Wednesday 20 March 2013

Garth Evans at Longside Gallery

I'm looking forward to seeing this exhibition when I visit Yorkshire in April.

www.ysp.co.uk

The Arts Council Collection presents a new exhibition of sculpture by Garth Evans, selected by his friend and former student Richard Deacon, which will open at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park on 23 March 2013.

This is the first major Garth Evans exhibition in the UK in over 20 years and will feature 28 works spanning the period 1959–1982, many drawn from the Arts Council Collection. The show will reconsider Evans' contribution to sculpture in this formative period, moving from early reliefs, to large colourful fibreglass sculptures through to entirely floor-based works. It will include a re-creation of Evans' seminal work Breakdown (1971) which was stolen shortly after its first public viewing. Evans has recreated the work based on surviving drawings, photographs and original plans and it will be installed immediately outside the Longside Gallery.

Born in Manchester in 1934, Evans studied at the Slade School of Art (1957–60), exhibiting regularly in London from 1962 until 1991. One of Britain's most innovative sculptors—a generation younger than Anthony Caro and coming before the New  British Sculptors of the 1980s, which included Richard Deacon as well as Tony Cragg and Richard Wentworth. Evans is known for his use of geometric, asymmetrical forms and a commitment to using everyday materials such as plywood, fibreglass and polythene. Evans influenced a generation of British sculptors not just through his innovative approach to sculpture but also as a teacher at Central St Martin's School of Art.

Turner Prize winner Richard Deacon's selection of Evans' work results from extensive conversations between the two sculptors and focuses on work created in the first two decades of Evans' long and varied career. The show will bring together the Arts Council Collection's significant holdings of Evans' work, alongside key loans from major UK collections including the British Museum, Leeds Museums and Galleries and Tate as well as a selection of key pieces from the artist's studio. It will feature many sculptures that have not been seen in public since they were first exhibited in the 1960s and 70s.

Influenced early on by American Abstract Expressionism in painting, one of Evans' central preoccupations was how to create sculptural forms that carried no reference to the world. Pieces such as Untitled No. 37 (1967) will show how Evans investigated this, working with the then new, versatile and lightweight medium of fibreglass, to depart from the sculptural traditions in bronze inherited from Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

Evans' 'carpet' pieces of the 1970s will also be exhibited, and will demonstrate his testing of a variety of materials including polythene, which he used to form a tactile sculptural membrane in St Mary's No 1 (1978). Later pieces such as Wedge II (1979), made from the salvaged debris from a collapsed shed outside Evans' studio, demonstrate the radical departure the artist instigated in British sculpture in the 1970s. Evans' achievements of the 60s and 70s were perhaps overshadowed by his almost immediate retreat from the British art scene, moving to the USA in 1979. Dramatic new directions are also apparent in the series of 41 drawings he made in the US in 1982. The Yaddo Drawings, 11 of which have been borrowed for this exhibition from the British Museum, where made during a five-week residency at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Exuberant and inventive, the drawings introduce a multitude of forms and 'bodies' that anticipate later work.

Saturday 16 March 2013

Studio Project Exhibition at Market Gallery

This morning I made a few adjustments to the lighting in the exhibition, so as to ensure that all areas of the gallery is lit and to minimise any light shining directly into the viewers eye as they look at a work. I also tidied up the cables so that people would not trip over them. I was concerned that some people at the opening were not going into certain areas of the gallery because they needed to walk over lighting wires, and so tried to prevent this by moving the wires.



I like the dramatic effect that the lighting creates with it being from the floor as opposed to from above. It matches the angular nature of the sculptures, and makes for some interesting shadows.




I also reassembled the large birch plywood structure so that it stands, using strong wood contact adhesive to secure the two pieces together. I will monitor whether this proves to be an effective solution.




I was delighted that the exhibition was well attended on the first day of it being open, and pleased that people are enjoying the work.

I had a wonderful conversation with Jenny Brownrigg, the Exhibitions Director at Glasgow School of Art, who enjoyed being surprised by discovering more pieces in unusual places the longer that she spent in the space.


I told her that I was hoping to arrange for a kind of 'in conversation' event to be held whilst the exhibition is on. I would like the opportunity to talk with a selected group of artists about some fundamental elements that the exhibition raises such as materiality and colour. I am in discussions with the Market Gallery committee about making this happen, and will keep you posted.


Friday 15 March 2013

Market Gallery Residency - exhibition opening



Once the rubbish was taken out of the gallery, and all the materials and equipment that I no longer needed were moved, I found it easier to work out where the remaining pieces should be positioned.

I moved the flat grey floor piece near to the window to benefit from the daylight.

I placed the 'dribble pipe' towards the back left corner of the gallery to replace the yellow pipe. They are both of a similar height, but I think that the 'dribble pipe' ties all the elements together.



I altered the positioning of the cone sculptures by the tubes to make it easier for the audience to be able to inspect them in detail.



I arranged the circular holed pieces in a corner together, some on the floor and some on the shelf, some on their side and some on their base.



I moved one of the cone sculptures outside so as to point into the gallery.



When I left the gallery at 5:20 pleased with all the work, all that needed to be sorted was the lighting. The gallery did not have sufficient lighting, so they had purchased some floodlights for my exhibition.

Due to time constraints, wiring the lights was rather late in being finished, and I was disappointed that I was unable to play around with the lighting prior to the opening. I felt that the lights were too bright for my liking, and some areas of the gallery were in darkness, but this is something I can resolve tomorrow.

The preview evening was really well attended, and people were very enthusiastic about the exhibition which was very pleasing.

I had a few technical problems with the large birch plywood structure as it fell down a few times, presumably when someone brushed past it. I decided to leave the two pieces on the floor, and will reapply wood glue or strong contact adhesive tomorrow.


Time passed very quickly and unfortunately I was unable to see Pauline and Rebecca's performance, but this was videoed so I look forward to watching that.

I was able to attend Kim Noble's talk in which he showed the audience 4 video works, and asked us to vote on which one will be shown throughout the exhibition.

I look forward to spending more time looking at the work in the exhibition when I can view the work properly.

Market Gallery Residency - Day 32

With one day until the exhibition opening, there was plenty to get done today.

I began with the mammoth task of drilling into the breezeblock wall in order to hang the breezeblock sized panels.






I also hung the portrait breezeblock panels on the adjacent wall, but wanted to hang them in a different format, this being one of the reasons why I chose to have them in a line. I also did not want them to interrupt or interfere with other artworks, and realised that I have more wall space than floor space.









Wednesday 13 March 2013

Market Gallery Residency - Day 30

After another full day of work at Glasgow School of Art I headed to the Market Gallery to paint the rest of the floor.

Before I started painting yesterday I thought about whether to scrape the plaster off the floor to make it even, but I decided to leave these spillages as they give an indication of the process used to make the work. I didnt want to leave these areas unpainted as this would make them too obvious.








The gallery looks much bigger now that I have moved lots of the materials, equipment and rubbish out of the space, and I had a sort through of the work that I already moved out of the space at the weekend so that I only bring artwork into the gallery so I can focus on the layout of the exhibition.







Tuesday 12 March 2013

Market Gallery Residency - Day 29

Today has been a full day of work for me at Glasgow School of Art & the plan to paint the rest of the gallery floor this evening altered when B&Q had no more of the paint we used yesterday for the floor! Hopefully we can get the rest of the floor painted in the same colour tomorrow evening.


Market Gallery Studio Projects open Friday 15th March 6pm - 9pm

presents

 

Studio Projects 2013:
New work by Helen Shaddock
(Gallery 3)
and
Solaris Simulacra
by Pauline McCloy and Rebecca Green

(Gallery 2)
Market Gallery, Glasgow
15th March - 12th April 2012
Opening Friday 15th March 2013 6pm - 9pm

New Work by Helen Shaddock
 
Helen Shaddock has combined controlled processes with chance elements to create colourful sculptural forms and ‘object paintings’. This new body of work responds to the industrial environment of the gallery and investigates the space between painting and the three-dimensional.  Shaddock’s work stems from a curiosity with, and visual attraction to, colour, stripes, strata and natural and man-made patterns.
 
 
Solaris Simulacra
by Pauline McCloy and Rebecca Green
Solaris Simulacra, based on the 1961 Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, is a collaborative art work consisting of performance, film and lighting installation which explores that which is considered ‘alien’ intelligence, and the predicament of the ignorance trap, a phenomenon that affects all species, and our own in a particularly tragic, comic and often predictable way.
The work features a 15 minute spoken word/object animation performance, entitled Cowboys and Aliens, which includes a reading of Lem’s original text in Polish. (On opening night at 7.30pm)
Meet the Artists
Helen Shaddock is a Glasgow based artist who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2008 with a First class Honours Degree in Fine Art:Environmental Art. 'Shaddock has exhibited in national and international exhibitions, and her work is in a number of public and private collections. Selected solo exhibitions include Strength in numbers at The Briggait, Glasgow (2011), Coloured Matter, Here Gally, Bristol (2011) and Schema, Che Camille, Glasgow (2010). Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo-exhibition at Motherwell Concert Hall and Theatre (September/ October 2013). Shaddock is the co –organiser of Glasgow International Artists' Bookfair held at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in 2008, 2010 and again in 2012. In May 2012 she was awarded Talent/Professional Development funding from Creative Scotland, and this exhibition is one of her outputs.
helen.shaddock@yahoo.co.uk
www.helenshaddock.co.uk
http://helenshaddock.blogspot.com/

Pauline McCloy is an environmental artist and designer-maker, combining the techniques of design, visual art, sculpture and craft. She works with light as a central medium and theme, creating installations, objects and environments. Her current work examines the concept of emergence and aims to find an intersection between our man-made environments, the forms that exist universally in the natural world and the concepts we humanly try to construct in between.

Previous works include public art works, St. Cuthbert’s Gateway and Stonefield Park Gate installed throughout Lanarkshire. Pauline has worked as a traditional theatre designer for The Edinburgh Playhouse and as an experimental theatre producer for The National Trust Scotland and as assistant director of film/ gallery project Linda Fratianne for Alex Hetherington and CCA Glasgow. Object based works by Pauline have been exhibited internationally at Salone del Mobile, Milan, Desinersblock and London Design Week, London, The Lighthouse and The House for an Art Lover, Glasgow. She currently lives and works in Glasgow with time split between her own environmental arts practice, as creative director of design firm McCloy and McCloy and as frequent collaborator of Sha Nazir, as McCloy and Nazir, making art and design for the public realm.

paulinejmcloy@gmail.com
http://paulinemccloy.tumblr.com
 
Rebecca Green is an artist who works with overlaps and fusions of screen and theatre performance, spoken word, live art, writing, craft and participation. She maintains a diverse practice, which is intimate and universal, noted for its use of a mixture of improvised surreal intentions, extraterrestrial dreaming pathos, wilfully alluring insistent humour and a collision of empathic bewilderment amid a searing focus illuminating the natures of individual human interactions and relationships. Her ongoing project Scheduling Spontaneity seeks to establish connectivity through tokens of love, instinct and sentiment, while her spoken word performances and writing examine, among other things, accepted and absurd human conventions, the act of performance and the moments between performer and audience, deviant relationships and observations below the surfaces of everyday activities. She also played Mrs Dempsey in Alex Hetherington’s short film Linda Fratianne (2010), commissioned by the CCA, Glasgow, which has screened internationally and at Trongate 103, Generator Projects, and GFT. She also works regularly with the Edinburgh International Festival on their education programmes that have linked visual art practices with those in devised theatre. She currently lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland.
rebeccagreen1@mac.com
http://rebeccagreenperformance.tumblr.com/
https://vimeo.com/greeny


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