Juliet Fleming exhibits at The House of Blah Blah

It all began with an article. An article targeted at Juliet; one of those that pop up on the screen as recommended reading in response to browsing history. The article in question, 'How a 3D clitoris will help teach French schoolchildren about sex', prompted Juliet to investigate this part of the female anatomy that she, and it turns out, many others, were relatively uninformed about. Why is it that we are so familiar with depictions of male genitalia in all its states but so ill-informed of the clitoris? 

Juliet Fleming has set out to address this in her current exhibition, Something Coquettish at The House of Blah Blah in Middlesbrough. But please do not panic; this is not a sex education class, it is an investigation into female sexuality, domesticity and pleasure. 

Just as Fleming acknowledges that these topics have historically been ignored, she merges traditional techniques such as sewing with modern technologies such as digital printing.

On entering the gallery (a large, multifunctional and fairly nondescript space with exception to the tiled floor showing evidence of previous artistic intervention) the viewer gets a general overview of the entire show.



A couple of metal frames that were originally intended to be used as structures for temporary studio walls have been reappropriated and now function as reclining supports over which digitally printed wallpaper is draped. 

A third metal structure stands tall acting as a support over which another sheet of clitoris-decorated wallpaper is hung.



Towards the back of the gallery the viewer can see hand crafted ceramic vessels and dishes displayed on the wall and arranged on shelves rather like one may find in the home of someone from the elder generations. One of the recurring motifs in the exhibition is painted in gold directly onto the corner walls at the back.

Numerous unique objects described as plush toys, are scattered over the gallery floor.



At this stage I must reassure you that this is not a gallery in disguise as some form of sex shop, or erotic boudoir.

I want to address the 'plush toys'. Rather than viewing these items as toys, objects giving one pleasure from the act of playing with them, I regard them as soft furnishings. In this case they are clitoris-shaped stuffed cushions that are made from fabric that has been adorned with clitoris designs. 

Throughout the exhibition there are two clitoris icons that reappear. Fleming explained to me that one of these is the anatomical depiction of a clitoris, and the other is a shape that she has adapted as she worked with the previous image.

Using modern image transferring processes, the aforementioned icons have been applied to the surface of the ceramic objects and feature on the patterned paper and the cushions. It is the clay sculptures that I remember from Juliet's previous work when she was based at Newcastle University. Not surprisingly given the problems of making work of this kind; dependent on the use of a kiln, requiring large amounts of space to make and then store, she has adapted her practice so as to concentrate on smaller ceramic items that have a more direct relationship to the home.

When talking to Juliet about the exhibition, I was struck by all the things that she wants to address within the work. It could be quite easy for the exhibition to have felt weighed down by all these issues, but this is not the case. Suggestions are made and references alluded to, providing a starting point for discussion.

What better opportunity for this than by attending the following event on Thursday evening:

Something Coquettish: Closing Party & A Clitoral Conversation

Thursday 28th September 2017
6 - 9pm

Event description

6 - 7 pm Open discussion held in Something Coquettish Exhibition looking into themes of feminism, the digital age, sexual autonomy, gender and stereotyping.

7 - 9 pm Closing Party for Something Coquettish

http://thehouseofblahblah.com/

https://www.facebook.com/events/1569446566469566/?

Gallery visit to Middlesbrough

My trip to Middlesbrough began with Something Coquettish, a solo exhibition by Juliet Fleming at House of Blah Blah, an independent, artist-led gallery, studio complex and project space. House of Blah Blah has a strong emphasis on supporting and developing underground and emerging artists from the region. I'll do a blog post specifically about this exhibition soon.



I then made my way to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), which is known as a 'useful' museum, a civic institution that promotes art as a tool for social change. Its programme integrates exhibitions and collection displays with learning activities, off-site projects, commissions and community-focused initiatives.

"We wish to have an influence on society, taking a leading role in addressing current issues within politics, economics and culture, and contributing to change. Our programmes encompass themes such as housing, migration, inequality, regeneration, and healthcare."

The tall walls are put to good use in the Kellenberger-White Print Room. Kellenberger-White is redesigning the institution’s brand throughout 2017. The project includes exhibitions featuring archival materials, samples of their own productions, and printed matter drawn from workshops and consultation sessions. The exhibition consisted of a workstation—a printing machine and a digital interface—that visitors could use to create posters expressing their views on Middlesbrough, art, society, and what a museum should be. The posters are being displayed in the gallery on a rotating basis.

http://www.visitmima.com/landing/



The final destination on my visit to Middlesbrough was Platform A located in the railway station of central Middlesbrough. Founded as an extension to Platform Art Studios in 2011, Platform A is a gallery dedicated to innovative developments in contemporary art through its diverse programme of exhibitions. Platform A represents emerging and established artists.

The current exhibition, My Paths Are My Ideas of Imagination is by one of the associate artists, Rachel Clewlow. See my separate blog post for more information about this exhibition.



I had previously arranged to meet Tony Charles, the Director of the gallery to see the exhibition outside of the gallery opening hours. Not only did he do this, he gave us a wonderful tour of the studios attached to the gallery and the workshop facilities that studio holders have access to. He is one of the artists represented by Platform A, and has a studio at Platform Art Studios attached to the gallery. We were fortunate enough to be shown his work which involves the investigation into the relationship between sculpture and painting. Working on aluminium, he paints onto the surface and then uses a grinder to remove some of the surface. He then applies a layer of resin to give an incredible sense of depth and retain the vibrancy of the colours. As the viewer walks around the work, the light reflects different areas of the scratched surface, creating a moving drawing.

For more information about Tony's work visit http://www.platformagallery.net/artists/tony-charles/

Thanks Tony for a wonderful insight into the gallery and studios. It was a great way to end my Middlesbrough gallery tour.

Rachel Clewlow at Platform A

The current exhibition, My Paths Are My Ideas of Imagination at Platform A is by one of the associate artists, Rachel Clewlow.



It consists of a number of beautifully executed paintings and drawings relating to walks made by Clewlow. Employing tactics used by cartologists, she transforms raw data gathered from her experiences and transforms this into colourful charts, maps and patterns that are in themselves a new form of landscape.



"Through painting and printmaking Rachael Clewlow has created a visual language that reflects an obsessive attention to detail and a desire to map out her own experiences of the world. In an ongoing series of diaries begun in 2003, she creates rigorous and detailed recordings of her every day movements. Planned abstract journeys taken to explore selected cities and regions sit alongside the mundane routes she takes from A to B. This record becomes a highly personal form of trace and a rich source of data from which Clewlow begins to construct paintings and prints. Drawing from elements of the language of infographics and of cartography, these works also demonstrate an obsession with colour and the formal concerns of abstract painting.



Over the past 18 months she has created a large body of new work for her first solo exhibition. A series of paintings presented in groups, focus on a set of pre-defined walks around Newcastle, London and Rochdale. Each walk represents a performative journey made to explore place through the demands of the related paintings. In the case of this group of works, it is the scale and proportion of the paintings, themselves derived from OS maps, which influences the nature and duration of the walks. Clewlow is bound to 'complete' the walks, a slave to her own rules, composing with her feet and discovering chance like paths through this quasi-intuitive process.



A group of walks in London saw her attempt to find routes across the city created by the 13 protected vistas of St Paul's Cathedral and other monuments. In Protected Views, 69.78 Miles Walked, London (2017), architectural planning restrictions provide Clewlow with a hidden visual structure, which she seeks to make real through the process of walking the streets it traverses below. As with each group of works, a 'Map' and several 'Keys' are the manifestation of this performed experience, charting these new routes as images whilst also speaking of an unknowable, sublime landscape.

Longitudinal Geometry, 129.53 Miles Walked, Newcastle (2016) charts seven days walking north to south across an OS sheet map. By playfully and absurdly sticking as closely as possible to lines of longitude, she invites us to consider the nature of theoretical systems of measure and mapping. The meandering lines of circles in her own map chart the physical meeting of our real world roads, routes and rivers with the cold authority of the OS National Grid. Realised in complementary colours, these delicate forms dance across the surface of one painting, each one a waypoint, a moment of lived experience and a data point in a grander scheme.



Her most recently completed group of four paintings explores the industrial heritage of the area around Rochdale. Man Made Waterways, 91.9 Miles Walked, Rochdale (2017) saw her crossing the Pennine Hills over five days to join a large group of reservoirs, canals and waterways. Here, Clewlow is interested in establishing a new route that honours these critical historic monuments at the heart of the regions growth. For the first time in these works, Clewlow introduces a system of symbols and forms that organises every moment, thing and place she records into her own taxonomy. These paintings offer a visual codification of Clewlow's exterior and interior observations during the process of 'collecting' these unassuming local landmarks. Together with her other recent work, these works provide us with a new way of imagining the ordinary and overlooked as parts in a rich constellation of interconnected moments – new landscapes of colour, form and imagination."

Nick Kennedy



For me, it is the hand-drawn and human elements that elevate the work from being a translation of information into another realm. Clewlow's work gives me great pleasure and the more time I spend with it, the more I am drawn into the detail and notice new things. The process behind the work adds weight to what simply are stunningly beautiful creations.

The exhibition runs until 5th October

http://www.platformagallery.net/shows/my-paths-are-my-ideas-of-imagination/

Multiple animation screens

I am working on some stop motion animations at the moment, and thinking that they could be exhibited on multiple screens as they have a dialogue with each other.

A friend alerted me to the multiple screens used to a similar effect during the Mercury Music Awards this year.

Tick Box Art on BBC Radio 4

Is it possible, or desirable, to measure the quality of an artwork?

In a world of shrinking resources, the question of how we decide which art should receive finance is ever more pressing. Rosemary Laryea asksif, when putting money into good quality art is the goal, it's possible to set criteria to judge what makes "good art".

Rosemary talks to members of the public looking at - and arguing about - artwork, and discusses questions of artistic taste and judgement. She also hears from the jazz musician and rap artist Soweto Kinch, playwright Simon Stephens and filmmaker Destiny Ekaragha. Tiffany Jenkins makes the case for critics and Barry Smith, a philosopher of the senses, and the art critic Lynda Neade explore the idea of taste, subjective pleasure and expertise.

Arts Council England has trialled a method of measuring quality in the art it funds, called Quality Metrics. Audiences, artists and arts organisations are invited to assess artworks - exhibitions, dance pieces, digital art, poetry, theatre, music events and more - across a range of criteria, and become part of a conversation about what constitutes quality. Rosemary wonders whether this might be a way of finally answering the question of how we know something is good, while Dr Sarah Garfinkel shows that it might be our hearts, or rather our heartbeats, that hold the clue to understanding and mapping our aesthetic response.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0938p7s

Latest paper by Hearing the Voice - how voice-hearers can detect speech in unusual sounds

Hearing the Voice collaborated with Sophie Scott’s Speech Communication lab at UCL on a study investigating distinct processing of ambiguous speech in people with non-clinical auditory verbal hallucinations.

The study involved a group of people who regularly hear voices but do not find them distressing. The results showed that voice-hearers were quicker than control participants (with no experience of voice-hearing) at detecting hidden sentences in some ambiguous sounds known as sine-wave speech. Usually sine-wave speech requires training to be understood, but the study demonstrated that 75% of the voice-hearers could detect the hidden speech, even before being told to listen out for it. Voice hearers also appeared to recruit different brain areas, specifically when they listened to the sounds containing hidden speech.

To read the full paper please visit the link below

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/doi/10.1093/brain/awx206/4085330/Distinct-processing-of-ambiguous-speech-in-people