance of our natural world.  Participants learnt new skills and how to be imaginative with ‘rubbish’.  They had time to think, explore and exchange ideas about sustainability and creativity. Alongside these, I gave a talk Art and The Climate Emergency.

The more the world wide web and social media increase their grip on us, the more I savour face to face interaction.  Through leading workshops, talks, invigilating and private views, I’ve had conversations with all sorts of people recently, mainly revolving around art, wildlife and the climate emergency: how we can work together for a better world, how art has a role to play in helping to turn the tide of awareness for positive action. 

In order to create the massive behavioural change needed we have to emotionalise that data (Olafur Eliasson, 2018). 

For me, a socially engaged practice is important.  Human stories emerge.  Connections are made between people.  Through making, conversations flow.

I’m looking forward to working with Mead Community Primary School, Trowbridge on the Masterpieces in Schools project, which I was selected for via RSS.

I continue to run workshops and masterclasses at the Holburne Museum, Bath. My next one is 9 April, a 1 day sculpture workshop on Nature’s Wonders for their Spring Art Camps.

Other news:

I’m thrilled to be featured in Creating Spaces, a book by Graham McLaren celebrating Bath School of Art & Design’s long history.

Other potential projects are in the air - meetings and applications still in progress. More news on them later.

Final thoughts:  face-to-face conversations are valuable, but a period of self-isolation due to the Coronavirus will be a wonderful excuse for some sustained art in my studio - benefits of working from home ;-)

Hope to have conversations with you at some of these events before then!

Back in the Studio

Last year my studio underwent a space-saving transformation. Walls and floors are now free of clutter - ready for new mess!  I’ve been enjoying the space, absorbed in making alchemical concoctions with everyday soft and hard materials for a sculptural piece Path of Pollination for Fifty Bees IV, an exhibition starting next week at Black Swan Arts, Frome. The piece is a hybrid of sculpture, drawing and installation. I’ve been re-purposing old sponges, plastic netting, recycled wax, paper, out-of-date mustard powder and violet oil ... transforming through cutting, bending, stitching, wrapping and melting.  The process takes me back to my childhood making strange mixtures in my little jungly world at the back of our garden in Kenya.

Path of Pollination - work in progress. Photos by Seamus Nicolson

Fifty Bees is a collaborative art project showcasing the plight of our British bees and pollinators.  Lydia Needle sculpts fifty miniature art pieces and invites fifty artists to create new work in response to one bee’s ecology.  My designated bee is Hoplitis Claviventris (Welted Mason). 

Researching the Welted Mason bee’s path of pollination I got hooked on pollen as matter.  Key to its makeup is its stickiness, the yellowness due to flavonoids for UVB protection.  Mason bees are far more efficient pollinators than social bees.  Pollen transfers from flower stamens, collects all over their body hairs, then drops to other flower pistols, causing cross-pollination.  BirdsFoot Trefoil - the main pollen source for the Welted Mason bee - has a strong sweet ‘violet-scented’ aroma.  After drinking the nectar, the bee deposits pollen moistened with nectar in piles inside a stem, an egg laid on each, so the young can feed after hatching.

The fine copper wire and thread connectors between pollen forms in my work are transmitters of energy. 'Nature is an ever dynamic and complex matrix of individual lives and supporting elements, forming interconnections, of which we are a part… interconnections exist between all matter and lifeforms..a kind of three dimensional fabric .. bristling through all, across space and time… The light dims a little when small threads break between phenomena, fading entirely if there are deeper tears and cuts'. (Ginny Battson, 2018).

Fifty Bees IV - the interconnectedness of all things runs 8 February - 14 March ‘20 at Black Swan Arts, 2 Bridge Street, Frome BA11 1BB. Preview Friday 7 Feb, 6-8pm. All welcome!

I’m interested in string theory and mycelial networks, which offer a symbiotic relationship with plants, evoking imagination and hope.  How to combine life with death, despair with hope. I’d also like to develop more work along similar lines to my piece Glut - wrapped tentacular entrails, sensual bodily forms from waste materials. While thinking on new work, I began an ink and oil pastel drawing (below). Strangely, around the same time I came across similar structures in rock iron secretions at Burton Bradstock beach, Dorset.

The tragic wildfires in Australia (and Amazon) affected me deeply as so many others worldwide, and ignited the idea for an ongoing piece for Incendiary, an exhibition at Pound Arts, Wiltshire (19 March - 18 April).  The focus is Fire, Mourning, and the 'carbon-heavy masculinities' (Alaimo) of climate change. Entitled Pyre, I’m creating wrapped bundles of found/collected objects: items of love and life including sticks, bones, feathers, flotsam & jetsam, all bound, charred and eventually stacked in a pile to form a pyre. To me they are like grave offerings, memorials, wailings, grief bundles.   

My work is currently on show at The Royal Society of Sculptors Gilbert Bayes Award 2019 Winners Exhibition until 20 March, when it tours to Grizedale Sculpture.  I’ll be taking part in a Sculpture Slam on Wednesday 12 February, 6.30 – 8.30pm with all other exhibiting GBA artists. We are presenting a series of short 3 minute talks, chaired by Alex Chinnock. The Slam is an opportunity to tell people about our practice, an informal evening open to the public. Doors and bar open at 6.30pm, the Slam runs 7-8pm followed by viewing the exhibition and chatting. Please come along and support if you can!

Glut. Photos above and below by Jennifer Moyes

I’ve been leading a range of workshops and Masterclasses for young people at the Holburne Museum: Colourful Still-Life drawings in oil pastels, Life Drawing and the next one is Painting Self-Portraits in Acrylics on 16 Feb, 10.30am-4pm. For more info and to book visit: www.holburne.org/events

I’ll be running drop in family friendly workshops for Somerset Climate Action Network on behalf of Somerset’s four District Councils, the County Council and Somerset Art Works. We’ll be making sculptural pieces using recycled materials including tin, copper wire, twine and plastic netting, highlighting the climate emergency. Come along on either:

8th February, Sedgemoor District Council. The Sedgemoor Room, Bridgwater House, King Square, Bridgwater, TA6 3AR

15th Feb, Mendip District Council. The Council Chamber, Mendip District Council Offices, Cannards Grave Road, Shepton Mallet, BA4 5BT

22nd February, Vicarage Street Methodist Church, Yeovil, BA20 1JB

For more info visit: somersetartworks.org.uk/have-your-say-on-climate-strategy

Delighted to be taking part in Window Wonderland, Shepton Mallet. I’ll be re-purposing an old work Tendril (5 metres sculpture - see below) for a window display at Tesco, Shepton Mallet (5-8 March), adding recycled components related to Bags for Life funded community projects. Running concurrently with All the World’s Our Playground performance at St Paul’s School, the project is supported by The Art Bank,  Make the Sunshine and the Rubbish Art Project.

Art UK are coming to film me next month for their national project aiming to introduce young people to contemporary artists, writers, filmmakers and performers. Exciting!

I was delighted to have been selected for the Learning Programme Masterpieces in Schools in partnership with the Royal Society of Sculptors.  One of the following 5 artworks will be loaned for a day loan alongside my delivery of a sculpture workshop for schoolchildren. I wonder which they’ll pick?

All the above sculptures will then be available for sale - contact me if interested!

The sculpture course I’ve been running via Frome Community Education ends next week. It’s been wonderful working with some lovely enthusiastic adults, who’ve made some amazing pieces.

I’ve been inspired by visiting several exhibitions in the past month, ranging from The London Art Fair to Hauser & Wirth Somerset (where I sometimes invigilate), and the impressive studios of Simons Hitchens and Michael Fairfax.

Hope to see you at some of my forthcoming events!

My time inside comes to an end

Cells Residency

May was an exhilarating month for me, dominated by my solo residency/exhibition in the incredible atmospheric Cells, Town Hall Arts, Trowbridge.  My exhibition ‘Offenders’ (9-31 May) was the culmination of an art residency there in April.  Set in historic holding cells for suspected offenders (the grand magistrates court is on the floor above), the show may have offended some, but alludes to a question ‘are we all offenders given the state of our world?’ The work was a response to the site and to the horrors that we are facing - plastic oceans, factory-farming, animal extinctions.  The labour-intensive process of my work - weaving, wrapping, sewing - is a form of suturing, a cathartic attempt to repair in response to world destruction. I created a range of large and small works, installing as I made them.  Ironically, it was such a pleasure to be unrestricted in the cells spaces, free to test out new ideas and take risks.

Tongue, 2019, 330cms (l) x 158cms (h) x 135cms (w)
Recycled and found materials: fabric, old clothes died with avocado pits, foam, sponge, copper wire, steel, wax, twine, blankets, duvets, pillows, cushion, towels, wool, leather, plastic, rubber, thread

Photos by Tchad Findlay

My larger works - a body-sized Tongue sculpture (above) and 3 rickety ladders - filled the 3 main cells.  Fragile and exposed, Tongue activated the space. Like a wounded body, its vulnerable softness was juxtaposed against the harsh surroundings, repulsive but seductive. The ladders were precariously balanced, with wrapped soft sculptural entrails made from recycled materials weaving through them, and dangling from cell bars.

Photos by Tchad Findlay

Other works became interventions in smaller spaces and in the corridors.  The work included a sound piece - a new direction for me. I made a series of Spiderweb drawings - ancient neglected spider webs captured from dusty corners of the Victorian cells.  To become acquainted with the space I spent time creating a large graphite rubbing of a decaying section of brick wall, and some imprints on fine handmade paper, which I oiled, transforming them into skin-like parchment. In the loo, large stone spheres that have been incongruously left on the floor inspired an installation of interconnected cellular/planetary forms like a constellation. The stone balls remind me of these ancient ones.

Spiderweb drawings

Cellular/Planetary structures - installed in the cell loo

Photos by Tchad Findlay

As part of the residency, I invited various community groups to engage through debate and collaborative making.  I had some great conversations with visitors about the work, which expanded to discussions about human use and abuse of materials and wider issues about the state of our world.  I really appreciate all the visits and am grateful to those who supported me. Towards the end, I engaged the community in make a growing artwork for the exterior fencing outside Town Hall Arts. As a finale, I joined forces with artist Katryn Saqui (also exhibiting at Town Hall Arts) on Saturday 25 May, to create a colourful Street Sculpture ‘Bahuli Entrails’.   It was a wonderful way for members of the public to engage with art while having a bit of fun. All sorts of people dropped by to contribute to the work as a social activity, it attracted more people to enter inside the formal town hall to see the exhibitions, (several who don’t normally go to art exhibitions).  I have grown fond of friendly Trowbridge and was particularly charmed by a man Peter, who spent hours making a long finger knitted woollen piece for the display.

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Workshops

I took part in a spectacular Jack in the Green event organised by The Old Stores Studio, Evercreech. My role was to run a rag cloak-making session, with community help. The event celebrated the release of the spirit of summer.  At Bruton School for Girls, 50 students made cellular/planetary structures with me (based on the work I made in the cells) using recycled copper wire, twine, wool, plastic netting, printed handmade paper and oil.  The ethereal forms link to the 50 year anniversary of the first landing on the moon. Each piece will eventually interconnect with others to become part of a whole room installation at the school, to be exhibited as part of Somerset Art Weeks Festival 2019. At the Holburne Museum I ran a ‘masterclass’ with 11-16 yr olds creating self-portrait paintings - I was so impressed with their outcomes.

I will be running workshops at Town Hall Arts, Trowbridge in August making carnival headdresses: 13, 20, 27 August, 10am-1pm. Book here.

Current exhibitions

My piece Accretion has been selected to feature in the Bath Open Art Prize at 44AD, part of Fringe Art Bath. The exhibition runs until 9 June, 11 - 6 daily (until 2pm on last Sunday).  4 Abbey Street Bath BA1 1NN.

Forthcoming exhibitions

Re-Formation: a summer exhibition at Bishops Palace, Wells, 22 July - 6 October, organised by Heritage Courtyard Gallery.   Private View Saturday 10 August, 6.30-9pm. I am making a large outdoor piece entitled Crown of Thorns, inspired by a mixture of myth and religion, using re-purposed materials.  Re-Formation calls for a new vision.  With our planet at risk, we need to re-think our belief system.

I am thrilled that Traces has been selected for a book and exhibition: Drawing On Dorset organised by Dorset Visual Arts. The publication features 40 drawings linked to Dorset.  The exhibition will be at Fine Foundation Gallery, Durlston, Swanage 5- 17 July.  I made Traces in 2017 during my MFA. It is made mainly with copper wire on handmade paper, some elements 3d, inspired by whelk egg sacs found on the  Dorset coast.  In the work I was interested in blurring the boundaries between drawing and sculpture, so it expands into an out of form.

Sculpture at Marks Hall 2019: outdoor exhibition of sculpture throughout the landscape of Marks Hall, Coggeshall, Essex, CO6 1TG, 20 July - 31 August.

B-Wing

B-Wing is an arts project I’m co-curating with Luminara Star in Shepton Mallet Prison, for Somerset Art Weeks Festival 2019.

It’s so great to have the support of several sponsors including Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Chrisi & Simon Kennedy, MJW Architects, Kelly O’Brien, Cameron & Daniella Scott, Cranmore Parish Council and 2 anonymous donors. Many thanks to all!  We are waiting on news back from our main funding applications. Meanwhile, we are still fundraising, so if you can contribute to our project that would be wonderful!  Sponsors will be mentioned on social media and our website. Thanks to Mark Adler (Mendip Times) and Giles Adams (Whats On Somerset) for fab features.

Talks

I’m taking part in a Pecha Kucha at Hauser & Wirth Somerset on June 11, part of a professional development day for Artist/Educators. Hauser and Wirth’s current exhibition ‘Unconscious Landscape’ is such a joy, with so many of my favourite women artists featured, including Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse.

Farewell to Spring, Hello Summer!

Tentacular

At the start of this month, I went to a Somerset Art Weeks Symposium in Taunton ‘Prospecting: new directions and territories for artists’ practice’.  It was an invigorating day, albeit condensed, making connections and thinking laterally.  I particularly enjoyed catching up with SAW artists and meeting new practitioners. One of our tasks to bring to the event was a ‘This is Me’ profile for a group wall display.  Mine (below) reflects on the tentacular nature of my practice:

The talks highlighted inspiring examples of socially engaged practice and collaboration.  In workshops with Kerry Harker and Lydia Catterall we discussed the imperative for resilience, forging artist-led initiatives, and finding interesting spaces to show our work.  With this in mind, I’ve been planning a few interesting ventures for next year.  Two happen to involve prison cells.

I’m excited to be mulling over ideas for a residency culminating in a solo exhibition in the basement cells at Town Hall Arts, Trowbridge, in the Spring.  Alongside the show, I'll be delivering some related workshops with the young and elderly.  I am also in early stages of organising a joint art project and exhibition with Luminara Star and the Rubbish Art Project in Shepton Prison (the oldest UK working prison - now vacant until it gets developed into residential homes).  The cells are still in tact.  Both sites are unique, intriguing spaces for site-specific work, full of dark, sad histories, appropriate for creative responses to current society and environmental issues.  On a sunny day, light through the windows, steel bars and grids casts dramatic linear shadows. The prison, now silent, has great acoustics - one can only imagine the sounds of its past. We hope to include other artists, possibly sound, film, performance and installation and will engage the community in the making process.

A recent tweet about a bull elephant being shot because it broke out of its fenced enclosure in South Africa made me fume.  Almost as bad as poaching and trophy hunting.  It turns out they did not maintain the fences adequately, and all he was doing was naturally pushing boundaries, exploring, roaming beyond barriers – human imposed after all.  Why shoot him? Because he wasn’t towing the line we impose for our own humancentric logic.

Inky the Octopus, a hero in 2016, broke out of his aquarium tank in New Zealand National Aquarium, slid/crawled across the floor and down a drainpipe to the ocean.  Amazing intelligence and agility, but as this article points out, for many reasons beyond our own intelligence. Octopuses are so very different to us – ‘aliens’ apparently.  What’s fascinating is that ‘octopus literature is full of such flights to freedom’. The escape and how he did it remains a mystery. I was in awe watching an octopus in David Attenborough’s Blue Planet (Green Seas episode) trick a shark and escape by very cunningly and swiftly covering itself with a coat of shells. Picasso and his contemporaries were intrigued by ‘The Octopus’, 1928, a film by Jean Painleve, which led to Picasso's octopus-like women.  Octopuses also remind me of the interconnectedness of life:

‘The tentacular are... fingery beings like humans... squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings... swelling roots... The tentacular are also nets and networks... Tentacularity is about life lived along lines... a series of interlaced trails’ (Donna Haraway, 2016)

So, this creature – a symbol of our great and mysterious oceans- inspired my design for a giant octopus lantern to lead 2018 Shepton Lantern Parade (see top).  I am making the chicken-wire structure, then working on it with the community and the Rubbish art project in workshops at the Art Bank,Shepton Mallet, using recycled materials, especially plastic.  Workshop dates: Sat 24 Nov 11am-1pm, Mon 26 11-1, Mon 3 Dec 7-9pm, Thur 6 Dec 4-6pm + more... To take part in a workshop email lucy@therubbishartproject.co.uk   The Octopus will be lit by led lights and paraded on 22 December with the Shepton Lantern Parade. Please come along!

Creature and environmental concerns continue to engage me, as does the blurring of boundaries.  My thoughts are currently meandering around concepts of confinement, caged animals/humans, factory farming, obstruction, barriers, walls within walls.. and I'm sure there will be an element of the tentacular.

Other news:

I received the official results of my Masters in Fine Art this week and delighted to have passed with distinction!

In between tidying up my studio so it's fit for purpose, I've started working on a 1 metre Great Crested Newt as a commission for Carymoor Environmental Centre in memory of Hamish Craig, whose amazing contribution to Carymoor was instigated by great crested newts found there.

Last week I ran my first workshop as part of the Holburne Museum education team.  It was an A'Level life-drawing session linked to 'Rodin: rethinking the fragment'. It encouraged me to do some of my own life-drawing beforehand and prep on Rodin's link with the Pantheon sculptures, which all helped.

The class did some fabulous drawings:

Forthcoming exhibitions include: Residency and Solo Exhibiiton (title TBC), The Cells, Town Hall Arts, Trowbridge, April - May; Incendiary, Landsdown Gallery and SVA, Stroud, 4-10 February 2019; Marks Hall Sculpture, Essex, 20 July - 1 September 2019; Reformation, Bishops Palace, Wells, July - October 2019.  More info to follow.

If you'd like to receive updates please follow me here or on instagram, where I add regular updates: https://www.instagram.com/fionacampbellartist/   

My website is undergoing a complete rehaul and a much needed paring down.  Watch this space!

June Projects

June flew by for me with a host of projects on the go in tandem, allowing only snatched moments in our fantastic tropical weather – one of the best summers I’ve known in UK. Art in the community

I spent 4 days with PRU teenagers in a short residency at Bridgwater and Taunton College as part of Somerset Art Works Young ProspectUs Project.  We created mutant creatures inspired by insects and sea creatures, experimenting with reclaimed and found materials including aluminium cans, bottle tops, copper pipe, wire, found plastic and metal objects. It was a unique experience, great fun working with the PRU staff and students and hugely rewarding to see the youngsters lose their inhibitions to master skills like soldering.  ‘...turning down a mountain biking trip to do a second session soldering metal was what this project is all about: creating great artefacts with a professional artist ... within an environment they felt safe, providing an experience that strengthens their resilience as they move on from school to college’ (Lisa Robertson, Deputy Head of PRU Centre).  The work will go on display to Taunton Flower Show in August.

My last project with All Hallows students involved making headdresses for an exhibition ‘All the Fun’ at Silk Mill, Frome.  The theme was carnival and circus.  I worked with students in Years 4-8, making the sculptures from found, reclaimed and discarded materials, based on endangered wildlife, particularly sea creatures.  The project was inspired by the issue of waste, our plastic oceans, and the plight of creatures such as albatrosses and turtles who are suffering from the effects of our rubbish, ‘a stand against plastic pollution so we can see our sea creatures thrive once again’ (Tia West, Year 8). ‘Making my headdress was great fun!’ (Louis Roberts, Year 6).

I was involved in a recent Up Late event ‘Drawn to the Museum’ at the Holburne Museum (29/6) - a collaboration with Bath Spa University.  The event involved MA students, artists and speakers engaging with the public at the museum.   We set up pop up exhibitions of our work, focusing on drawing.  I attended an inspiring talk by Tania Kovats who makes drawings, casts trees, and explores water as her subject.  I also ran a life drawing session with a clothed model doing quick poses in the grounds, where members of the public and students joined in, it was fun!

I worked with The Rubbish Art Project and members of the Shepton Mallet community making a sheep out of reclaimed steel, chicken wire and various ‘trash’ materials as a community project for the town.

Plans are afoot for a Halloween Harvest Scrap Sculpture Community Project, based on harvest and the cycle of life.  I hope to created 3 large-scale metal sculptural works for a public event on Halloween, to be installed at Shepton Mallet market cross. The work may be filmed by a TV series Scrap Kings for Discovery.

Inspiring exhibitions

A couple of intense research trips to London were inspirational.  As part of my MA Degree course, a tour de force trip led by Andrea Medjesi-Jones (Bath Spa Uni MA course leader) introduced us to several new galleries including the smart spacious Marian Goodman Gallery.  An installation by Leonor Antunes (Portuguese) consisted of suspended ‘wormlike forms’ made of immaculately stitched leather, wrapped rope and brass tubing, interspersed with sculptural glass lights hung close to the ground.  The organic linear forms are repeated on both gallery levels, interrupted by reflective screens – all based on work by Anni Albers and Mary Martin.  Amongst others we visited Hauser & Wirth, Alison Jacques Gallery (Michelle Stuart: The Nature of Time), Herald Street Gallery and Maureen Paley (Oscar Tuazon: Fire).

I returned to London to see the results of the Tate Exchange project 'Inventory of Behaviours' at Tate Modern, a project in which I was invited to take part with a set of 'instructions'.  While there, I visited Lee Bul's, ‘Crashing’ at the Hayward – a mix of sculpture, installation, sound, film, and performances from the ‘80s.

Theatrical hybrids and fictional landscapes combining industrial and organic materials fill the spaces in a dramatic show.  Bul, from South Korea, confronts political persecution in her country, references disasters, questions cultural attitudes to the female body, and the pursuit of perfection through her re-appropriation of architecture and bodily forms.  She explores our ‘fear and fascination with... the uncanny’.   It was all fascinating, though I felt more affinity with her less glitzy other worldly soft sculptural monster works, especially ‘Monster Pink’, a reconstruction of a 1998 piece, and her stitched cocoons, made from various fabric.  In Scale of Tongue (2017-18) a hidden fan created a gentle motion in the fabric.

Sarah Sze’s ‘Image in Debris’ installation at Victoria Miro is extraordinary.  The darkened room is lit by a mesmerizing set of flickering moving images - luminescent blue satellite images of cities at night, reminiscent of bio-luminescent microorganisms, celestial imagery, a cheetah running in slow motion, the elements - layered on the wall and on small torn paper fragments supported by a delicate framework of thin rods.   Drips of dried paint catch the light. Everyday objects, particularly office supplies, are placed around the installation. This is all accompanied by sounds of clunks, gentle whirring, drips, clicks. The magnitude of our universe becomes a mad invention.

Berlinde de Bruyckere’s sculpture ‘Quan’, 2010, in Bumped Bodies at the Whitechapel Gallery is a contorted, bruised human figure buried in a cushion, built up from several layers of wax over an iron structure.  It makes one feel uncomfortable, even repulsed, but I was in captivated by the wax skin tones and powerful form she has created.

Closer to home, at Hauser & Wirth Somerset ‘Alexander Calder: From the Stony River to the Sky’, is a beautifully curated exhibition.  His delicate balanced mobiles and stabiles and their shadows fully occupy the space. Conversations between artworks, recurring forms and his upcycled jewelry, some seen in UK for the first time, offer scope for new ideas.

Participation in Manifesta12

I am very excited to have been selected to take part in a 10 day workshop in Palermo soon as part of Manifesta12, supported by Bath Spa University Enterprise Showcase Fund. The project ‘Ingruttati Palermo Planetary Garden’ research and fabrication workshop will involve a group of international artists, geographers, urban landscape architects and students who will be exploring the extraordinary hidden underground networks of the qanat waterways.  Metaphorically similar to the mysterious powers of mycelium – also an underground system, which can stretch thousands of miles within one organism, the waterways reflect science’s recent discovery of vast reservoirs of water contained hundreds of miles beneath earth’s surface.   This will be a wonderful opportunity for me to take part in the prestigious international art event, and to develop the aspect of my practice involving collaborative art projects in the community on an international level.

My website will be undergoing some changes in the next couple of months – look out for the rebrand!