Spirit of Things

Yoriko Murayama - seen here

I like the look of the next exhibition at Flow Gallery in London's Notting Hill - Spirit of Things: Crosscurrents between Japanese and Finnish Crafts. Gallery owner, Yvonna Demczynska says of the show: "I have travelled to both Japan and Finland and from these trips I have often wondered why the two cultures share the same spirit of simplicity, organic formations and pared down essence in the objects they create".  Artist's Include: Akiko Hirai, Anelma Savolainen, Anna Maria Väätäinen, Chioyoko Tanaka,  Hisako Sekijima, Kati Tuominen-Niittylä, Kristina Riska, Ritsuko Jinnouchi, Ulla Maija Vikman, Yoriko Murayama, Yoshimura Toshiharu. The show runs from 12 September - 10 November.

Graduate/Graddedig 2012

I went along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff last night to the opening of a survey show curated from Wales' graduate courses by Carmarthenshire artist and educator, Peter Finnemore. The show was displayed within the main body of the Centre on three floors and, as Peter Finnemore outlined in his Curators Notes, the architecture of the venue was influential on the choices as well as the quality of the works. It is not an easy space at all in which to show artworks, and with that taken into account it was a good show; it is heartening to see the quality of new work being produced here.

I particularly liked Peter's insightful comments in the introduction of the exhibition catalogue, a clear statement of the political dangers inherent in an environment of austerity and financial anxiety where the arts are a soft target for swingeing cuts.

"...It is well documented that the creative arts (in its many forms) is one of the biggest industries within the UK. It is a tool for regeneration, it drives wealth and it enriches individual well-being, communities and culture. It can also be utilized as a soft power to increase national standing and promotion upon the international stage. A career within the arts is a useful and productive life. The arts and humanities are not a luxury but a necessity. Creative thinking and the acquirement and mastery of artistic skills in traditional and new technological forms are essential to new economies, which themselves are driven by innovation, invention and imaginative problem solving. Creativity is capital.

An investment in art and education is an investment for the future. George Orwell’s laments on the failings of the UK were likened to the wrong family members being in charge; this is true in 2012 as it was in 1941. A political climate of austerity and anxiety, the rise in tuition fees, the arts and humanities being a soft target for cuts, bodes to the fostering of a new dark age upon culture and innovation. Fine Art courses are the creative emblem for any arts based universities; the closing down of an arts course with strong historical traditions, such as the fine art course at the University of Newport, is folly. However this model of thinking is not for everyone, there is room for expansion of the arts; for example, Trinity St David’s in Carmarthen will be starting a new BA (hons) course in Fine Art and Design (Celf a Dylunio) mediated through the Welsh language and a bilingual MA beginning this September.

Set amongst this background there is a continuing personal, social and cultural need for expression, creativity and innovation. Current graduates have a professional outlook upon art making activities and a career within the arts; this exhibition gives evidence to this and the quality and diverse creativity of the arts produced in colleges throughout Wales..."  from Peter Finnemore, Curator's Notes


I also enjoyed being a passive 'performer' in Tiff Oben's MA piece, VIP Area. It was initiated with a formal RSVP invitation sent out through Tiff's mailing list to attend an exclusive VIP event at the opening with complimentary Möet and Chandon champagne. We were required to attend in formal wear and told that the door staff would be refusing entry to informally dressed guests.

"Tiff Oben’s participatory installation, VIP Area, is activated and extended through the viewer’s unknowing participation as they act as central protagonists within the works’ narratives. Blurring the boundaries between reality and performance art, the elitist opening event wilfully aims to create an antagonizing sense of difference within the viewing- audience. The strict and prejudicial entrance requirements upheld by doormen divide friends and acquaintances, segregating and generating a sense of otherness between those on the inside and those on the out. The viewer on the outside focuses, often surreptitiously, on the revelry on the inside. Their exclusion is integral to the work which visualizes and makes an exhibition of exclusivity. Negative responses, confusion, anger, bafflement and division are deliberately and unethically fostered so that it becomes truly inclusive (despite exclusions) and truly participatory (even with those who feel that they could not, or are not allowed to, participate). Thus the politics of viewing are inverted as the viewer becomes
the subject of the work of grotesque, excitement, repression, beauty, fun, and the mundane." From Graduate/Graddedig 2012 catalogue.

I liked the insider-outsider tensions that were set up, and the clever layers of looking that were at play. I don't really own much in the way of formal wear, so that was a challenge before I even got to the venue - I felt suitably discomfited.  It was smart to set this up within the opening of an art exhibition, an event seemingly run-through with exclusive and excluding protocol.

In a similar vein, I've thought a lot recently about the 'Private View' as a phenomena and an accepted term within the art world, it is curiously misleading. For any arts organisation in receipt of public funding, the evaluated focus of pretty much all and every activity is inclusivity and reach into the community, it is only within the purely commercial sector that the term has any true meaning - an event to court the wealthy collector/buyer to part with their cash in advance of the onslaught of the hoi-polloi. I'm all for an opening celebration, but the persistence of 'Private View' as a term means something; something rather dubious perhaps about the institutions of art. The democracy espoused within a lot of art practice and insisted upon through arts funding maintains a revealing dissonance with the protocols and language of the industry.

On the Edge of the World

We said goodbye to our summer exhibition at Oriel Myrddin Gallery today, On the Edge of the World has been a delight to live with for the eight weeks it has been with us. The work was curated from the British Council Collection and was originally shown at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh in 2010 as part of a bi-centenary programme of events to celebrate the achievements and lasting legacy of Charles Darwin.

The exhibition featured work from: boredomresearch, Christine Borland, Dalziel+Scullion, Anya Gallaccio, Tania Kovats, Rob Kesseler, Michael Landy,  Heather & Ivan Morison, Simon Starling, Alison Turnbull, Marc Quinn.

"The 14 contemporary artists selected for this exhibition assume the role of modern-day explorers.  Through their work, they make connections between us, our environment and nature.  For many of them, travel is an important part of their practice; they seek to examine and interpret the complex and changing natural world around us.  Here we see the enduring legacy of Darwin and his commitment to bringing new interpretations, rare discoveries and insights to a wider world carried beyond a scientific community into the imaginations of artists today."

My personal favourite from the show was Tania Kovats' two hundred and eight two, a slice of oak tree  onto which Kovats has traced each individual ring in india ink to make a delicate, poignant record of the  tree's life span.

It was also a great pleasure to host 8 of Michael Landy's etchings from his 2003 Nourishment series. Each etching depicts a common weed that might grow between paving slabs - 'street flowers' as Landy describes them. These were the works that emerged after Landy's famous work Break-down which saw him destroy all of his posessions in 2001.

One of the favourite pieces in the show for our visitors was boredomresearch's Oriental Bug Garden (2004), a digital piece that uses gaming and artificial life modelling technology to create a screen based work that has a self-generating pattern of triggers and collisions which, in turn create an incidental soundtrack. Meditative and tranquil, the sound sets the tone for the whole exhibition in many ways.

The centre piece of the show was arguably Anya Gallaccio's installation, Preserve Beauty (2003). 800 brilliant red Gerbera flowers were installed behind a sheet of glass and left to disintegrate over the duration of the exhibition. The process of decay was quite present in the gallery as the piece went through various stages - sometimes the smell was quite interesting!

Vetch Veg

Owen Griffiths seen here

Swansea has seen a marvelous art project develop on part of the old Vetch site of Swansea City Football Club over the last nine months. Owen Griffiths has been the inspiration and the engine behind creating and populating a community vegetable garden on the site with the enthusiastic participation of local residents and groups. Glynn Vivian Gallery is holding an off-site event, the Sandfields Festival of Ideas on the site this weekend with a lovely programme of events including performance from Peter Finnemore, food from the Bangladeshi Community who have a plot at the garden, music from Joan Joans, Sarah Passmore and the Swansea Ukelele Orchestra, yoga with Glynn Vivian Gallery's Karen MacKinnon and much more...

Vetch Veg is a socially engaged art project commissioned as part of the Cultural  Olympiad, you can read all about the project on the Vetch Veg site.

Assemble/Cydosod at Melin Glonc

If you missed Mike Murray's exhibition, Assemble/Cydosod at Goat Major Projects in Cardiff, you can see selected works at Melic Glonc in Carmarthenshire until 1 September.

Antonia Dewhurst - Ty Unnos/One Night House

Antonia Dewhurst - Tŷ Unnos/One Night House - courtesy of Antonia Dewhurst

 If you are in the Newtown area of Mid Wales, make sure you drop into Oriel Davies to see Antonia Dewhurst's Test Bed Project - Tŷ Unnos in the park adjacent to the gallery. Antonia built the house in accordance with the historical Tŷ Unnos/One Night House tradition:

"Tŷ Unnos is an old Welsh tradition dating back to the 17th century: if one could build a house between the hours of sunset and sunrise and have smoke rising from the chimney by dawn, the ownership of the land could be claimed. While Antonia does not lay claim to Newtown’s park on 19 July she will build a Tŷ Unnos - literally overnight - in the town’s parkland opposite Oriel Davies. This will be a temporary structure made from recycled materials - wooden pallets, tarpaulin and corrugated iron. After a night of feverish building the structure will be in place by the morning of 20 July, complete with smoke rising from the chimney."

Here's a short stop motion video of the construction.

You can also see Antonia's Gimme Shelter series of small scale constructions in the Test Bed Space inside the gallery - including the newly made piece of the Tŷ Unnos in the park.

Courtesy of Antonia Dewhurst

The house remains in situ until 5 September and Antonia is occasionally 'In Residence' - ring the gallery for times on 01686 625 041

Mike Murray - Assembled at Home/ Cydosod yn y Cartref

Mike Murray - Who ya going to call - Seen here

My favourite show of the moment is Mike Murray's Assembled at Home/Cydosod yn y Cartref currently showing at Goat Major Projects in Cardiff.

"Mike Murray will be presenting new works on paper at GMP from 12/08. Murray's watercolours are the result of using the techniques associated with 'Free Association'. The resulting observations look at how we define and associate ideas of self-awareness and character traits through the placement and assembling of groups of what may seem random objects. All these objects come together through a process of experience, memory and personal preference which the person assembling is likely to be unaware of as it is automatic and beyond conscious knowing. The collections appear as dislocated from their surrounding, the places that bring meaning to their use and purpose are removed. A subconscious dialogue occurs between mute objects and we are invited to contemplate the meaning and purpose of the objects that surround us everyday. Mike Murray's work explores ideas and processes that we could term as surrealism, the influence of the subconscious in our everyday and what exists beneath the thin surface we mistakenly describe as reality. The resulting work presents a form of dark humour at odds with the delicate and refined process of the watercolour.

For part of Assembled at Home, Mike will be resident in the project space responding to a book of diagrams for making house hold objects that forms the title of the show."

The show continues until 28 August - look here for opening times.

Colony: Contemporary Art in Alternative Spaces

Sean Puleston

I went to the inaugural opening of a nice new initiative a couple of weeks back in Cardigan, west Wales. Artist, Lee Williams, recently returned to his native Wales from London has gathered together a group of artists to show work in a couple of buildings either side of the river Teifi on Cambrian Quay and Teifi Wharf.  The works on show include installation, photography, video and sculpture and make use of some lovely interior spaces, partly renovated (above Fforest on Tefi Wharf) or partly derelict (Cambrian Quay). Artists showing include: Jonathan Anderson, Alex Duncan, Sean Puleston, Erin Rickard and  Lee Williams. 

The show continues over the bank holiday weekend until 27 August 2012 and if the weather is nice you can also get a bite to eat at Pizza Tipi - lovely!

Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru 2012

Carwyn Evans - Cast

Congratulations to Carwyn Evans for his gold medal win at The National Eisteddfod of Wales 2012 in the Vale of Glamorgan. I was particularly proud to see Carwyn's work win as I know that his time working with us at Oriel Myrddin Gallery in 2011 as part of our Project Object series of exhibitions was instrumental in bringing this current work into being.

The Gold Medal for Craft was won by Anne Gibbs with a series of abstract arrangements of ceramic objects Am gael bod rhywle arall / To be elsewhere.

Other highlights for me were Angharad Pearce Jones' new Tirlun y torrwr / Disc cutter landscape series and Sarah Ball's little portrait paintings.

High Tide Heels

High Tide Heels - seen here

I saw these posted on Facebook today and they made me laugh out loud - imagine trying to walk in them! Very appropriate for this miserable British summer though!

Take the M4 East then the M5 South

I have recently installed some new work at an exhibition in Somerset, Take the M4 East then the M5 South. The exhibition features six artists that have previously shown as part of Rhôd, an annual exhibition and event held in west Wales: Sam Aldridge, Kathryn Campbell Dodd, good cop bad cop, Jason Pinder, Anthony Shapland and David Shepherd.

The exhibition has been organised by Reveal Somerset following their presentation at the Rhôd symposium, held at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff in July 2011 and can be seen at The Brewhouse Theatre & Arts Centre, Taunton, it runs until 11 August - more pics here.

Rhôd 2012

Clare Thornton - Tact Series: Orange

I had the great privilege in 2012 to be selected as curator for Rhôd 2012. Now in its fourth year this annual contemporary art event is held at Melin Glonc, a 16th Century corn mil set in 11 acres of ground in the rural village of Drefelin in Carmarthenshire.

Over the four years of its existence the event has seen about fifty artists exhibit on the site both inside and in the grounds of the mill building. I was selected to show my own work there in 2010.

For the 2012 event in early June, I chose ten artists to participate in the show all of whom visited the mill over the preceding months and made their work in response to the site, Jonathan Anderson (Swansea), Phil Babot (Cardiff), Antonia Dewhurst (Conwy), Eddy Dreadnought (Sheffield), Maura Hazelden (Pembrokeshire), Anne-Mie Melis (Cardiff), Seren Stacey (Carmarthenshire), Clare Thornton (Bristol), Jobina Tinnemans (Pembrokeshire), Elizabeth Tomos (Carmarthenshire).

Eddy Dreadnought - Moving Away from Aborescence - Towards a Rhizomatic Future

 

Pete Telfer from Culture Colony was kind enough to film the event and me talking about the artists' contributions to the show - you can watch it here - if you are not a member of Culture Colony you can register for free to watch dedicated Welsh arts content.

Seren Stacey - Untitled (detail)

The Institute for Imagined Futures and Unknown Lands...

Fern Thomas - When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit

The current exhibition at Mission Gallery in Swansea is When the Moon Fell Out of Orbit by Fern Thomas. Following her recent MA studies at Oxford Brookes University in Social Sculpture, Fern has established the Institute for Imagined Futures and Unknown Lands. Through her research she is exploring intuitive thoughts and visions brought through dreams, imaginative ideas and images to ask questions of our current condition in the world and what our future might hold. The artworks use texts, objects, structures, performances and actions to set a kind of transformative process into being through which she and her audience engage in an ongoing exploration of the resulting imagined material.

There has been a series of weekly performances during the show in which Fern relates a series of dreamed/imagined narratives full of poetic and symbolic triggers, through repeating these sequences she hopes to come to a greater understanding of their significance, these are active interventions into the collective imagination which is manifested through and around the exhibition.

The works are also beautifully imagined within the gallery space and make direct reference to the history of the architecture of Mission Gallery. 

The exhibition runs until 15 July 2012.

Antonia Dewhurst - Ty Unnos

Antonia Dewhurst - Gimme Shelter - seen here

I am really looking forward to Antonia Dewhurst's forthcoming Test Bed project at Oriel Davies Gallery in Newtown. Antonia's series of shelters, Gimme Shelter which were made as part of her degree work at Coleg Menai, Bangor in 2010/11 have led her to undertake the creation of a Ty Unnos dwelling in the parkland alongside Oriel Davies on the night of 19/20 July 2012.

"The tradition of the Ty Unnos (One Night House) was established in Wales around the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century when  over 5000 Enclosure Acts were passed. This resulted in common land being passed into the hands of landowners. In response to the resulting homelessness and poverty there was a rise in the tradition of the Ty Unnos.

Thought to date back to Hywel Dda, but never enshrined in law, this tradition stated that if a house could be built between sunset and sunrise and have smoke rising from its chimney at dawn, then the builder could keep the house and the land as far as a hammer or axe could be thrown from each of the quarters.

Materials would be collected secretly over several months and all the builder's friends and family would be involved on the night. Often the only clue the landowner's agent would find was that the local carpenter was making a door for someone. However, the house was often pretty primitive and the 'door' might be a woven hazel screen, the walls of cut peat, the roof thatched with gorse or whatever was to hand. The chimney too might be of woven hazel or willow and these house-names persist today e.g. Corn Helyg, Willow Chimney.

Once the house-builder's title was established they could amass more permanent building materials and replace the original building with a more substantial dwelling and these too persist into the present day in the house-name Ty Newydd - the new house."

Antonia Dewhurst - Materials for Ty Unnos - Courtesy of Antonia Dewhurst

  

In keeping with the tradition, Antonia has been collecting her materials over the last couple of months and is getting ready to undertake the building of her dwelling overnight on 19/20 July.

SOFA New York 2012

Walter Keeler - Image by Dewi Tannant Lloyd

I am in New York at the moment visiting SOFA - The Sculpture Objects and Functional Art Fair - being held in the Park Avenue Armory for 20 - 23 April. I am here as part of a research delegation of Welsh craft galleries who are accompanying and assisting Ruthin Craft Centre who have a stand here this year.

Ruthin Craft Centre are representing the work of potter and ceramicist, Walter Keeler and textile artists, Eleri Mills. We are writing a dedicated blog for the initiative - I do hope you'll visit!

Lab Craft: Digital Adventures in Contemporary Craft

Lab Craft, the Crafts Council touring exhibition is in its final week at Oriel Myrddin Gallery. It's the last chance to see this extraordinary show as it ends its tour here. 

Here is a link to more images of the show.

Rose Wood

Image courtesy of Rose Wood

In conjunction with Oriel Myrddin Gallery's exhibition Lab Craft: Digital Adventures in Contemporary Craft, currently touring from The Craft Council, west Wales based accessories designer, Rose Wood will be showing a range of her laser cut leather jewellery in the gallery shop.

Rose works with laser cut components, slicing and slotting flat shapes to build into sculptural jewellery. Working predominantly in leather and textiles she enjoys the tactility of the making process. 

The jewellery pieces are made from soft leather and have a gestural, performative element to their design, they are sensuous in their physicality and designed to be enjoyed and experienced as tactile objects. 

Rose has also designed intriguing folded textiles that act as sculptural garments and performance pieces.

Untitled from rose wood on Vimeo.

Lab Craft: Digital Adventures in Contemporary Craft

Installation of Lab Craft at Oriel Myrddin Gallery

I'm really excited that we are currently in the process of installing The Crafts Council touring show, Lab Craft: Digital Adventures in Contemporary Craft at Oriel Myrddin Gallery. The work arrived with us yesterday and our colleagues from The Crafts Council arrived today to work with us on the installation.

We first saw the show at Tent London in 2010 and were really captured by the ideas and possibilites that the show present to the contemporary designer and craftsperson.

Lab Craft includes 26 makers who combine hand, mind, eye, technical mastery of tools and materials, and aesthetic sensibility, with cutting-edge digital technologies. Using rapid prototyping, laser cutting, laser scanning and digital printing, Lab Craft explores the use of technology as an extension to the capabilities of the human hand.

Curated by Max Fraser, the exhibition includes work by some of the most experimental names currently working in craft and design, including; Tord Boontje, Michael Eden, Gareth Neal, Timorous Beasties and Nina Tolstrup, with many showing innovative work previously unseen. Textiles, ceramics, furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting and much more are presented to engage and intrigue anyone with an interest in craft, materials, design, and technology.

Watch this space for more images and thoughts as the show comes together. There will be an opening event on Saturday 3 March at 2pm with a talk by craft practitioners Anna Lewis and Claire Savage Onstwedder called Crafting Technology. Both Anna and Claire work with CIRIC at Swansea Metropolitan Museum.

Lab Craft will run from 25 February - 7 April 2012.

Lost in Lace

Lost in Lace at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

I managed to get to see Lost in Lace at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery before if closed at the weekend. This major show was curated by Lesley Miller, one of the speakers at Oriel Myrddin Gallery's warp+weft Symposium in 2010.

The exhibition brought together 20 international artists and makers to think about the qualities and properties of lace and to play with these contexts in relation to the architectural space of the gallery.

Chiharu Shiota - After the Dream 201

The show included an installation by Berlin based artist Chiharu Shiota using her distinctive black-string installation technique which en-traps objects in its web of lines and space, in this case long, white dresses which seem to hover, ghost-like above the ground.

There is a dedicated website for the show which has information about the ideas behind the show and the artists involved.

Charmed Life: The solace of objects

Felicity Powell - Conjuring Coral - seen here

The Wellcome Collection in London is currently showing an exhibition of charms and amulets, Charmed Life: The solace of objects which is the result of a project with artist, Felicity Powell. Powell has had the opportunity to engage with the museum's collection of 1400 amulets and charms collected in the early twentieth century by folklorist, Edward Lovett. She is also showing her own extraordinary wax drawings and films alongside the collection.

The exhibition publicity uses this insightful quotation from 1580:  “It seems that the soul... loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless given something to grasp on to; and so we must always provide it with an object to butt up against and to act upon.” Michel de Montaigne, 'Essais' 

The exhibition runs until 26 February 2012.

January at Mostyn Oriel

I took a trip up to north Wales last weekend to see Gareth Griffith's exhibition Shelter at Mostyn Oriel in which I had a small piece of work. The show was really lovely (it closed on 15th January), about 60 artists had contributed and the work was shown on a simple trestle table as a 'field' of shelters. A crazy artists campsite of miniature dwellings! All sorts of ingenious solutions had been devised to the brief to make a shelter 20 x 20 x 15 cm out of found materials or materials to hand.

I was also glad to get to see the other shows currently running in the gallery, Ha Ha Road in the main gallery space takes a look at the use of humour in contemporary art - "The selected artworks demonstrate how acts of absurdity, irrationality or playfulness can interrupt reality and momentarily destabilise common assumptions." The perfect antidote to post-Christmas gloom, many of the works genuinely raised a smile. 

Grazia Toderi - Orbite Rossa - seen here

I also enjoyed Grazia Toderi's video Orbite Rossa installed in gallery 6 as part of the gallery's Love Video series. Night-time cityscapes are layered and superimposed  in a slowly changing vista of lights. The result is a mesmerizing and slightly disorientating experience, the gradual alterations to the landscape and the impossible movements of light within it set up beautiful. "...luminous geometries...". Personally, I saw a kind of melancholic dystopia - Blade Runner came to mind with its nocturnal rooftop city scenes - a balance of beauty and sadness in the universal city-at-night.

Mike Nelson - Coral Reef

Mike Nelson: The Coral Reef, 1999, installation view;

image courtesy  of the Artist and Matt’s Gallery, London, Collection of the Tate.

On a recent trip to London, I went to visit Mike Nelson's Coral Reef recently acquired by Tate Collections and installed at Tate Britain until January 15th. This work was made in 1999 for Matt's Gallery in London, at the very end of the 20th Century but before events which have come to define current times; 9/11, 7/7 and the economic crash of 2008 in particular. In the light of our recent history this claustrophobic, disorientating piece has extraordinary resonances.

Entering the work through a grubby reception room, you begin your journey into a complex series of rooms and corridors. Each room has its own character - all are shabby, depressed, clues are scattered throughout to tempt us to construct a narrative for ourselves. The title, Coral Reef reflects Nelson's concept of a fragile structure which exists under a metaphorical ocean surface, in which "...in a sense each room is indicative of a different belief system". We are "...invited to become lost in this world of lost people" and that is exactly what the experience achieved for me.

Under electric light, the structure doubles back on itself, the spaces are tight and only just big enough to occupy. A sense of panic rises even though this is obviously a work of art, installed in a gallery - one cannot actually come to harm or get forever lost in the maze - the fiction is powerful enough to suspend the rational just enough to allow the anxiety to emerge. You can hear others elsewhere in the structure, doors are opening and closing, squeaking on their hinges, it could be reassuring but it also increases the panic. The residual evidence of characters living out their days, conducting their business and worshiping at their own particular alter in these uncared for spaces is disturbing, familiar and loaded with prophetic tension.  In a carefully constructed, paranoia educing twist we are led to believe we have reached the room through which we entered only to find the exit leads us into a loading bay, its shutters down - we have no choice but to turn and retrace our steps. 

It is a remarkable experience, here is Mike Nelson talking about the work and its contemporary significance.