Skimmer

Brass Skimmer

Rice Paper

This is probably the most minimal artwork that I've ever made. I saw the skimmer in an Asian supermarket and felt an urge to buy one and admire its beauty. I had also picked up some rice paper, and so cut it into strips and soaked them in water prior to then laying them over the dome of the skimmer, ensuring that they neatly cover the surface. When it was dry I carefully removed the cast from the mould. I hung the skimmer on wall and then balanced the rice paper on the wire skimmer part. Over time the rice paper moulded itself around the skimmer, and as it dried out it began to crack.

Here it is in stages

Some thoughts on my first year of the MFA

Yesterday I took down my exhibition and continued to sort out my studio space. As I look at all of the things I have in my studio, I realise how much work I made over the past year, and the wealth of materials that I have collected. I'm trying my best to reduce the amount of things I keep in my studio so as not to clutter it, but it is challenging given that I work in such a varied way and make use of lots of materials, both found and made. I often have materials in my studio for a while before I decide what I am going to use them for. It is almost like I am getting to know them and try to understand their properties before I make use of them.

Going through my year's work also made me realise how much I have embraced the course and really challenged myself, and I feel as though my work has moved in a different direction, and into the a place of possibilities. I have grappled with the notion of play and playfulness. I started out thinking that in order for artwork to be playful, it had to be fun and look cheery. I now realise that this is not the kind of work I want to make as it often appears childish and is very literal. What interests me much more is how artists can be playful in their approach and process. These ideas are going to be explored further in my dissertation.

My work started out brightly coloured and made of art materials such as plaster. Over time I begun to move away from what had become a somewhat familiar way of working, into the unknown. I introduced found materials, and begun to use materials not usually associated with art such as jelly. This made the work less predictable. Who knows where my work will be in another year?!

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Mirela Bistram

Mirela Bistran

is a Romanian artist living in the UK.

In her “

Unfolded Dowry

” she explores the cultural significance of objects

.

The imagined space of the installation is a layerin

g of references alluding to

Romanian cultural heritage and veiling Bistran’s ow

n memories.

In seeming together old and new fabrics - hand fini

shed and machine fabricated –

the past and the present, the real and the artifici

al combine.

The installation is a journey out of time, it is ab

out past traditions – though traditions

which have become increasingly alien – and it is th

rough memory: but it is a memory

re-imagined, remembered and manufactured.

Mirela Bistran is a Romanian artist living in the UK.

In her “Unfolded Dowry” she explores the cultural significance of objects.

The imagined space of the installation is a layering of references alluding to Romanian cultural heritage and veiling Bistran’s own memories.

In seeming together old and new fabrics - hand finished and machine fabricated – the past and the present, the real and the artificial combine.

Mirela Bistran

is a Romanian artist living in the UK.

In her “

Unfolded Dowry

” she explores the cultural significance of objects

.

The imagined space of the installation is a layerin

g of references alluding to

Romanian cultural heritage and veiling Bistran’s ow

n memories.

In seeming together old and new fabrics - hand fini

shed and machine fabricated –

the past and the present, the real and the artifici

al combine.

The installation is a journey out of time, it is ab

out past traditions – though traditions

which have become increasingly alien – and it is th

rough memory: but it is a memory

re-imagined, remembered and manufactured.

The installation is a journey out of time, it is about past traditions – though traditions which have become increasingly alien – and it is through memory: but it is a memory re-imagined, remembered and manufactured.

http://www.mirelabistran.blogspot.co.uk

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Sofija Sutton

Sofija Sutton has created a large installation utilizing the room’s architecture to construct an oversized diagram linking multiple short stories. 

"Text, audio, space, and video unite through flash fiction to express various notions of ‘low mood’ and, in contrast, combatant methods. Ticks consuming bus passengers, dawn and dusk as lovers, a bear with a yellow tongue, a woman bleaching her hair, and other fantasies each use absurdities with the mundane as metaphors for mental health shortcomings. "

Sutton writes "I hope my work will compel the viewer to physically interact with the mind map, so that the story points may thread together a work that is both thought-provoking and entertaining."

http://www.srlsutton.com

Newcastle University MFA Summer Exhibition 2015 - Nigel Morgan - Hiraeth

"In Welsh the word hiraeth offers a way into understanding our yearning for the elusive something that nature and landscape means to us; analogous to an unattainable longing for a place, or perhaps a person, the language of landscape becomes metaphoric to an emotional language of the soul. The language of landscape is a language of loss, of distance, of longing, and the more we try to define it the less clear it becomes."

"Landscape is made and it is the mediator by which nature has been perceived as something other. This continues to be a cultural problem:the measurement and technological representation of landscape reinforces an anxiety over our distancing from nature; however now, in the Anthropocene, everything is landscape and landscape can re-connect us to nature, it is a real material connection."

"This work is an attempt to understand this longing, through the use of nature, the matter of landscape."

Being Landscape: The Landscape is a creation of and by ourselves and our imagination. It is ‘the peculiar moment of being present to perception [the] ‘matter of experience’… the materiality of what is otherwise an ephemeral and contingent snatch of lived experience.’ J. J. Marshall, p202, Landscape Theory. 2008.

Newcastle University MFA Summer Exhibition 2015 - Sarah Dunn

Sarah Dunn is an artist whose practice focuses very clearly upon the observation and consideration of her immediate cultural and natural landscape. Through a process of careful documentation and patient archiving a catalogue of elements is built, within this, its many indexes may now evolve and shift. This ‘catalogue’ may be regarded as an accumulation of stimuli, one in which objects transmute sensibilities; buildings become new habitats, patterns become language and books become birds.

The work uses drawing and writing to begin, it is sculptural, sensitive to changes, personal, social, political, but firmly rooted in the traditions of form, craft and observational relationships.

In Between Fear and Mother Love is an entry into the index of observation. It uses the three totemic birds, the Bittern, the Woodcock and the Nightjar as symbolic chapter headings into which the objects, textiles and elements within the work are placed. These objects carry more than the sum of their parts. However, The canny observer will also find memories, emotions and experiences. The library of these birds is an echo chamber, a place of responses.

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Paul Martin Hughes

"My current work explores the interactive qualities of kinetic sculpture. I am interested in creating a direct interactive response that is individual, rather than generic, exploring themes surrounding childhood fantasy and the limits of an imagination long since lost to adulthood.My work relies heavily on pre-existing relationships with objects associated from my own and the viewers past. Writing fictional stories combined with pictorial narratives and producing simple CAD designs, my studio work has evolved to focus on precise draughtsmanship and experiments with new media and technology." 
Paul Martin Hughes

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Soonwon Hwang

Leaves, thread, light installation

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Liying Zhao

Liying's exhibition features three projections that explore the notion of the in-between. She states, "I am interested in creating ambiguous visual effects with multi-media." 

"My current work tends to explore the grey space which is ‘there or not there’, ‘real or imagined’, ‘moving or still’, ‘visible or invisible’, ‘at the present or in the past/future’."

"In this overlap, a part is tangible and can be touched and the other part could only be imaged or felt. In other words, my work is questioning how to visualize the overlap which is ‘inhabiting’ or interacting in a paradox."

Newcastle University MFA 2015 Summer Exhibition - Ute Kirkwood

Ute works with a variety of media including drawing, painting, printmaking and video. Her work deals with issues of women and mental health. This year she became a mother for the first time, and her recent work tracks the journey through pregnancy to motherhood. 

abyss, cavity, chasm, emptiness, gap, gulf, hiatus, hole, hollow, hollowness, interstice, interval, lacuna, nihility, nothingness, nullity, omission , opening, preterition, pretermission, abyss, cavity, chasm, emptiness, gap, gulf, hiatus, hole, hollow, hollowness, interstice, interval, lacuna, nihility, nothingness, nullity, omission , opening, preterition, pretermission, skip, tabula rasa, vacancy, vacuity, vacuum, void, wombskip, tabula rasa, vacancy, vacuity, vacuum, void, wom

For more information please visit

http://www.utekirkwood.com

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