The year that was 2018

The White Pube - One of the best 'Creative' Talk's I've ever been to!

I'm just out of the weekly Artist / Curator / Writer Talk at Newcastle University and am totally buzzing and fired up. This week was 'The White Pube' "the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which [they] write criticism and (sometimes) curate. 



It is based at thewhitepube.com and also on Instagram and Twitter as @thewhitepube. 

[They] publish a new text every Sunday, mostly exhibition reviews but every so often baby essays filed under art thoughts. 

[They] started writing about art because [they thought] everything else was boring/overly academic/white nonsense////and male. 

Every review is a personal reaction, and a record of an encounter with an aesthetic experience. [They] wanna write GOOD ~ have politix ~ n call out the general bullshit that stops a lot of us even wantin 2 go to galleries."

Their presentation was equally as entertaining as their writing is, and it was a pure joy to listen to them freely discuss matters that simply many other creatives are too scared to approach. I'm thinking in particular of the fact that they share their accounts with readers and thus highlight the institutions that simply fail to pay a fair wage. 

It is too common that artists / writers / musicians / curators are paid a minimal fee without travel expenses and accommodation. If we all shared our accounts online it would show which institutions are good and bad at paying artists.

I feel there is a bigger conversation that needs to happen here, so please watch this space!

My current exhibition reviewed by Sarah Davies for Corridor 8

Helen Shaddock: 
Themselves Here Together

• The Word, South Shields

by Sarah Davies

The installation at The Word, South Shields is a repeating sequence of projected images and accompanying soundtrack, a montage of voices speaking, whispering or singing disjointed words and phrases. The recording was produced by vocalist musician Sarah Grundy then edited and layered by Helen Shaddock to accompany her projected images and animations.

The words were provided by Shaddock after spending time with groups such as Unusual Experiences at Broadacre House. Here the artist spent time with people who have experienced auditory or visual hallucinations, with a desire to express something of that experience to her audience.

The installation certainly conveys a sense of disorientation, with images flashing up at different points around the room, using all the walls in the space. The viewer is forced to turn this way and that, trying to keep up but always missing something. Frantic, aggressive lines like scratches or scars criss-cross in fast succession as the voices build to a chaotic discordant frenzy. Moments of relief come as softer images take over, pastel coloured discs like microscope slides which linger a little longer.

Shaddock’s research revealed that often those who hear internal voices find the dialogue at times reassuring and comforting, whilst at others it can be disturbing and destructive. These contrasting effects are expressed through the use of pace, volume, colour and mark-making in this piece. The barrage of light, movement and sound, in which it is impossible to distinguish more than the occasional word (‘lose ourselves without… forever… everything… everyone…’) give the viewer an experience of sensory overload, struggling to know what to focus on or where to look. In the more harmonious moments the voices come together like a monastic chant or plainsong which has a strangely soothing influence.

Shaddock is keen to maintain a hands-on approach to creating her artwork, despite it being presented ultimately in digital format. The images and animations were created by drawing, scratching or collaging directly onto 16mm film, with the later conversion from analogue to digital producing a sense of detachment, of being ‘one step removed from reality’, a state perceived by many of those who participated in Shaddock’s research. The artist’s method here makes visible the human involvement in the creative process, with the vastly magnified images refusing to hide the flecks and squiggles of imperfection.

Themselves Here Together is the result of Arts Council England funding and is on display in the StoryWorld room on level 2 of The Word, South Shields, until Thursday 21 June 2018. Opening times are Monday to Thursday: 4–6.30pm and Sundays: 1–4pm.

More about Helen Shaddock’s work and research can be found on her website.

Sarah Davies is an artist and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

http://www.corridor8.co.uk/article/helen-shaddock-themselves-here-together/

Emily’s Voices by Emily Knoll reviewed by Nancy Nyquist Potter

Emily’s Voices by Emily Knoll (Knoll Publications, 2017).

Reviewed by Nancy Nyquist Potter, Professor of Philosophy and Associate with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Louisville.

Emily Knoll offers readers a first-person account of her experiences with voice-hearing, telling of her journey of fear and despair, and her growing path to understanding not only herself but the phenomenon as well. Her memoir is aimed at a young adult audience and is written accessibly but powerfully in the present tense, giving an immediacy and concreteness to Emily’s story. This memoir is extremely rich in conveying to readers a non-pathologizing way to think about voice-hearing and voice-hearers. It should be read not only by voice-hearers themselves, who will find comfort in her narrative, but also by mental health professionals, as it presents a challenge to the biomedical model of voice-hearing as evidence of psychosis. 

Phenomenology. 

Emily describes in detail the experiences of overwhelming emotions that accompany and sometimes lead up to voice-hearing. Terror, shame, confusion, anger, failure as work and education become too difficult, and low self-esteem are almost constant companions in her path toward knowledge, recovery, and employment. These varying emotions are conveyed clearly in ways that many readers can relate to and which may help them understand what Emily’s experience of being a voice-hearer has been. As Emily interprets them, her voices are separate from her (87). During one period of her early life, she develops eating disorders as a way to cope with her emotions. Later, she turns to alcohol, which she learns makes her feel more depressed and even suicidal. She also goes through agonizing periods of isolation, which serve to protect her but tend to increase the voices and her anguish. She longs for connection—to tell others what she was feeling, and she needs listeners who will understand and not treat her like she’s crazy. But as she begins to see psychiatrists who diagnose and medicate her, she fears that she is ‘trapped within a world of illness’ (108). ‘I’m not who I was before I cracked up,’ she screams at her mother (p. 90). Cycles of retreat and resistance are discouraging and defeating. She does have some close friends, such as Beth and Daniel, who listen, spend time with her, and stand by her, and the role of these people in her life cannot be over emphasized; friends keep her tethered to love and reality, and give her hope that she is capable, worthwhile, interesting, and fun just as she is.

Challenging the biomedical model. 

Emily’s experiences with mental health professionals illuminate the need for more clinicians to learn to think differently about voice-hearing and to challenge the prevailing model. While some clinicians in Emily’s story play a crucial role in departing from the biomedical model, others do so less. The question directly arises in Emily’s story of what the ontology of voice-hearing is and what meaning to make of it. Emily receives numerous diagnoses, including Borderline Personality Disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia; none of them seem to fit. Schizophrenia seems to be the most common diagnosis given, perhaps due to an ontological and epistemic commitment to categorizing voice-hearing as a symptom of psychosis. But, as I explain below, it has become increasingly clear that not all voice-hearers are mentally ill, and the question arises as to just what to make of such experiences and when to think of them as symptomatic and when not to. Causality is also a contested issue in voice-hearing. Emily, who as an adult is an academic student working towards her Master’s degree, is a brilliant, talented, and sensitive child when we meet her. Her childhood development occurs in the context of her father’s abandonment, pressure from her mother to be a high achiever, and tension between her grandmother and her parents. Early on, Emily draws on imaginative powers to entertain herself and to escape difficulty in daily life. She often needs to retreat from uncomfortable and tense environments. Yet it is not clear that her voice-hearing is caused by traumatic experiences. After undertaking considerable research into others with such experiences, Emily concludes that ‘This trauma paradigm risked being as reductive a model as the biomedical explanation that psychiatry gave for voice-hearing’ (154).

In terms of treatment, some clinicians suggest that she needs to lower her expectations, and they medicate her in ways that she finds are dampening her creativity (96). These forms of treatment are fairly common experiences for voice-hearers. But other clinicians normalize Emily’s voice-hearing, bringing together questions of ontology with questions about treatment and recovery. When Emily arrives at University, for example, her therapist Daphne Coton explains that ‘You can hear voices and not be psychotic,’ a position that some clinicians who are committed to the biomedical model of mental disorders may reject (154). Daphne also tells Emily that ‘the voices are parts of yourself’—an idea that seems antithetical to Emily’s belief that they are separate from her— and she asserts that no medication can make the voices go away. ‘We all hear inner voices,’ Daphne says to Emily. ‘It’s just that yours are outside your head. So you have to work hard to remind yourself that they come from within you. And that it’s your mind creating them’ (104). Later, when Emily tells Daphne, ‘I just wish that I was like the others, and I didn’t hear voices,’ Dr. Coton bluntly replies, ‘Well tough, you do. So you’ve got to think of ways to cope.’ A central part of Emily’s coping and recovery includes becoming part of a network of people who are talking about voice-hearing and reframing it so that it isn’t as stigmatizing and damaging (see below.) Many clinicians guide Emily toward communities with whom she can feel more comfortable. For instance, she is recommended to attending a ‘hearing voices’ training course to learn to facilitate peer support groups, and this somewhat alleviates isolation and stress by finding connection with others who will listen openly and respectfully and will be encouraging of change and growth.

An important message in Emily’s book is that there is no monolithic way to frame voice-hearing. Instead, there exist diverse experiences and many strategies of dealing with voices. Some reject their voices and yell at them to go away, others have a dialogue with them. Emily learns that some voice-hearers accept their voices and even welcome them.

Stigma 

Goffman describes stigma as an experience of being deeply discredited due to some characteristic or attribute of a person. He argues that, rather than thinking of stigma in terms of negative attributes, it is better to think of it as a relation between groups. In mental illness (or perceptions of it), the relation is that the stigmatizing attributes are always understood in the context of the ‘normals’ (Thachuk 141). ‘Public stigma encompasses negative stereotypes, prejudice and discriminative behaviours present in the general public, while self-stigma refers to internalization of these stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination’ (Vilhauer 2017, 6). Thus, stigma is part of a complex knowledge structure that negatively affects marked social groups (Corrigan 2004). In fact, Thachuk reports that people considered to have mental illnesses often find the stigma attached to them to be far more painful than ‘having’ the mental illness itself(141). Just referring to voice-hearing as ‘auditory hallucinations’ is stigmatizing, because hallucinations are clinically and popularly associated with schizophrenia and psychosis. Vilhauer (2017) found that media associates voice hearing with schizophrenia; she performed a literature review on damage experienced by voice-hearers who are stigmatized. Harms suffered by the stigma of voice-hearing include not being able to talk with others about the experience because of fear and shame; isolation; low self-esteem; and heightened stress of living alone with a confusing problem. Additionally, when mental health professionals hold low expectations for recovery, voice-hearers can become discouraged and trapped in illness (see 108; 173). These are all difficulties that Emily writes about in her memoir, where she makes vivid how destructive the stigma of voice-hearing really is.

Persistence. 

Emily’s story is one of struggle, terror, and pain—but it is also one of persistence. Readers come to see that lowered expectations of people who hear voices and have a diagnosis of psychosis are not always appropriate and may even be undermining. Despite mistakes, Emily continues to pick herself up, find avenues of recovery, and dedicate herself to playing the cello and to research on voice-hearing. In fact, I have permission to report here that Emily is a pseudonym for Roz Austin, who received her Ph.D. in 2017 from Durham University as a member of the ‘Hearing the Voice’ research project. Drawing on work in cultural and emotional geography, Dr. Austin’s survivor-researcher-led project investigates emotional aspects of the experience of hearing voices and demonstrates the significance of space and spatial metaphors in voice-hearers’ relationships with their voices.

Emily’s Voices is a poignant and ground-breaking memoir on the phenomenological experience of one voice-hearing person that plainly illustrates the fears, hopes, and strength it requires to face stigma and loneliness yet come out radiant. I was moved by reading this memoir and urge clinicians to read it and consider the limitations of the biomedical model and the successes of other treatment options for voice-hearers.


References


Corrigan, P. 2004. How stigma interferes with mental health care. American Psychologist: 614-625.

Thachuk, A. Stigma and the politics of biomedical models of mental illness. International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Special Issue: Feminist Perspectives on Ethics in Psychiatry, 4(1): 140-163.

Vilhauer, RP. 2017. Stigma and need for care in individuals who hear voices. Int. J. Soc Psychiatry, 63(1): 5-13.

Posted on JANUARY 19, 2018 by MDICLHUMANITIES

http://centreformedicalhumanities.org/emilys-voices-by-emily-knoll-reviewed-by-nancy-nyquist-potter/

Reality Check exhibition - Corridor 8 Review by Elisabetta Fabrizi

The NewBridge Project has expanded and set up a new home in Gateshead. Right in the High Street, The NewBridge Project : Gateshead houses a gallery, studio spaces for artists and The Collective Studio, a new ambitious graduate development programme created in collaboration with Newcastle University and the Institute of Creative Practice.

Reality Check, the inaugural exhibition, brings together works by eight early-career artists, resulting from The NewBridge Project’s 2016-2017 Graduate Programme in partnership with Newcastle University. In spotlighting the work of young artists the show acts as a statement of intent, in that it underlines the continuing core aim of The NewBridge Project to support emerging talent.

At opposite ends of the bright rectangular gallery space two works by Oliver Doe welcome and engage us in a conversation about the body. ‘Touch me as you need me’ (2017) consists of a framed assemblage of everyday yet very personal objects – a t-shirt, towel, trousers and a plastic bag. Under perspex, the familiar elements are squashed and trapped. Objectified, they become fossils of intimate moments that we can’t help but stare at and ponder about. At the other end of the gallery, Doe’s ‘and no sex or gender will still be the pleasure of love’ (2017) consists of two abstract sculptures: pale and almost transparent, they appear delicate and mysterious. One leans on the other, which in turn appears to recede. Despite the minimalism of the shapes, a questioning narrative concerning two bodies appears.

The body is also at the centre of Olivia Turner’s ‘Eyepiece’(2017). The two sets of four large sculptural elements (cut plywood sheets) that make the core of the work can only be read correctly (as hands holding a microscope) when viewed at a distance, but become abstract forms as we get closer. And yet, the screens embedded in the sculptures (two surgical videos) can only be viewed up close. In creating the conditions for the impossibility of finding a fixed viewing point to look at the installation, the artist creates an apt metaphor for the difficult relationship between the physical and the cerebral, the verbal and the non-verbal.

With the text work ‘Portion Control’ (2017) Helen Shaddock successfully uses stream-of-consciousness writing to give us access to her perception of being an artist. We read: ‘I’m embarrassed to admit I feel the need to prove… Exhibition opening. Everybody asking: what are you working on?’ Whatever shall one answer? Hope is not lost though and we find it in Emily Garvey’s animation, ‘When life gives you lemons’(2017). Here we follow the life adventures of a lemon learning that, as one of the pop songs of the soundtrack remind us, ‘turning bitter into sweet’, is possible after all.

Visiting The NewBridge Project: Gateshead brings back memories of when, over ten years ago, Workplace Gallery opened their first space nearby, in the now demolished Gateshead Car Park, with the intent of supporting young North East based artists. These two organisations share the crucial common goal of creating the conditions for artists not to feel isolated and for talent to prosper in the region. Their new close physical proximity is a welcome development and acts auspiciously for the future of The NewBridge Project.

Reality Check, The NewBridge Project : Gateshead, Gateshead.

14 October – 28 October 2017 (Wed-Sat 12-5pm)

Elisabetta Fabrizi is a curator and writer based in Newcastle upon Tyne and London.


http://corridor8.co.uk/article/newbridge-project-gateshead-reality-check/

Artists come from around the world to study in Newcastle - meet some of them here

The annual Master of Fine Art degree show has opened at Newcastle University and is full of surprises

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/artists-come-around-world-study-11775389

• BY DAVID WHETSTONE

Liying Zhao and Mehan Fernando preparing for the MFA Exhibition at Newcastle University

People cross continents to study for a masters degree in fine art at Newcastle Universityand for the next couple of weeks we can see what they get up to.

The MFA exhibition 2016 features the work of 13 artists who have a passion for art and could go on to great things.

I was lucky enough to get a guided tour before the official preview.

“Edible sculpture, fantastical beasts, illuminated mountains and a working film set” were promised. Who could resist?

My guide was Pipi Lovell-Smith from New Zealand who has just completed the first year of the two-year course (first and second year students are represented in the exhibition along with three PhD students).

Each student on the MFA course gets a studio in which to work and exhibit. This is an exhibition of mini exhibitions.

Pipi’s is called The Perilous Cliff and it features a video shot in the North East and Switzerland where she ventured earlier this year on a Bartlett Travel Scholarship.

“I got really bad vertigo the whole time,” explained Pipi who suffered for her art.

She said she had bought an album of photographs from an antique shop in New Zealand which appeared to chart an Englishman’s grand tour in the 1930s.

“I bought it years ago but I was keen to find the exact locations that he went to. He went to other places, France and Germany, but I decided to focus on one country.

“It took quite a long time and I was hiking through forests to find the exact spots. Some were easier to find because they have been tourist spots for a century but there was a glacier that no longer exists.”

Who was the mystery man? Pipi has a name but isn’t sure if his identity is the point of her interest. As she explained, the MFA course was a chance to explore.

“It’s a great opportunity to push yourself and try new things. I applied with my paintings but when I got here I started making films.”

Pipi worked in TV production before deciding to push her creativity in a different direction.

But why Newcastle University? “Because the art school has a really good reputation. Coming from a creative industry I was keen to make more of my own work and this course gives me time and space to explore ideas.”

Hannah Elizabeth Cooper with her paintings in the MFA Exhibition at Newcastle University

Hannah Elizabeth Cooper is a painter from Ohio whose exhibition of abstracts in oils is called Cope.

She came here for different reasons. “I’ve always had a taste for foreign culture and as I only speak English it would have to be an English-speaking country,” she said.

“I’m from a village of 3,000 people. I’m a small town girl and coming to a city, even one the size of Newcastle, is a big step for me.”

Hannah said she had enjoyed her first year. “The instructors are very helpful and want you to succeed.”

She had worked in the past with mixed media, notably glass and sawdust, but was currently using oils.

The paintings, she said, were a sort of coping mechanism and she saw them as having personalities. “That’s the obnoxious one,” she said. “It just didn’t want to cooperate.”

The paintings were “not supposed to be anything that you can recognise”. People would see in them what they wanted to see.

Hannah said: “A lot of the time I paint in the moment. Sometimes I’m confused by the colours I use. They come about in such a strange way.”

Jim Lloyd lives in Hexham and for 18 years has worked at the RVI in its nuclear medicine department, a branch of radiology.

“I’m a scientist by background but one of the things I’m interested in is how science and art interact,” he said.

He took the science route, taking a first degree in physics and then studying for an MSc in medical physics and a PhD.

But he is the son of a distinguished artist, RJ Lloyd, who was a friend of sculptor Henry Moore and also of Ted Hughes whose poems he illustrated.

“Probably I went into science because I could see what a precarious life it was but I’ve always had an interest in art and I’ve dabbled over the years.

“I started to take it more seriously in 2007 when I began studying for a BA with the Open College of the Arts.”

At 56 he is planning a change of direction.

His contribution to the MFA exhibition is We Have Never Been Modern, the title taken from a book by French philosopher Bruno Latour.

He has made a corridor entrance to his darkened studio with draped sheets bearing various painted marks, some mimicking the texture of the floor.

A video charts a mysterious journey, made more eerie by music and voices (actually those of late scientists David Bohm and Francesco Varela) heard through headphones.

Jim said the filmed journey was actually his daily commute from Hexham. There were “lots of different strands,” he said, adding that there were perhaps too many. It’s intriguing, though... and he’s learning.

Liying Zhao with one of her projections in the MFA Exhibition at Newcastle University

Liying Zhao, from China, deftly uses projections to wonderful effect in her show, Nameless Wild.

She said her initial idea had been to add nothing to a room containing just a sink, a radiator and a table. “I wanted to build up a zoo in this human space, this architectural environment.

“I wanted to pose a question to viewers about human activities and nature.”

The result is magical – a projected ‘flower’ of human hands on one wall and, apparently balancing on a tap, a little person with a hippo’s head fishing in the ceramic sink below.

There’s a projected tiger-headed woman watering real grasses arranged in the radiator.

“I like to keep my work in between the real and the imagined and I like to put my own narratives into the actual space,” said Zhao.

She considered engaging a model but then decided to pose as the animal creatures herself.

Coming to the end of her two years, Zhao is going home for the first time next month. “I’m so excited,” she said. She will go home and, I suspect, go far.

Other exhibitors are Anna MacRae, Harriet Sutcliffe, Michael Mulvihill, Yein Son, Bex Harvey, Helen Shaddock, Mirela Bistran, James Quin and Mehan Fernando.

The exhibition is on at Newcastle University fine art department until September 3 (closed Sundays) and admission is free. Find details at http://fineart.ncl.ac.uk/ma2016/

Knowing that I am in the process of writing my dissertation, (its working title is An exploration of play in contemporary art), I was sent a link to Adrian Searle's review of the Lygia Clark retrospective at MoMA in The Guardian

It mentions some of the things that are included in my dissertation such as the relationship between audience interaction/participation and play

Lygia Clark at MoMA review – playing cat's cradle at the edge of art

"The Brazilian artist, who died in 1988, was a complex figure, and her life and art followed a convoluted trajectory. It took her from being a painter and leading figure in the Brazilian neo-concretist movement, an offshoot of European constructivism, to becoming a maker of abstract sculptures that were as much propositions as fixed objects. These wonderful plays between the organic and the geometric, between form and formlessness eventually led her away from art altogether, and towards what she came to regard as a kind of therapy, in which objects took the place of speech and gesture.

At various points in the exhibition you can play with replicas of her Bichos (Creatures) which mimic how her larger sculptures were made. As you play with them these small hinged forms flip-flop and fold this way and that. They have a nice weight, and handling them feels a bit like doing card tricks. However, as you turn the articulated metal planes the results always have a jazzy, spiky sort of life. Unlike a card-sharp's sleight of hand, there are no wrong moves here. Putting her art in the hands of her audience, Clark allows us to play out their variations in unpredictable ways.

Other sculptures are more like architectural models for imaginary dwellings. Even when she worked with nothing more than matchboxes – open, closed, piled up, painted – she worked through their repertoire of possibilities. 

Gallery attendants are showing visitors the correct way to handle more of Clark's later objects: mirrored spectacles to be worn by two people; clear plastic envelopes containing water and shells, or air and ping-pong balls. Play doesn't always need to have a purpose. Yet there is something here that has a lot to do with sculpture, with touch, balance and physical coordination. A whole world seems to be here, caught between the density of the stone and the weightlessness of the bag.

Why not make cat's cradles and webs of knotted rubber bands, to get yourself into a tangle? Elsewhere children are gluing paper into Möbius strips, which they twist around their wrists, and manipulating flexible discs of industrial rubber that have been cut to resemble spirals of thick, black orange peel. This is sculpture you can drape over your shoulder, or which can flop over a plinth or hang on the wall like the sloughed skin of some bizarre cold-blooded creature. What curious and compelling forms they are.

Whether this sort of thing actually takes us from passive spectators to active participants is moot. But we do get a feeling that the artist is following the consequences of her work to its limit, and beyond. The limit, for Clark, and for this exhibition, is the abandonment of art altogether, in favour of collective activity and ritualised interactions. We are no longer in a world of spectators and artworks, but in a place where the object – a plastic bag or length of hose – becomes a therapeutic tool, with a function and a use, however obscure it may be."

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

To read the full review, visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/29/lygia-clark-review-art-moma-new-york

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Review in the Chronicle

Art made from seaweed and a dancing wardrobe feature in the postgraduate exhibition at Newcastle University

Digory Kirke by Paul Martin Hughes

A cyclist who studies manhole covers and a snorkler who swims with sharks helped to make a lively night livelier as Newcastle University’s Master of Fine Art exhibition opened to the public.

The absorbing work by students on the two-year postgraduate course is on show until early next month at the Hatton Gallery.

Alex Charrington’s exhibition of mixed media works on paper is the first you will see in the main gallery. All geometric shapes and muted colours, it glories in the name Sigils of the Staveley Warriors.

A Newcastle University fine art graduate who returned to do the MFA course, Alex is well established in the city with a base at Cobalt Studios in the Ouseburn Valley.

A ‘sigil’, he explained, is a magic symbol. This had come to mind when he whizzed over the drain covers made by a firm called Stanton & Staveley.

“They’ve got the word ‘warrior’ written on them but they also look like tribal patterns, possibly Aztec. I’ve been cycling over them for years. The geometry of them also reminds me of the modernist abstract artists such as Bridget Riley and Victor Pasmore – so you’ve got this artistic significance and this ethnographic significance.

“I thought they looked exotic, as if they’re from a lost world. For me they’re like little time warp things.”

They might also help Alex to his MFA degree.

Downstairs you will find Nigel Morgan’s installation involving a wooden construction and piles of rubble. It is called Hiraeth which is a Welsh word meaning a wistful longing for an imagined or unattainable landscape.

Into the Emptiness by Soonwon Hwang

Upstairs is Soonwon Hwang’s Into the Emptiness. “What do you think of as emptiness?” challenged the affable South Korean artist. Not quite like this, I replied... not as beautiful.

This, he explained, was the outer expression of what was inside his head. He added that it was ironic and that it had taken him two months to produce and hang the roughly 20,000 skeletal leaves that make up the fagile installation.

From leaves to feathers describes the journey from Soonwon Hwang’s installation to Sarah Dunn’s.

Between Fear and Mother Love is a room full of bird-related objects including a Reader’s Digest bird book which I used to love when I was a child.

People were carefully picking their way around books and other artfully arranged objects.Along one wall a sequence of enlarged images shows the development of a chick inside an egg.

Digory Kirke, a kinetic sculpture by Paul Martin Hughes, is a jolly but noisy affair, a mechanically-driven dancing wardrobe inspired by an investigation of the childhood imagination.

Narnia fans will know that Digory Kirke owns the house (and the wardrobe) in CS Lewis’s novel The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe which provides entry into the magical kingdon for Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy.

Yein Son’s work takes up a couple of linked studios. Chasing the Light is a large work taking up one entire wall and comprising a white board studded with nails linked by silver string.

Nocture 3.12 conists of hanging fabrics inked over in shades of grey.

“My work is the trace left by my responses, experimental yet respectful, to this space in this time in this place,” she explains.

“Chasing the Light is like a race for drawing the shapes and lines of the light coming through the windows into the space every moment in a day. I chase and tracing the silver lining of the sunlight.”

Of Nocturne 3.12 she says: “Every night after work, the nocturnal air inspires. In this city of wind and clouds, the sky is creating different textures and changing quickly each time.

“With this, I am expanding the energy of the nature of painting through my improvising gestures by using ink marks and experiments within painting.”

Climb another flight of stairs and you will find A Yellow Tongue by Sofija Sutton, from New Hampshire, who explained that she was going to move to New York with her sister but then chose to come to Newcastle “for an adventure”.

In her studio you will find writing on the floor, writing hanging from the ceiling, various colours and dividing lines and a set of headphones through which you will hear a good deal of shouting and yelling.

“It’s my father and sister,” explained the artist with a smile. “I had tried to do screaming sounds but they laughed at them because they were too high-pitched. I challenged them to do better and so they did.”

Sofija said the text-based installation is a 3D short story collection with the painted lines delineating the boundaries between them. It is also an exploration of mental health using therapy-based language and the fruits of her own self-analysis.

As much writer as artist, Sofija said she had been snorkling with basking sharks off Oban in Scotland in preparation for her next collaborative project. “They have small brains but huge mouths and it’s quite something when they swim right at you, turning away only at the last second.”

If you sense a vaguely fishy smell in Helen Shaddock’s studio, it’s nothing to do with sharks. One of her exhibited works is a wall hanging comprising squares of printed seaweed. It’s far from unpleasant. There are also screenprints on tissue paper and a piece called Strut Your Stuff made from lotus leaves, pegs and an aluminium rod.

As I was about to leave I was introduced to Chinese artist Liying Zhao who came to Newcastle from one of China’s most modern and dynamic cities, Shenzhen.

Walking in the Paradox by Liying Zhao

She said: “I got an offer from London too but I chose Newcastle because the group is very small here so you get more turtorials one-to-one. It was a good decision.”

A thoughtful student, she said she was struggling to find what medium interested her most. She had played around with different materials but settled on video installation.

“I also like to perform and to have a personal narrative in my work,” she said.

In the end she had allowed her allotted gallery space to dictate the terms of her exhibition, Walking in the Paradox, and had four days to install everything.

Film of a musician is projected onto a wall through a gauze, a girl with needle and thread seems to be repairing a curtain hanging over a doorway and there is a tiny image of the artist herself, dancing.

Prof Richard Talbot, head of fine art, said: “The MFA exhibition at Newcastle University is always an exciting melting pot of ideas.

“The two year course gives these artists the opportunity to explore their thinking and develop and hone their practice.

“Having the setting of the Hatton Gallery in which to show their work gives them a fantastic springboard to launch their careers as professional contemporary artists.”

The exhibition is open to everyone until September 5, Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm.Admission is free.




Review written by David Whetstone

Published 25th August 2015

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/arts-culture-news/art-made-seaweed-dancing-wardrobe-9921479

Review of 'Studio Project' exhibition written by Kat Hayes and published by DEADBIRD Review

http://deadbirdreview.com/helen-shaddock-breaking-mould/#more-2016

Helen Shaddock – Breaking The Mould

Artwork by Helen Shaddock, a Glasgow-based maker refusing to be categorised.
Review by Kat Hayes

Links – Helen Shaddock / Glasgow International Artists Bookfair

“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject-matter; an art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.”

Henri Matisse, Paris, 1908

Helen Shaddock’s work on first encounter is, rather thrillingly what I’d imagine it’d be like to wander into a (admittedly oversized) child’s playpen. Solid blocks of colourful abstracted shapes are dotted around like beautiful building bricks strewn around by the errant hands of a toddler.

 

Shaddock’s work seeks an immediate familiarity with the audience through its playful simplicity. Each piece has a tactile quality, from the bright colour scheme to the rounded and squared off geometric form. The bright colours do as much to suggest childhood toys and games as do the shapes.

Stemming from both a curiosity and attraction to colour, stripes, and patterns, both natural and man-made, the work is pitched in an ambiguous area between painting and the three-dimensional. Layers of colour are used to create sculptural forms via an intricate casting process.

Shaddock’s motivations include the desire to blur the boundaries between 2D and 3D and to reject the “human need to organise and categorise”. She does this by producing work that defies this categorisation; it is neither what one would necessarily consider painting, nor is it purely sculpture.

Shaddock’s intention is to force us to question how necessary it is to classify, in the artist’s words, “sculpture as sculpture or painting as paintings”.  This rejection of formal boundaries allows the work to escape the ties of a particular medium, which Shaddock says she finds ‘unoriginal’, especially in the context of galleries that link unrelated work together via medium alone. This rejection of traditional values makes it difficult to pigeonhole her practice as either sculptor or painter. Shaddock clearly finds a lack of classification liberating:

“[I enjoy] not being restricted to one medium as working in a variety of media as gives me the flexibility to realise different ideas in different ways. I feel that it keeps my work evolving as I am not tied to one way of doing things.”

Interestingly, despite Shaddock’s rejection of over-simplified classification, she regards her work  as ‘an enquiry into order and chaos’. Put simply, it can be seen a metaphor for the world in which we live, where one can so easily be overwhelmed by the mass of information that bombards us on a daily basis.

Her interest lies in the way that the mind processes this mass of data into a semblance of order. The playful lines of colour could be said to represent Shaddock’s “desire to focus on the positive aspects of life, remain optimistic about the future, and remind others of the joy that the simplest of things can bring”.

Method

The physical process involved in the making of Shaddock’s pieces is a laborious task: methodically preparing the shaped moulds; making them waterproof; mixing unique (non-factory) colours in the plaster pigment; adding the polymer. It is ritualistic and points towards a preoccupation with process. Regarding her cone-like structures, the preparation is not where the process stops, as the mould needs to be constantly shifted to allow the plaster to cover the entirety in layers of distinct colours. This then needs to be repeated for subsequent colours, which can be numerous.

Despite this methodical preparation, the artist states that she “fully embraces the uncontrollable outcomes” of this highly structured casting process: “I try not to control the pouring of the plaster too much. I like the unexpected elements [of each piece]; the dripping, the merging of colours and the splashes”. She admits that, when working on multiple casts, she often loses track of the order of colours that have been used in each mould.  However, this is a consequence she enjoys, as it creates an air of excitement when the mould is opened and the colours emerge.

Shaddock’s work is playful and touches upon a great swathe of styles and influences. Look once and you see familiar but abstracted shapes common in modernist architecture (see the lately refurbished cubed colour scheme of Park Hill in Sheffield or the bold aesthetics of the Golden Lane Estate in London). Equally, you could look again, and see echoes of Kitsch, Pop Art and perhaps a whisper of Vorticism.

Background

Helen Shaddock graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2008 and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Her work is in a number of public and private collections.

She  was selected for a residency at Market Gallery, Glasgow in March 2013, which culminated in Studio Project, a solo exhibition of selected work produced during the residency. Other solo exhibitions include Strength in numbers at The Briggait, Glasgow (2011); Coloured Matter, Here Gally, Bristol (2011); Schema, Che Camille, Glasgow (2010). She currently has a solo exhibition titled  Groovings, at Motherwell Theatre and Concert Hall (until October 30th 2013).

Helen is also a co-founder of Glasgow International Artists’ Bookfair.