Kieran Dodds is a photographer specialising in long-form essays.
Dodds' work crosses the pictorial genres of landscape, portrait and still life in the realist tradition. Trained as a photojournalist the images seek understand of specific contemporary issues which connects to deeper themes in his wider body of reportage- the beauty of the world and the suffering that pervades it.
The work was funded by a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship and undertaken over two months in China's Qinghai province during 2012. His photography has won national and international awards from the World Press Photo and UK& Ireland picture editor's guild with publication in the New York Times, National Geographic and Geo (Germany) among others.
This most recent work 'Displaced' is taken from the series ‘Third Pole’. Employing a landscape approach to the subject of human incident during economic and social upheaval, the photographs document China’s highland clearances of modern Tibetan nomads. The works considers how cultural identity rooted in the environment is reshaped by the necessity of nomadic resettlement.
MakeMatter is Glasgow-based designer and DOJ Graduate Ed Watt's response to socially engaged design practice, matching creative projects with social action.
The launch project Window Shopping is a response to the growing issue of food poverty. Across the UK there are increasing numbers of families and individuals who can't afford even basic goods and who are struggling with rising costs and low income. The prints will raise awareness and funds to support local food banks, who are bringing hope to people in desperate need.
Ed is a creative director at O Street, Glasgow where he has worked on visual identities for the National Galleries of Scotland and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, amongst others.
by Claire Briegel, Sam Jack and Deirdre Robertson.
25 April - 19 May 2013 Show concludes with Artists' Talk at The McManus Gallery, Albert Square, DD1 1DA Sunday 19 May. 2.00pm - 3.30pm.
"The social & political reformer has always to state and re-state his ideas, long before he forms that resolute minority, which by restating these ideas more widely still - persuades a sufficient majority to [adopt] them". - Patrick Geddes
"Openings" is a collaboration of 3 artists all studying the MFA at DJCAD and all interested in the process of social change.
Sam Jack's work often takes the perspective of political activist. Her window celebrates both Dundee's waterfront future and jute past using both digital technology and traditional textile processes.
Claire Briegel's project will explore organisational and social openings throughout the duration of the exhibition, weaving together research and documentation as it develops towards a 'final' presentation.
Deirdre Robertson is working to open up the tunnel that goes through the Law Hill and is reopening dialogue about the nearly forgotten strange Dundee tradition of dressing herrings.
The theme of "Openings" is explored by all 3 artists within the local Dundee context - of both the physical spaces that may occupy our futures and the planned and unexpected relationships with others that are formed along the way.
(Poster background image credit - www.regularjane.deviantart.com)
In The Eye Of The Needle
Louise Ritchie SSA
An artist works through many processes and experimental pathways that lead to both discoveries and creative cul-de-sacs. This sometimes tangential exploration asks questions of what you do, why you do it and who you are as an artist and person. Most of us are multi faceted with contrary fascinations that in my case compel me to sweep broadly and loosely with abandon... paint soaked brush in one hand and at the same time shrink the gesture down to a controlled needle point on the other.
The creative obsession is in the eye of the beholder and at the core of what makes an artist scratch the artistic itch. In embracing those polar extremes of my compulsive desire to make a mark, the work that forms In The Eye of The Needle allows me to compose the image using the smallest of points or dots that react to and work within selected images or reproductions that have struck a chord in some way. Pouncing, as a method of transferring a drawing or tracing onto another surface using pin prick dots, was used historically during the creation of frescos and by old masters such as Holbein and Tintoretto. The pounce would once have been fine powder or charcoal dabbed through the tracing onto the surface underneath to leave a delicate drawing, but my puncture marks use light to reveal the drawing, transferring my response to the reproduction and subverting or erasing the original image into a palimpsest of something curious and other.
Louise Ritchie SSA, Biography
Louise Ritchie is a visual artist + creative facilitator and graduate of DJCAD. Louise is currently Artist in Residence with Angus Council and has completed public art commissions for Dundee City Council, Angus Council and been commissioned to participate in School Design /Creative Engagement Programmes by Ginkgo Projects and Angus Council. Louise is a lecturer on the BA (Hons) Contemporary Arts Practice Programme UWS/City of Glasgow College and is one of two co founders of research + participatory artists network TRiGGER, funded by ArtWorks Scotland/ Paul Hamlyn Foundation/Creative Scotland. Louise is President of the Society of Scottish Artists, one of the oldest exhibiting societies in the UK showcasing the work of The Impressionists, The Scottish Colourists, Picasso, Degas through to Bruce Mclean and Douglas Gordon and was the first ever organisation to bring the work of Edvard Munch to this country in 1931. She has won several major awards and has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad including exhibitions in London, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Spain. Louise has work in several major collections including The Mirror Group, London, Dundee City Council and Fife Regional Arts. Louise was invited to participate as a performer within installation 'Killing Time', a collaboration between artist Graham Fagen and Suspect Culture`s Graham Eatough at Dundee Contemporary Arts (2006) and as the vocal coach and one of the voices for Speaking The Land for Dalziel + Scullion (2009).
Robert Orchardson is an artist based in London. He graduated from DJCAD in 1998 and Goldsmiths College, London in 2004. Orchardson’s work draws upon sources from modernist architecture and futuristic design, to utopian texts, stage sets or details from science fiction films. These appropriated fragments frequently reflect a sense of aspiration offset by failure as they attempt to give form to that which is inherently intangible. Orchardson’s work allows this cultural flotsam to surface and collectively become something new; disparate elements working together to explore a tension between our immediate situation and that which is unknown.
For Nomas* projects Orchardson has created a work applied directly to glass. Highly coloured imagery based on details of crystalline forms is reproduced in Cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The suggestion is that the imagery is in the process of being printed through a colour separation process, though the “final” product is missing. As such the imagery takes on a provisional quality.
The work emerges in response to a book called The Grey Cloth by Paul Scheerbart. In the novel, the architect travels the world producing outlandish modern glass buildings in a dazzling array of bright colours. To his annoyance, people occasionally stray into his buildings and invariably the colour of their clothing clashes with the vibrant hues of the architecture. The perfection of the transcendent, modernist experience he proposes is interrupted by the frustrating taste of those for whom the buildings are designed.
Orchardson’s work offers a possible solution to the architect’s dilemma - like architectural models, perhaps these are works in progress. Carriers for an idea where utility has been postponed.
Previous exhibitions by Orchardson include Endless Façade, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Six possibilities for a sculpture, La Loge, Brussels; Edge of the Superstructure, Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin, Perfect Vacuum, Wilkinson Gallery, London, The Associates, Dundee Contemporary Arts; Let Me Show You Some Things, CCA, Glasgow.
Marrow of forms
This installation of paintings by Steven Anderson (stevenanderson.info) is part of an ongoing series whereby each painted canvas is reduced to predefined minimal means.
Looking like an x-ray of a canvas or the back of a painting, they are worked-objects as much as paintings.
Through a process of painting on, then wiping off black oil paint from a clear primed linen ground, the work reveals the texture of the cloth and the structure of the wooden stretcher frame. Process and repetition are fundamental features of this body of work. In a performative sense the activity of ‘doing’ the work is the subject of the paintings. The paintings perform the activity of their own making.
A key reference for this work is the value found in things imperfect and incomplete within the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. The beauty of an object in the process of becoming or else disintegrating indicates the transforming independence of each painting within the extended timeframe of it existing.
The opposite of a colour, as it doesn’t reflect light, the black pigment in these paintings is not an image-making medium. Instead the black is treated as material substance as is the linen fibres and the wood of the support.
To layer on and wipe away black is allegorical for something and nothing, light and darkness, life and death, crudeness and beauty. An aim of these paintings is for the polarities to exist together as a singular reserved presence; tonally balanced by what is left behind.
The title for the installation is quoted from Federico Garcia Lorca who said of the famous Flamenco singer La Niña de los Peines, “she had an exquisite audience, one which demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music, with a body lean enough to stay in the air.”
Steven Anderson lives in Glasgow. Having graduated from painting at GSA in 1997 and an MFA at DJCAD in 2008, Anderson also makes performances, which present unaccompanied vocals, audience participation and artifacts alongside each other. Previous shows include Beyond Here Lies North at the Arbuthnot Museum in Peterhead, Your Leaning Neck at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh and Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen, Fix at Catalyst Arts, Belfast and as part of Instal'10 at Tramway, Glasgow.
Anderson is currently art project coordinator at The Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice, and was recently a visiting artist and temporary lecturer for the Contemporary Performance Practice department at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
Map to Roseangle Cafe Arts Venue (for talk)
The inspiration for Lucinda's work comes both from the built environment and travel brochures; the mundanity of the modern office block or images which provoke wonder and longing, of tropical idylls in the pages of Winter Sun. Her paintings confront the viewer with a picture of Paradise, whilst also suggesting a frustration with this. The skies often appear more like wallpaper than wide-open spaces. They promise, yet fail to deliver. Her paintings suggest a kind of futility to our longings and dreams, whilst also stimulating the desire for the sublime.
The sun lounger calls us to lie down, to place ourselves at rest in the heat of the day, to contemplate, reflect or look towards the horizon. The experience of reclining suggests also a real need for this rest. We exhaust ourselves, working perhaps for the weekend or desperate for the next holiday where the weather will be better and the escape will rescue us for a short while. We see sun loungers as a place of recovery, not far from the hospital bed.
The series of black and white paintings rid the images of their holiday brochure sparkle. We are confronted with the shadows. The palms, a symbol of the exotic, cast dark spirals which appear more menacing than happy. Lucinda mainly works onto a fluorescent red ground, which often peaks through ominously, bathing everything in an artificial light. In "Sea Wall", she uses this trademark red as the shadows glow, and the sky here also shuts us inside. We look for the horizon, but the sky ahead seems impenetrable and looms heavy. We continue to hope.
Born 1977, Aylesbury, Bucks, UK. Lucinda Metcalfe is a London-based artist, she recently worked as “Artist-in-Residence” for Singer/Songwriter Imogen Heap and currently teaches Diploma Art to International Students in central London.
She lives in Whitechapel, but works from a studio in Wapping. She gained an MA with distinction at London’s “Slade School of Fine Art”.
London exhibitions include "Remember Paradise" at Husk, Limehouse, "Getaway"' Wandsworth, "Supersaturation" at the Crypt Gallery, Kings Cross, "Moonko, Shoreditch High St", "Urban Outfitters", Kensington, "The House my Sister Drew" at The Albany, New cross, New Contemporaries, Barbican Curve gallery and "Sitting Tenants", Lotta Hammer. Lucinda has also shown at Moonko, Sheffield, SOLAS, Dundee, "ReCreation" at "The Holy Biscuit", Newcastle, "No1 Paint" at "Blank Media Collective, Manchester, Hotel Eger in Eger, Hungary and The Terry Frost Gallery, Lemba, Cyprus.
"Fugitive Significance" Helen Kellock and Jo Mango From February until 16 March 2014
“Fugitive Significance” is an interdisciplinary exploration by visual artist, Helen Kellock, and musician, Jo Mango.
These paintings can be viewed as an experiment in ekphrasis, a visual translation of what Helen felt to be the significant moments of the musical composition, ‘Spiegel im Spiegel’ by Arvo Pärt. Jo went on to create lyrics based on certain aspects of Helen’s paintings, now divorced of their original context. Although the exhibition lacks sound, the paintings and lyrics can be viewed together as an expression of a new, complete song.
JO MANGO is a Glaswegian singer-songwriter and a Lecturer in music at the University of West of Scotland, specialising in musicology and songwriting. She has co-written songs with the likes of Teenage Fanclub and Admiral Fallow and collaborated musically with Vashti Bunyan and David Byrne amongst others. The Herald rated her latest album 'Murmuration' in the top five best albums of 2012.
HELEN KELLOCK is a visual artist and writer from Glasgow. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art before continuing on to complete a degree in English Literature at Glasgow University. Helen has had work exhibited in Sienna, had visual/textual pieces published by Freight Books and is also a published children's book illustrator. She is currently based in MANY studios in Glasgow.
ARTIST'S TALK & PERFORMANCE Sunday 16 March, 2-3.30pm, The McManus Gallery, Albert Square, Dundee, DD1 1DA (venue TBC)
nomasrojects.org in partnership with jomango.bandcamp.com, helenkellock.tumblr.com and mcmanus.co.uk
Pink Sea Blooms: Retention and Loss New Works by Holly Keasey
Armeria maritima, better known as 'sea pink', 'thrift' or 'lady's cushion', is an unusual alpine plant that has both coastal and mountainous populations. Beginning from a consideration of how this species of plant possibly came to germinate in two such types of location and the adaptive qualities it is required to have, Holly’s work will focus on the causes and implications of global rising sea levels. What does it mean when the term ‘Act of God’ has multiple interpretations in both religious texts and legal documents? If no one can take responsibility for the effects and therefore causes of climate change, what does the future hold – or rather, lose? Treating the Nomas* Project's exhibition space as small greenhouses for cultivation, Holly will be sowing pink sea kneelers and asking what is necessary to assist them to take root.
Holly Keasey is a Tay-based artist. Graduating from DJCAD in 2011, Holly continues to explore how engaged artistic practices can act as a durational enquiry towards ecological sensibilities and living. With a focus on water ecology and tourism, her work often intertwines the personal, social and environmental through the creation of site-responsive installations. Holly is also currently working with the Clyde River Foundation and students of Biggar High School on the 'Trout and Transition' project and is a member of the Generator Committee.
ARTIST'S TALK Sunday 6 April, 2-3.30pm, The McManus: Dundee's Art Gallery and Museum, Albert Square, Meadowside, Dundee DD1 1DA
nomasrojects.org in partnership with thewetcentre.org and mcmanus.co.uk
DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE:
Saturday 10 May.
WASPS Project Room 2, Floor 4.
Meadow Mill,
West Hendersons Wynd, DD1 5BY
Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/IKatO
ARTIST'S TALKS:
Sunday 11 May, 2–3.30pm.
The McManus: Dundee's Art Gallery & Museum,
Albert Square, Dundee, DD1 1DA
Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/nFN9E
OUTDOOR FILM SCREENING:
Sunday 11 May, 10pm.
35 Yeaman's Shore
Dundee, DD1 4BJ
(Thornton's Building - opposite Train Station)
Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/Lp8nn
Linnea Spransy and Lia Chavez (USA)
Endurance and discipline are an artist's means of entering an almost soporific state of concentration and submission to their work.
Respectively, Spransy and Chavez depend on this highly productive feature of studio practice in different mediums and from different angles: Chavez in performances which germinate theories of consciousness and various works in the fecund darkness of deep meditation, and Spransy in installation drawing from the alert specificity and startling diversity of equations and rule-making.
Individually, each artist displays a robust and unique studio practice; collaboratively, they emphatically demonstrate their shared discovery that severe limitation and stamina have counter-intuitively lavish results.
Their tandem endurance-drawing performance titled 'Poiesis' to take place at Husk Gallery in London and documented in video, displays the obvious difference and similar repetitive commitment of both artists. Spransy works eyes-open with methodic delicacy, allowing blind accumulation to arrive at an image; Chavez is physically blindfolded and gesturing with her entire body in the act of mark-making, recording the violent meteorological images she sees in prolonged theta-state meditation.
Via Nomas Projects in Dundee Scotland, their collaboration then matures into an environment - an installation titled 'Tumult' wherein Spransy's drawings hover over Chavez as she performs, a headset monitoring her neural state and translating her brainwave oscillations into stroboscopic pulses.
The viewer is invited into this ongoing atmospheric performance, similar in many ways to the artist's internal state, one which is utterly silent and constructed with profound discipline, yet seethes with complexity and effulgence.
nomasprojects.org in partnership with linneagabriella.com, liachavez.com, waspsstudios.org.uk, dundeecity.gov.uk and mcmanus.co.uk with support from rehabstudio.com
Samuel Sander (Stockholm, Sweden)
Themes of wandering, escapism and longing, the natural environment, and their interplay in art and imagination are central to the work of Stockholm-based artist, Samuel Sander. A travel itinerary in the form of small-scale paintings of the imagined Scottish landscape, and explorer's equipment, will form his first Scottish exhibition at Nomas* Projects. As part of his ongoing experiments in constructing visual narratives, Sander will use the Scottish landscape, combine fragments of conversations, film, photography and painting to create a large scale installation in Sweden.
Given the nomadic nature of this Samuel's project in Scotland, a video interview will be available online for the duration of the show.
nomasprojects.org in partnership with samuelsander.com
Flannery O'kafka (Glasgow)
Flannery O'kafka is an artist-mother-photographer working and living in the wild Glasgow suburbs. Her work is divided between photographing children in order to sell clothing and photographing children in a bid to understand humanity. The latter work has been exhibited in the UK and the United States, most recently shown at Michele Mariaud Gallery in NYC.
I would kill for you: a study in maternal ferocity is a series focused on portraits of the artist’s two youngest children. A selection of these diptychs were recently included in the 2014 Frames photo projections during the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art along with the following text online: On the downside, wearing one's heart on one's proverbial sleeve is a surefire way to become absolutely vulnerable. Through the power of the internet and the evil in the heart of mankind, we became victims of The Creeps. Like the devil-lion of The Bible, they roam around the world wide web, seeking whom they may devour. Because of the anonymity of the digital age, I cannot break their teeth, though I desperately tried.
The photographs shown with Nomas are part of this ongoing project and have been chosen in response to the space provided, the time that has passed, and a belief that the redemption of all things just keeps drawing nearer.
ARTIST'S TALK 21 September, 2-3.30pm, The McManus: Dundee's Art Gallery & Museum, Albert Square, Dundee, DD1 1DA
nomasprojects.org in partnership with http://flanneryokafkaphotography.blogspot.co.uk/
Stephanie Mann: "Pasty Works"
Pasty works is an installation of two works graced by the presence of a pastry.
In the film Yum yum, 2014, the viewer is presented simultaneously with stage-set and back-stage throughout the construction of a careful mise-en-scène composed precariously on the artist's hand. The work shows objects, ready to collapse from momentary perfection and instate balance, as something fundamentally sculptural. The interplay between the canonising qualities of the still life genre in stage set, and the super saturate, ready-to-hand nature of the chosen balanced objects results in a heady salad of the synthetic and natural; classically refined and casual or throwaway, but none-the-less unstable. This instability brings potential for the chosen objects to act as idiosyncratic bedfellows: sea shells with Greggs 'yum yums' or a slinky with red plasticine.
Still Life with Pastry, 2013, features a painted still life and it's subject, photographed side by side. This three-stage process results in quick fire comparisons between the ‘original’ objects and the painted trompe-l'œil. These little movements of the mind, like the focusing of the eye, or a lens are tiny and precise, a delicate liaison between the real and unreal whilst viewing this gentle sprezzatura.
Artist Bio: Stephanie Mann's practice works across various media and is rooted in sculptural principles. Her work often features a physical engagement with or arrangement of a collection of self-made visual tropes, an act which disregards a natural hierarchy of objects to focus on their inherent qualities. Mann graduated with an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice at Edinburgh College of Art in 2013. Recently projects include I See I Don't See, Lewisham Arthouse, London; What do you think of the title 'Nothing Lasts', 37 Gallery, London; Tourist in Residence, Edinburgh Art Festival; SAY Award, CCA, Glasgow; Inherit this Mango, (solo) Summerhall, Edinburgh; The White Ring, (solo) Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; There is No Rewind, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh.
ARTIST'S TALK 12 October, 2-3.30pm, The McManus: Dundee's Art Gallery & Museum, Albert Square, Dundee, DD1 1DA
nomasprojects.org in partnership with http://www.stephaniemann.org
Yum Yum from Stephanie Mann on Vimeo.
EXHIBITION Oliver Mezger: "AABA BBAB" - as part of NEoN Digital Arts Festival.
2 - 27 November
Oliver Mezger makes work that explores the instability of our minds to recall and remember. He is interested in questioning contemporary cultures dependancy on temporal methods of recording. Mezger finds fluid ways to both capture the legacy of our ‘physical traces’ and the impact of our ‘character’ in time. Making viewing a process of active interpretation, his performances provoke emotions and through the subtle rhythmic combination of image and sound sources he explores a kind of reverie. Mezger uses a variety of media - 16mm film, digital video, slides, flick-books, knitting, concrete poetry, soundscapes and musical collaborations.
ARTIST'S TALK
4 November, 7 – 10pm (event kicks off at 7.20pm) Bonar Hall, Park Place, Dundee, DD1 1PB. Tickets: £5 - Must be booked in advance (to pay ondoor, click ‘Show other payment options’ under the 'Order Now’ button when booking ticket). Further Information and bookings online at Creative Dundee
EXHIBITION: Group Show Incarnation Celebration.
1-31st December 2014
The central theme of “The Incarnation” is the focus of Nomas* Projects first (playful) group show this Christmas.
Limited to 6 x 4 Christmas Card format, artists from the Morphe Arts Network sent their reflections to our Ward Road Gallery.
Bloated by contemporary Christmas imagery? Try our dainty feast for your eyes this mid-winter.
Sincere thanks to the following artists:
Jonathan Baxter / Michael Dryden / Sam O’donnell / Lydia Levett / Cully / Lydia Hiorns / Jaynie Topping / Rachel Rebus / Kirsty MacFarlane / Jane Roy / Andy Robertson / Flannery O’Kafka / Helen Kellock / Daniel Otto Jack Petersen / Lucy Roscoe / Leah Robb / Jess Armstrong / Catriona MacKenzie
ONE WEEK OUTDOOR FILM SCREENING
Nedyalka Panova; "Dreams of Matter" - as part of UNESCO Year of Light 2015.
26 January 2015 - 1 February 2015 - evenings
35 Yeaman's Shore Dundee, DD1 4BJ (Thornton's Building - opposite Train Station) Google Map: https://goo.gl/maps/Lp8nn
Artist's Statement
The growing number of potential materials for art practices has changed my perspective about my practice, whose focus has now shifted to a state between being a sculptor and being a materials scientist. I am questioning 'How far can my knowledge and aesthetics drive me down this new path?' My work explores the boundaries between organic and non-organic matter and studies the fragile balance between them. What intrigues me the most in this creative exploration is the properties of materials and how these change as a function of scale.
In the course of my MA in Art and Science (2011-2013) I have closely explored the nanofabrication method and nanoscale materials. The application of these materials creates a narrative and concepts for our future as humans, artists and scientists, and it also raises ethical and environmental issues which I have being looking to explore through dialogue in the last three years.
My collaborative work with scientists brought me to a point where dialogue has become a mutual understanding and shared experience in the process of questioning, testing and generating a new body of work that for artists and scientists is an 'object of desire': a research paper or an art exhibition.
'Dreams of Matter' shows my artistic relation to aerogel, a material I have explored with The Synthetic Optics Group, at The University of St. Andrews in 2014. For a sculpture every material is a statement and aerogel as such states that what matters most is the periphery, the edges, the outskirts and the interconnected emptiness of its pores: the enclosed breath. This is where its power remains.
Lucas Battich: Colourfield Studies
Colourfield Studies is a series of algorithm-generated works. Inspired by the simplified and regulated systems of twentieth-century abstract colour painting, the studies are produced by a computer script, which randomly chooses colours and applies them in areas at random angles. Digital media, for all its intermedia output, is ultimately based on text, composed of binary digits and algorithmic commands. And yet, our experience of colour resists being restrained by words. As philosopher Charles Riley remarks, “Colour refuses to conform to schematic and verbal systems.” Colourfield Studies addresses the tensions inherent in mediated experience, where concrete sensations of colour encounter the abstract and rigid language of algorithms.
Bio:
Lucas Battich is a multi-disciplinary artist, born in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, and a DJCAD graduate in Art & Philosophy from 2014. Battich works through process-led experiments in different artistic mediums, including moving-image, digital photography, algorithm works and artists’ publishing, addressing the question on how we engage with a range of cultural objects through the technologies that we utilize daily.
Artist Statement
At the heart of my practice lies two key threads of interest, 'how are images used to communicate' and 'what it does it mean to make and exhibit'. A questioning of ‘value’ is central in the way I explore these. In an ever-more visually stimulated world my works are relativity quiet and still, yet they consciously hold an agenda, allowing motifs to form and questions to be asked about their loaded context. My work looks at the relationships between gesture, artifice and the objects on which they are displayed often exaggerating and emphasising shapes and signs, which may otherwise go unnoticed, re-appropriating them and allowing them to create new conversations.
Bio
b.1990, currently lives and works in Glasgow
Education
2009-2014 First Class BA (Hons) Painting and Printmaking, Glasgow School of Art.
Awards
Glasgow Print Studio Award, September 2014 - August 2015
RSA New Contemporaries 2015, Selected Artist
Phoenix Bursary Recipient, October 2014 - January 2015
Selected Exhibitions
2015 RSA New Contemporaries, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 14th March - 8th of April.
2015 Forms of Exchange, The Old Hairdressers, Glasgow, 30th March
2014 School of Fine Art Showcase, McClellan Galleries, Glasgow, 12th - 21rst June.
2014 "Untitled" - A 4th Year Exhibition, Group Show with Andreas Behn-Eschenburg, Lin Chau and Elizabeth Pirie; Studio 44, Glasgow School of Art
2013 Et Al., Group Show, SWG3, Glasgow
Artist Statement
Series of screen prints and pinhole photographs.
The prints displayed in this exhibition with Nomas Projects are part of a body of work exploring death, commemoration, ritual and sense of place, all based on a micro residency on the island of Iona in the West of Scotland. The prints are based on objects and pinhole photographs collected during walks on the Island and respond to the themes which prompted the trip. The title "Sraid nam Marbh" refers to the road leading from the harbour to the burial ground where the dead would be carried to their final resting place.
Bio
Joanna Helfer is a Dundee based visual artist, working primarily in film, photography and performance. She graduated in Time Based Art from Duncan of Jordanstone in 2009 and has been actively involved in the Dundee creative community since then. In 2010 she co-founded Tin Roof Arts Collective where she regularly exhibits in group shows and events. Previous work includes residencies with Scotland and Venice, and Fife Contemporary Arts and Crafts. Currently she is working towards her first solo exhibition.
ONE SMALL MOMENT
Photo Etching on Banks Cream Paper, 30.5 cm x 30.5 cm
£ 100 (+ additional £10 postage and packaging cost)
Edition of 10
Email dryden_@hotmail.co.uk to purchase
NO IMAGE AVAILABLE
Embossed etching on Fabriano Avorio paper W45 cm x H50 cm
£100 (+ additional £10 postage and packaging cost)
Edition of 40
Email cullyisphoney@gmail.com to purchase
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Alastair John Gordon: {AS YOU SEE}
Central to Gordon’s practice is the notion of a painting as a cultural artefact. At first these are paintings about paintings: images that oscillate between artefact and artifice. Certain questions emerge about the craft of the artist, residual materials and archiving of objects.
Notions of authenticity and illusion lie at the heart of Gordon’s artistic enquiry. Seaching for evidence of ‘the real thing’, of the artist’s process before and after a work is completed. Artists materials such as masking tape and paper are rendered in paint to appear as taped or pinned on a wooden surface, a practice that refers to a specific form of illusionism that proliferated in 17th century Northern Europe called quodlibet (what you will). As Jean Baudrillard wrote in The System of Objects: “We are fascinated by what has been created… because the moment of creation cannot be reproduced.”
Bio:
Gordon is a London based artist and course leader for Critical and Professional Development at Leith School of Art, Edinburgh. He was artist-in-residence for Husk Arts Centre in Limehouse, London 2012-15 and represented by BEARSPACE, South London. In 2014 he won first prize for the Shoosmiths Art Prize and was guest selector for The Open West 2015 national art prize. He is co-founder and director of the Morphē Arts Trust.
Artist talk with Alastair John Gordon August 23 2015. 2-3.30pm at The McManus Gallery, Dundee.
Lada Wilson: intertextuality
Lada Wilson’s art practice is permeated by language and words — it takes into account aspects of culture, language and audience and their interweaving and explores not only the meaning of words but also their spatial connotations by reworking them as sculptures, artist’s books and exhibitions. Wilson is strongly influenced by the spaces in which her exhibitions take place. The reconfiguration of space, which is often not a typical white cube gallery space, is as much her work as the artwork placed in it. The Nomas*Projects gallery space provides a perfect context.
By merging the roles of artist, curator and collector, Wilson creates carefully staged, mixed-media installations that draw on the conventions of historical archives and exhibition-making. Wilson seeks social engagement through collaborations and critical dialogue. The juxtaposition of her personal narrative, often expressed using different languages, and her sculptural interpretations creates a new sense, a new experience.
Bio
Lada Wilson was born in Croatia and, after living in the Netherlands and Spain, moved to Scotland 10 years ago and made it her home. Wilson studied Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), University of Dundee. In 2014, she gained a master’s degree – MFA Art, Society & Publics at the University of Dundee.
Wilson’s past projects include an exhibition entitled resonate for the Triennial Conference of the International Association for Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AERTI) which was held in Dundee. resonate was installed at Centrespace, Visual Research Centre, Dundee Contemporary Arts and was a curated reflection on the artists’ book collection Dundee (abcD) and the Rewind collection in Dundee.
This project led to another conference – Wilson was selected to present a paper at the 103rd College Art Association Conference in New York in February 2015.
Wilson’s paper, entitled Artist’s Book as Landscape: Scattered Words, Trails of Posterity, examined the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay in the context of his garden Little Sparta. While in New York, Wilson contributed to an Art Amnesty project at MoMA PS1 and started her ongoing project the city as playground.
In May 2015, Wilson was one of 21 artist selected at a national level to receive an Artists Information Company (a-n.co.uk) bursary to go to Venice for the opening of the 56th Biennale. Wilson’s project Words we have in common will be included at the Dundee Commons Festival in August 2015.
Some of her work is held by the Demarco European Art Foundation, the University of Dundee Collection and a number of private collections.
Wilson lives in Fife and works in Dundee and wherever in the world she finds herself.
Artist's Talk Sunday 27 September, 2.00pm - 3.30pm, at The McManus, Dundee's Art Gallery and Museum. Albert Square, Meadowside, Dundee. DD1 1DA.
Peter S Smith RE: RED DELICIOUS AND GREENSLEEVES - Four Drawings
Nomas* Projects invited Peter S Smith to make four drawings of apples to be exhibited during the Dundee Urban Orchard (DUO) events in October.
Peter Smith was the Head of the School of Art Design and Media Kingston College 1984 – 2010.
He is a member of the Society of Wood Engravers and member of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers(RE).
His paintings and prints are exhibited in the UK and overseas with works in public and private collections, including Tate Britain and the Ashmolean Oxford.
He currently has a studio at the St Bride Foundation, London where he also teaches wood engraving and lino printing workshops.
"Drawing from observation always confronts you with a set of circumstances larger than yourself and essentially beyond comprehension. The process of drawing from observation, with its own set of material demands, is an attempt to share some of one's own perceptions and understanding. Choosing to draw both an apple already purchased and apples from the garden, over the period of time it takes to draw, I began to understand a little of what I was observing. Some of the inherent properties of the subject are gradually disclosed. Visual metaphor is never far away. It had not been my intention to directly comment on the Dundee Urban Orchard Project, but just to draw some apples. However, I discovered that my choice of apples and how the drawings developed does seem to resonate with many of the aspirations of the Project."
Jo Mango: Ossicles
Manny Ling - Haikubot
Haiku are a form of Japanese Poetry comprised of three phrases of 5,7 and 5 syllables each. Inspired by the New York Times Haiku project, and developed locally by Albert Elwin using open source software, NEoN’s HaikuBot generates haiku by trawling through news stories in The Courier online. The best of these serendipitous digital haiku are presented in the windows of NOMAS* Projects for the duration of the NEoN festival.
Artist Manny Ling was invited by NEoN to respond to the collection of Haiku generated. He selected three from which he made artworks using a combination of print and calligraphy.
Dr. Manny Ling is a Senior Lecturer in Design. His work is exhibited around the world and appears in numerous publications. He obtained his PhD ‘Calligraphy Across Boundaries’ in 2008 and was awarded in the same year, the Honorary Fellow of the Calligraphy and Lettering Arts Society (HFCLAS) for his contribution to the advancement and development of calligraphy. He is also the Director of the International Research Centre for Calligraphy (IRCC) and has curated numerous international calligraphy symposia, exhibitions and publications. He is also a designer and typographer and is a full member of the Typographic Circles and Letter Exchange.
Nomas*Projects in Partnership with NEoN and Manny Ling
Promises Promises
December 1st - 31st 2015
Nomas* Projects reflect on the Incarnation with invited artist Daniel Otto Jack Petersen.
Dan is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, researching monsters and the environment in the fiction of R. A. Lafferty and Cormac McCarthy.
Links to his various online writings can be found at http://ecomonstrous.blogspot.co.uk
KILLBOX
Killbox is an online game and interactive installation that critically explores the nature of drone warfare, its complexities and consequences. It is an experience which explores the use of technology to transform and extend political and military power, and the abstraction of killing through virtualisation.
Killbox involves audiences in a fictionalized interactive experience in virtual environments based on documented drones strikes in Northern Pakistan.
The work is an international collaboration between U.S. based artist/activist, Joseph DeLappe and Scotland-based artists and game developers, Malath Abbas, Tom Demajo and Albert Elwin.
Bio's
JOSEPH DeLAPPE: Concept Design http://www.delappe.net
Joseph is an artist/activist with a substantial body of work on the subject of geopolitics and drones and is considered a pioneer in the nascent field of computer games and art. DeLappe is professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he directs the Digital Media program. DeLappe created and directs the crowdsourced memorial project iraqimemorial.org.
MALATH ABBAS: Production Design http://www.malathabbas.com/
Malath Abbas is an independent game designer, artist and producer working on experimental and meaningful games. Since co-founding the award winning studio Quartic Llama, Malath is establishing Scotland's first game collective and co-working space in order to support a community of independent game makers.
TOM DeMAJO: Sound Design http://www.tomdemajo.com
Tom is a UK based artist and designer working in digital arts and sound. Co-founder of Warp Technique Electronic music and Quartic Llama independent games studio, Tom now resides in Scotland where he designs and makes multi-sensory interactive experiences.
ALBERT ELWIN: Code Design http://albertelw.in/
Albert is an artist and programmer. Originally from New Zealand, Albert now lives and works in Scotland. He co-founded Space Budgie, an independent games studio in 2013, creating the game Glitchspace. Albert is working on a range of digital experiments and collaborations.
Reflections on the Incarnation
'The empty mirror,' he said. 'If you could really understand that, there would be nothing left here for you to look for.' (Janwillem van de Wetering)
Statement of intent:
Reflections on the Incarnation sets out to do two things. 1. to make explicit the Christian theological framework within which Nomas* Projects operates. 2. to queer that framework through a deeper theological reflection.
Devised in three parts: an exhibition, a reading group and a walk, the project strikes a balance between provocation and conversation, the better to learn, unlearn and relearn what it means to be a Christian today.
Bio:
Jonathan Baxter is an artist and ... He works across disciplines - both art and non-art related - using psychoanalytic methodologies and performative practices to variously open up, challenge and propose what is. In the context of this exhibition Jonathan plays the wolf.
Exhibition:
19th February - 31st March 2016
Reading group:
3rd, 17th, 24th March 2016
Walk:
1st April 2016
Landscape Imaginaries Mar 31 - 12 May 2016
Andy Slater is primarily a painter whose canvases are awash with pattern, however his interest in form, formulae, and repetition, has led him to create multiples, using industrial processes. In this series of vignettes, he has taken to machine made embroidery, removing the hand of the artist entirely from their production.
Whilst living in New York, he noticed the graphic images of agrarian idylls that are commonly printed on food packaging, and stacked high in the aisles of the bodegas. These invented vistas were all the more stark and questionable in the context of such a dense, built environment.
Images taken from (fruit and vegetable) produce packaging were photographed in America, rehashed in Photoshop, emailed to China to be recoded for embroidery machines back in Scotland, and, once stitched onto unbleached cotton (grown in India and processed in Asia), finally framed with Scandinavian birch ply wood hoops that had been laser cut in England.
Looking back, Virgil described Arcady as an idyllic pastoral land; looking forward, was the Grecian ideal of the Elysium Plane. Henceforth, literary and pictorial representations of these have formed the imaginary of the ideal landscape and life lived in it.
From the early 1600s landscape in painting became less a backdrop and more a legitimate subject matter in its own right. Artist Claude Lorrain “opened people's’ eyes to the sublime beauty of nature”, and his pastoral landscapes set standards by which real landscapes would be judged. Later, as painters such as Gainsborough and Constable sought out, rectified, or assembled landscapes, gardeners, such as William Kent and Lancelot Brown, remodelled actual estates on the same principles to improve the composition and beauty of the site.
The majority of landscape painters of the time were concerned with capturing or creating the Picturesque, a quality that shared in the Beautiful and the Sublime. Uvedale Price wrote in his 1794 essays that the Picturesque foreground should be of smooth, undulating and well managed topography. The middleground should host figures, animals, rocks, and vegetation, which is rugged of delineation though not necessarily rough of surface; a good level of variation which can be reflected in the water is what is desired. The background should be slightly indistinct but mountainous, with a nod to the Sublime. Sudden variation, drama and mystery are the key elements of the backdrop. Thus a curious circularity developed whereby the refined version of the landscape which appeared in paintings, became the model for the landscape architect, and his work in turn became the subject of painters seeking the Picturesque.
To give such a calculus for the ideal landscape may seem absurd, but the imaginary is so deeply rooted that it continues to form and inform our conception of and our relationship with a landscape which is increasingly mediated by globalised industries. Thus such reductive imagery is sufficient enough a trigger for thoughts of fair weather and abundant produce beyond the reality of the shrink-wrapped apple.
Biography
Andy Slater (born Scotland, 1979) is currently based in Dundee, Scotland whilst maintaining a studio practice in Newcastle, as a painter. His art work deals with manipulation and control, perception and beauty, mythology and traffic islands. Through abstraction, pattern, collage, plastics and embroidery, process is an integral part of Andy’s practice. In 2013 he completed an MA in Future Landscape Imaginaries, making new paintings and vacuum formed plastic works that examine systems, protocol, and the production of space.
In 2008 he undertook a residency in New York where he completed new large-scale paintings, screenprints and embroideries based on the representations of well-known female figures in history such as Eve (with Adam), Delilah (with Samson) and Salome. In his solo show at the Star and Shadow in Newcastle, Since I Got My iPod Everything is Filmic and Beautiful (May-June 2007) he exhibited paintings drawing upon the Greek myths of Flora, Chloris and Zephyr, amongst other works which made reference to famous landscape paintings from Monet to Bruegel.
In addition to his studio work, Andy has worked in a technical or artistic capacity for venues such as BALTIC and projects including Platform North East, Star Board Home (Newcastle), and The Embassy (Edinburgh) and spent a period of time working at the Venice Biennial (Zenomap Project, Scottish Pavilion, 2003). Slater has an MA from Newcastle University, a 1st Class Hons. Degree in Fine Art from the university of Dundee and has undertaken research residencies at San Martino de Scale, Sicily, on board the MS. Stubnitz, at the Banff Centre, Canada, and at Point B, New York.
Artist's Talk
Sunday 24 April 2016, 2.00pm – 3.30pm at Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG.
Memories of Sambaa K'e
Prints and drawings from the Canadian North
In 2014 Joanna Foster was artist-in-residence at Sambaa K'e Print Studio, a printmaking facility founded by the Sambaa K'e Dene Band of Trout Lake in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Traditionally nomadic, this First Nations community live around the beautiful and vast Trout Lake (Sambaa K'e) in a remote area of Boreal forest, maintaining highly skilled hunting and craft practices that sustain their way of life. A variety of fish, wild berries, moose, caribou and beaver provide source materials for food, clothing and shelter. The lake, forest and animals hold spiritual significance for the Dene and form the subject of stories that pass forward vital knowledge about the land to future generations.
Sambaa K'e Chief Dolphus Jumbo and printmaker Carielyn Jumbo proposed the idea of a printmaking facility for Trout Lake to Gavin Renwick of the University of Alberta, who had developed a longstanding relationship with the community. In collaboration with Paul Harrison of DJCAD, and Scott Hudson of DCA Print Studio, the print facility was established in 2010. Since then the community have produced an extensive archive of work relating to the lake, the forest, and Dene culture, with the print studio becoming central to everyday life. An inclusive creative space in which all members of the community, including Elders and children, engage in a creative process that promotes community wellbeing and visually reflects an intimate relationship with the land.
Recent changes to the ecosystem of the forest and lake have resulted from invasive gas company activity, through the burning of chemicals into the atmosphere, and the practice of seismic cutlines as a way of prospecting for gas. These unnaturally straight trenches bulldoze through Boreal forest regardless of habitation, felling trees, damaging rivers and disorientating wildlife. The Dene are acutely aware of the impact of these activities on the environment and to their way of life, and are engaged in ongoing dialogue with the Canadian government to protect the land, Dene culture, and a relationship with nature that has evolved over many generations.
As witness to the urgent issues of pollution and preservation facing First Nations communities and one of the world's remaining intact forest ecosystems, the print facility increases visibility of both the Dene way of life and the land in which they live. It is hoped that the growing recognition and economy of the print studio can support nomadic practice and call for further protection of the environment in the face of encroaching commercial interests.
This was the first residency programme at Sambaa K'e Print Studio, facilitated by Gavin Renwick, and made together with two other artists Scottish printmaker Madeline Mackay and Canadian printmaker Amanda Forrest-Chan. All three artists developed a close bond with the community during the residency through creative practice. Collective drawing by the lake and a series of printmaking workshops encouraged an exchange of skills and visual dialogue. Joanna's background as a musician also prompted interest in an exchange of music and songs, and a number of music evenings were held during the residency with posters developed at the print studio. These evenings where multi-disciplinary with drawing and lino-carving taking place alongside live musical performance.
Memories of Sambaa K'e is a collection of drawings and prints made during the residency, revisiting connections to the community, the Boreal forest and the source of life that is Sambaa K'e.
Biography
Joanna Foster is an artist, musician and PhD researcher at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Current work explores song performance and drawing practice as conduits for connection. Joanna has developed projects using drawing, printmaking and song to explore connections between people and place for a number of arts and community engaged organisations including Cupar Arts Festival, Jiwar Arts and Society Barcelona, and Scottish Sculpture Workshop.
Links
Image credit:
Puzzle-block print from the series ‘Portraits of the Elders’ J.Foster
Artist's Talk
Sunday 19 June 2016, 2.00pm – 3.30pm at Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG.
"Light This Candle"
Artists statement
As a boy I wanted to be an astronaut, and the thrill of exploring places beyond planet earth seemed worth the risk of being strapped into the nose-cone of a gigantic rocket. I remember watching the film The Right Stuff dozens of times and admiring the courage of the characters that manned those first experiments in space travel, trusting thin membranes to protect them from the certain death of the cold vacuum of space.
The group of objects comprising Light this Candle are 1:200 scale models of NASA's Mercury Redstone 'Freedom 7', Mercury Atlas, Gemini Titan, Apollo Saturn I-B, and Apollo Saturn V rockets - the iconic vehicles of the United States' space program race to put a man on the moon, wrapped in ribbon cut from old white undershirts, and coated in beeswax. The resulting entombed objects are suspended to suggest dipped candles, or the chrysalis of strange creatures undergoing a metamorphosis, objects inevitably bound to be consumed, and experience rebirth.
Artist's Bio
Dayton Castleman is a multi-modal artist, an educator, and manages the 21c Museum in Bentonville, Arkansas. A New Orleans native, Dayton received his BA in Art from Belhaven University and his MFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has taught as Assistant Professor of Art in sculpture at Trinity Christian College, and as a Museum Educator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. He has exhibited and presented on his artwork in venues throughout the United States and Europe.
Wow: Argos on Mute
Artist's Statement:
‘WOW’ is a body of work that takes its title and inspiration from retail marketing techniques. Through this body of work I seek to question what products or objects are deserving of the ‘WOW’ label applied so liberally by retailers, and I try to make sense of my own life experience alongside the images and messages broadcast through marketing materials.
In ‘WOW: Argos on Mute’ the “unique selling points” of televisions printed in the Spring/Summer 2016 Argos catalogue have been obliterated. I am wowed and unsettled by the choice of over 100 different TVs that the catalogue presents. The removal of all product information has brought satisfaction and a new understanding of the situation.
Artist’s Bio:
Lorna Bryan is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, where she completed both her BA and MFA at Newcastle University and previously worked as a designer for a large retail chain. Her practice takes various forms but frequently adopts or references existing visual presentation methods to examine what value judgements have been made.
ARTIST’S TALK:
Sunday 25 September 2016, 2.00pm – 3.30pm at Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG.
Artist Website
"Views Through Windows"
Artist Statement:
O'Donnell's painting practice is primarily concerned with a distinct feeling of disconnect with a time and a place. His work is concerned with paradoxical instances in which a place can be both very significant to a person yet at the same time remain aloof and uncannily distant. These places are fringes, aberrations.
"Views Through Windows" reveals some of the domestic tones to O'Donnell's work. The instances of disconnect here occur in particular when you look through windows, either from the outside in or the inside out. There's a double screening effect, when you look through a window and make a painting about the experience. This doubling is intensified due to the paintings being exhibited within window spaces.
These experiences of place lost and place gained are further disrupted by memory or nostalgia, by fleeting moments of beauty and by strange objects and occurrences, such as the habit of placing cat scratch climbers in bay windows, an odd motif found in some of the artist's paintings.
To understand these banal miracles in paint is to understand them better and at the same time to become more confused by them. Abstraction, surface, medium, framing, these languages common to painting are both a help and a hindrance, obscuring yet making clearer things clearer, like looking through a murky window.
Bio:
Samuel O'Donnell was born in Bolton in 1992. He received a First Class BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking from the Glasgow School of Art in 2015. He is currently living and working in Glasgow.
ARTIST’S TALK:
Sunday 6 November 2016, 4.00pm – 5.30pm at Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid Wynd Industrial Estate, Dundee, DD1 4JG.
Artist Website
"Santa Baby"
Artist Statement:
Hari seeks self-actualization, examination and release through her artistic practice. She creates collages employing a wide range of media drawn from items collected over her lifetime. Nomas asked Hari to ‘consider Christmas and the contrasts between its original meaning and what it signifies today’. The resulting body of work “Santa Baby” utilises her religious and cultural iconography, personal photos and both created and found text.
Artist’s Bio:
Hari MacMillan is a collage artist based in Fife. She completed her BA at Edinburgh College of Art in and her MPhil at Glasgow School of Art and is currently completing her MFA at Dundee University. She previously worked as a Video to Film Designer in London. She creates autobiographical collages, addressing subjects in popular culture and modern society.
Artist Website:
Hari will be creating an online advent calendar for the exhibition at http://www.harimacmillan.com
"Nymphs in mania"
Artist Statement:
The exhibition will focus on the image of the female and its history. It will engage with the nuances found in classical forms that are carried throughout history and into modernity. The paintings will specifically respond to the representation of the female form in popular culture and its relationship to the past through the medium of painting. They are conceived within the context of mythological antiquity and classical renaissance painting and sculpture. Through this method the purpose of the female image throughout history is considered objectively and will deal with historical and contemporary beliefs regarding the female form.
Artist's Bio:
Rachael Rebus was born in Edinburgh and graduated from DJCAD in 2010 before completed her training with Turps Banana Art School in 2014. Since then she has continued her practise and has exhibited throughout the UK.
Artist Website:
Mediterranea is a limited edition series of screen prints, based upon a wider body of work Crossings (2015- ongoing). Beginning life as found media images, the print titles reference idyllic household paint names; "Fare Thee Well, Utopia Beckons, No Boundaries, English Primrose, Sundown, California Dreaming, Adrift at Sea..." Juxtaposed alongside images of the recent Mediterranean migrant 'crisis' these romanticized paint names take on new meaning; creating tension and paradoxes between the images and their context. Kwant's selective re-appropriation of media images seeks to open up a space to question wider narratives - the very form of screen printing as a medium, bears in it's fabric associations with consumerism. The images once produced for media output have here been edited, and playfully deconstructed, opening up space to question our perception of reality.
Elizabeth Kwant is lives and works in Manchester, and is a member of Rogue Artist Studios. The production of 'Crossings' has been kindly supported by The Castlefield Gallery's New Art Spaces and Seedbed.
Downloads
Explosives Negatives
Nedyalka Panova works at the boundaries between art and science. Her ongoing research titled 'Artist as a material scientist and the extended phenotype' has placed her in a series collaborations with different research groups in UK and Ireland since 2013 when she graduated with MA in Art and Science from Central Saint Martins, London.
Her most recent project Explosives Negatives with the Organic Semiconductor Centre, led by Prof Ifor DW Samuel, University of St. Andrews crossed the line between organic and inorganic materials. The artist's exploration of organic (plastic) semiconductors used for humanitarian demining, organic LED, organic solar cells, Li-Fi communication and organic lasers entangles with the origin of fluorescence in nature and offers an imaginative walk through a newly built material landscape.
ARTIST'S TALK: 14 May 2017, 4:00pm - 5.30pm. Generator Projects, 25/26 Mid-Wynd Ind. Estate, Dundee. DD1 4JG
Artist Website:
Artist's Statement
Biblioteque
"When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs." (J.L. Borges)
The limit of our understanding dwells in the limits of our thoughts expression, that is our speech and writing. By depriving its possibilities of expression, a human risks being reduced to a creature made up of contradictory ideas and unrealized impulses. Our instincts for communication and creation are some of few primordial instincts, as in general a version of their realization. This impulsive primordialism is most obvious in the object of a book. Most of the items mankind has produced are extensions of its body, arms, sight, hearing, skin, but the book is an extension of memory and imagination. A book is a symbol containing multiple meanings, not an isolated entity or just a series of verbal structures: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
Nobody steps twice in the same river (the waters constantly change), but we are not less fluid as beings. If we read again the same book, it is a different experience, the connotation of words is changed; we act like children who, as it was their first time, create the story and meaning of letters in their own way. It seems we are reading and processing the entire time gap back to its original creation.
The books I use date from different periods (from 19th Century to today) and by their topics are incomprehensible to children. Nevertheless, if I act as a child, a wunderkind not in the sense of ingenuity but playfulness, I become an artist who revivify every single book with a different materialistic approach. By destructive palimpsesting a book as an object, a new symbol is established, reorganized as in the case of a ready made, rejuvenated, rebranded.
Stefano Katunar (Croatia)
Artist Website and CV:
THE GIFT: Kim Anderson
Artist Statement
"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift." - Mary Oliver
The Gift is from a larger body of work that documents my journey through grief after the loss of a loved one, and the lingering effect these emotions have had upon the way I perceive the world. In July 2015 I had my first close encounter with death through the passing of my grandfather. I was with him when he passed away, one of the most profound experiences of my life. It was traumatic, it was surreal, it was humbling, and in some ways it was also a privilege. Surely it must be one of the most intimate experiences you can have with someone, to be with them at what is possibly the loneliest and most vulnerable moment of their lives, when they can only cross over that final threshold completely and utterly alone, leaving the rest of us behind to process what has just happened.
Soon after I had a residency in Mildura, Australia, where it just so happened my grandfather had been born. It was my first visit to his beloved home country, and when I discovered the apocalyptic landscape near Kings Billabong it seemed to reflect my anguished state of mind. Ancient twisted trees, once huge and majestic, ravaged by salt and drought, reduced to pale corpses twisting in agony as they strove to reach an ever-receding water line. They reminded me of my grandfather in those final hours, fighting so hard to hold on.
Ever since I have analysed these emotions over and over again in my work, and I have come to discover that even in death there is a strange and terrible beauty.
The Gift I-V, 2016-17 Copic pen, ink and charcoal on Arches paper 60 x 45cm £300 each
Kim completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) at the University of Ballarat Arts Academy in Australia, and in 2007 was awarded a scholarship to study a Master of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art And Design in Dundee. Since graduating from DJCAD in 2008, she has undertaken residencies around the world including Hospitalfield House in Arbroath, Scotland, an Australia Council International Studio Residency at the British School at Rome, Australia House in Echigo-Tsumari, Japan, DRAWinternational in Caylus, France, and a number of residencies around Australia. She has exhibited extensively around Australia and internationally, and been a finalist and recipient of numerous awards. Along with more traditional works on paper, she has created large-scale site-specific ephemeral drawings, visual/sound installations, and curated many projects by other artists.
Alongside her artistic practice, Kim has had a curatorial internship with Deveron Arts in Huntly, Scotland, been a committee member of Artist Run Initiative Space 22 in Ballarat, Australia, tutored in Art Theory and Drawing at the University of Ballarat Arts Academy, and she is currently an Associate to the Board of the Ballarat Arts Foundation as a member of their Grants Committee. She has also been curator of the Skin Gallery in Carlton, Melbourne, an initiative between Arts Access Victoria and the Skin and Cancer Foundation Inc., where she presented solo and group exhibitions by artists living with disability.
Of Making Books There is No End: David (Cully) McCulloch
Artist Statement
Statement for Nomas* show
Of Making Books There is No End
For the Nomas* windows I have made five marble sculptures using reclaimed plaques in the shape of books. Words are literally carved in stone giving them a sense of gravitas. However, as the object is seen as well as read, the combination of word and image as a means of communication highlights the complex and transient nature of knowledge and understanding. The reclaimed memorial plaques also serve as a potent reminder of death that we all must face. The human pursuit of knowledge in the interim, rather than deter death, only mirrors the nature of death in that both are never satisfied.
Statement
My art practice is permeated by words and text. I consider these ephemeral forms of communication: propositions to explore the process by which a thought, idea or image is made visible.
I am convinced that art is a relationship and not a commodity. I realise my practice as both maker and curator through multi-media formats and by programming experimental galleries Nomas* Projects and Sharing Not Hoarding. My curatorial intention is to provide an opportunity to consider new models of art practice beyond the white cube; spaces in which artworks and publics can generate a positive encounter of shared learning and observation.
My artistic explorations are rooted in a theological framework. Taking into account aspects of culture and art, this outlook aids my response to basic human questions of worth, values, and communication, and invites consideration of life, reality and the artists’ role in society. My work explores changes in the historic relationship between the Church and the arts and investigates if a lost conversation between the two can be recovered. I am interested in the similarities and tensions found in the schema each provides to understanding humanity. This presents a dynamic counterpoint and a platform for developing ideas.
Juan Bolivar makes paintings that negotiate the tension between meaning and form. His work combines elements from disparate sources investigating hybridity, language and abstraction. Through this dialogistic tension, ‘abstraction’ acts as an intertextual springboard onto other sub-cultural positions highlighting the problematisation of this genre in post-conceptual painting.
The series of works in this exhibition at Nomas, refer to discordant points of reference used by the artists to investigate this 'inter-textual discourse'. Bolivar reenacts one of Malevich's last 'black squares' painted between 1920-1930; the smallest of versions of four black squares painted by Malevich, unusual in that it is painted onto a solid plaster support. It's an object/painting which marks the height of his interest into Suprematism before he is charged with 'formalism' and sentenced to two months in jail.
Bolivar uses this context of interpretation to create a new narrative by transforming Malevich's black square into a series of small 'combo' amplifiers such those a travelling musician, street performer or busker would use. The exhibition title refers to AC/DC's iconic anthem found in their first album 'High Voltage' (1976). Bolivar merges these elements drawing comparisons about, 'pure feeling' hope and optimism in Peter Schjeldahl's words writing of Malevich's square, creating a cosmic “song of the open road.”
Born in Caracas, Venezuela (1966) Juan Bolivar is a British artist and curator. He graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2003 receiving the ‘Warden’s Prize, and received a Pollock-Krasner award twice (2000, 2009). His work is included in collections such as The Government Art Collection, and selected for significant exhibitions such as New British Painting, John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton (2003), EastInternational, Norwich School of Art (2007). In 2015 his work was included in Nanjing Museum's first international exhibition of contemporary art, where he was a prize winner. His work currently is also on show at JGM Gallery, London, in 'High Voltage', a major exhibition presenting new paintings accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.
Bolivar lives and works in London and is a Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell College of Arts.
For more information please visit juan-bolivar.com
Advent is a time of preparation as we wait for Christ’s birth at Christmas. As I designed this set of illustrations I was very interested in what this would look like today, trying to make a connection between our lives today and a story from long ago.
The first image deals with the annunciation, the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Mary that as a virgin she will bare a child. The image shows two young women, Mary and Elizabeth chatting as they both await the arrival of a baby.
The second image explores the idea of expectation, thinking in particular about the stresses and negative feelings which can emerge in the approach to Christmas. It is easy to get distracted by gift buying, new clothes, Christmas parties, bad weather and money concerns during Advent, forgetting about the real reason for the excitement, that ‘Christ is coming’.
Incarnation is illustrated in the third image through a young family taking shelter in a stable. It is a quiet scene, fairly light in tone, enjoying the miracle that all childbirth brings. The final image highlights that this child is like no other though, He will bring salvation to all men and women.
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Kairos means ‘opportunity, ‘season’ or ‘sitting time’ – a Greek word for ‘time’, which doesn’t talk about the length, but is more non-linear and qualitative.
I used textiles to reference a baby blanket, which I hand stitched with gold thread to represent linear time (chronos). The vertical stitches over the top I began knowing that I wouldn’t be able to finish, as the arrival of my baby was so imminent. These represent a kind of count down to when everything was about to change – the finishing point is where the quantative and qualitive times meet. Where chronos time becomes kairos.
I was still stitching the vertical lines in labour, until I couldn’t go on any more. The baby arrived about 12 hours later. His name is Orrin Lucas Kevan Curtis.
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This pencil and ink sketch is a loose transcription of Francesco Bonsignori's The Virgin and Child Enthroned (c.1490-1500) which is housed in the Scottish National Gallery on the Mound, Edinburgh.
The pencil drawing was produced in situ with close reference to the original composition. Ink was added later.
My choice of colours bears little resemblance to the source painting’s earthy palette. The one exception is that both versions of the virgin sport a crown of brown hair, a detail that marked Bonsognori’s virgin as fresh and distinct from those on the walls around her. I took inspiration from Beyonce's carefully constructed maternity portraits (April 2017), opting for lurid tones of lime and fuschia in the virgin’s dress.
Initially subconscious, this subtle nod to Beyonce’s baby’s photo shoot is perhaps unsurprising. In the portraits, the singer positions herself as a modern day Madonna, employing devices used by artists throughout the centuries to depict the mother of Christ - a serene half smile, good posture, a symbolic assortment of flowers, the conspicuous absence of a (visible) father figure. Beyonce’s photos are iconic because they’re icon-like.
The gospels present the virgin Mary with quiet simplicity as an unassuming young woman, taken by surprise - but not averse - to becoming a vessel for the “Word made flesh”. Within her womb, for nine months, she bears the mystery of the incarnation; the invisible becomes increasingly visible and is then revealed; God in human form. Mary’s task is not untinged with sorrow. As in childbirth pain precedes joy, so it is again for Mary at the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ.
I wanted to show respect to the subject, and render the virgin and child duo with a level of restraint. I had originally planned to crop the present image to fit a 20x20cm format. I later chose not to as I wanted to draw attention to the processes in making the work - evidence of colours being tested and a doodle of the annunciation scene. This is a twenty-first-century artist’s response to a fifteenth-century artist’s depiction of a unique, first-century mother and child.
--
Other than her prayers to God and her visit to her cousin, little is revealed about the movements of Mary between the conception and birth of Jesus. It is a period of being ‘in-between’ - between one location, identity and state, and the next.
I imagined Mary in the present day, considering her new identity as a mother-to-be. I wanted to portray her in a place of contemplation during this ‘in between’ time, to consider the relevance of an image of contemplation and stillness in a modern world obsessed with projecting images of action and appearances. ‘Contemplation’ captures a moment in between the times of action and self-projection – a moment which no ones else sees.
--
'The birth of my son, Ransom, has meant coming to terms with the loss of many aspects of my agency and a change in my identity, as well as exploring the new found depths of love and care in my life. As an artist, these are themes that are quite literally woven into the wearable works that I create. A huge part of my garment works happens when they are simply worn throughout a period of time, using the daily interactions of life as a basis for subconscious performance, which is influenced by the clothing. I enjoy, however, the possibility of ambiguity surrounding what the works are, based on their context and the way they are installed. Being textile-based, the things that I make have a certain flexibility and are easily folded, draped, stuffed, and stacked within the confines of harder shapes while their snippets of text and imagery can be fluidly used to communicate different things. Finding solid, fairly immovable ready-made objects or the edges of existing myths, stories, or histories allows me to create new, temporary boundaries for the works, referencing other familiar spaces such as the museum, the showroom, the shop, or the home. Hinting at my own experiences whilst using the language of others’ history, my work aims to create heavily aesthetic, borderline formal sculptures, installations, and garments that nonetheless contain enough symbolic imagery or text to retain a sense of narrativity and magic that encourages the viewer to be drawn in and to form their own sense of a story through unconscious closure. In exhibiting the piece ‘Jumper No. 6’ in this show, the name Ransom becomes a noun, telling the story of the wholly (holy) other virgin mother.'
--
My
very
easy
memory
jingle
seems
useless
now.
Andy
Robertson
My very easy memory jingle seems useless now
is a series of print based works about the shifting lenses through which we perceive the past, present, and future; the spaces between possibility and impossibility, reality and imagination, known and unknown, ordinary and extraordinary.
Andy Robertson
is a designer and artist based in Dundee.
Feel free to say hello.
@teckleandhyde
Blub is an anonymous street artist working in Florence Italy who has kindly agreed to show their work at Nomas* Projects. The artist supplied the interview extracts below.
** Blub! Domande e risposte**
(Interviste rilasciate nel 2017 a Repubblica, Newsly.it, Magazine.it, etc)
Parlaci del progetto "L'arte sa nuotare".
Tutto è nato nella tarda estate 2013 in Spagna a Cadaques, per caso, accogliendo una richiesta di una famiglia
del posto. Dipinsi in uno sportello della loro recinzione esterna l'immagine di un bambino riccioluto con la maschera da sub
ispirandomi al loro figlio.
Rientrato a Firenze, per gioco, ho mascherato la Gioconda, poi la Dama con l'ermellino, infine Leonardo da Vinci.
La mia prima triade di opere.
Su stimolo di amici, scansionai le opere ed una notte, in loro compagnia, per la prima volta, le attaccai
negli sportelli esterni nel quartiere di San Niccolò a Firenze, il quartiere degli artisti. Era il 5 novembre 2013
nella nostra semplicità era un modo per ricordare l'alluvione ed il salvataggio di Firenze e delle sue opere
dalle acque che avevano sommerso la città. "L'arte non affoga" divenne quel giorno "L'arte sa nuotare".
Stai "operando" in tutta Italia?
Si, l'ambizione è quella di visitare tante città in molte regioni.
Firenze il mio teatro naturale poi Cadaques Londra, Bruxelles Roma Sansepolcro Foggia Lucca Pisa Pontremoli Alghero Rimini Arezzo Monteriggioni, San Gimignano
Street Art, quella vera, quella di abbellire davvero le città, di diffondere un messaggio ma anche la cultura, facendo cenno ad opere famosi e personaggi di rilievo. Cosa ne pensi delle sanzioni previste dalla legge? E, soprattutto, possiamo distinguere la vera arte (la tua) da quella dell'imbrattare i muri con scritte molto spesso incomprensibili?
Il confine tra writers e streetart, cos come quello tra centro e periferia della città, è spesso soggettivo.
Personalmente fin dall'inizio ho scelto gli sportelli, uso colla totalmente vegetale, prediligo sportelli messi male
imbrattati e realizzo coperture di misura precisa.
Fa piacere vedere che spesso ora opere di altri artisti non piu sui muri ma su altri fondi.
Credo che l'esperiena di Firenze dimostri che è possibile creare un dialogo tra istituzioni ed artisti
la creazione di un regolamento sulla streetart dedicato
Quando hai iniziato ad abbellire la città di Foggia?
In occasione di un viaggio in Puglia a fine ottobre 201 , ho accompagnato un caro amico a Foggia ed ho approfittato dell'occasione per affiggere una dozzina di pezzi, tutti in zona Cattedrale. Un secondo passaggio a fine gennaio.
Una sera, uscendo da una pizzeria con un gruppo di amici, ho notato il tuo Freddy Mercury; i giorni successi ho notato altre delle tue opere: Dante Alighieri e poi il noto cantautore belga Stromae. Ho capito così che ne avrei trovato altre, ed è partita una vera caccia al tesoro per gli angoli della città. La tua arte mi ha spinto così a guardare lì dove non avrei mai guardato prima d'ora: vicoletti, stradine, angoli bassi e angoli alti. Punti in cui transitiamo ogni giorno, nell'incessante caos della vita, senza mai farci caso. E' forse questo uno degli scopi del tuo progetto? Lasciarci il tempo di soffermarci e guardare dove non avremmo mai guardato?
I centri storici italiani sono bellissimi, il decoro urbano raffora il senso d'identità delle comunità. Dare un esempio, strappare un sorriso, suscitare la domanda: ma chi è questa dama, chi l'ha dipinta, un modo per stimolare divertendo.
Quadri, cantanti, attori. Cos'altro dovremmo aspettarci per le vie della città?
Omaggi alle grandi icone del passato, personaggi che hanno fatto la storia, in positivo, copie dei quadri più suggestivi,
Quando hai cominciato a fare street art a Firenze?
When did you start doing street art in Florence?
Ho iniziato "per caso" fine del 2013 a Cadaquès, in Spagna, mentre mi trovavo in vacanza e senza pensare certo a cosa sarebbe avvenuto in seguito.
Dopo quanto tempo le persone hanno iniziato a notare la tua arte e hanno notato te come artista?
After how long did people start noticing your art and noticing you as an artist?
Da subito, non me lo aspettavo un riconoscimento così immediato, dopo il primo attacco in strada a Firenze mi hanno cercato, sia giornalisti che sui social, e pensare che non avevo neanche facebook o instagram..l' ho aperto poco dopo spinto da amici, sono un tipo molto riservato e non mi piace stare sotto i riflettori.
Perche' hai cominciato?
Why did you start?
In realtà non ho mai pensato di fare street art, come ti dicevo, ero in vacanza e degli amici mi hanno chiesto di dipingere lo sportello della luce che avevano proprio di fronte casa, perché è comune a Cadaquès ( paese di Dalì) che gli artisti locali ci dipingano soggetti marini.
Non mi andava di dipingere la classica marina, e non avevo idea di cosa fare.
Senza starci a pensare troppo, mi è venuta l'idea di dipingere il bambino dei miei amici che ti guarda attraverso una maschera da sub. Ed ecco il primo Blub!
L'idea è piaciuta ai miei amici di Firenze e mi hanno spinto a continuare a fare lo stesso anche qui. Ma per Firenze ho pensato di usare immagini che avessero un senso per la città, quindi fare soggetti rinascimentali con la maschera mi divertiva…da lì è nato il progetto L' arte Sa Nuotare.
Ci tengo a dirti che non avevo programmato niente, tutto è avvenuto in un continuo flusso quasi indipendentemente dal mio volere. Come se questo Blub volesse nascere per conto suo attraverso me.
Cosa cerchi di rappresentare con la tua arte?
What are you trying to represent with your art?
Si parla tanto di crisi, ed in effetti basta accendere la TV ( per questo l' ho buttata)o ascoltare le lamentele della gente per strada che ti prende male e ti frena, frena i tuoi sogni, i tuoi talenti..e così si vive nella paura, e quando si ha paura ci si blocca.
Ma sai che la parola CRISI in cinese viene messa come ideogramma accanto alla parola OPPORTUNITA'?
Questa cosa mi è sempre piaciuta, perché ti da il potere di capovolgere le situazioni a tuo favore..anzi la crisi o problema che hai di fronte nasconde dietro di sé una importante lezione o prova da superare, quindi di crescita personale. Questo approccio mentale ti rende anche libero e non più schiavo delle situazioni. Diventano porte aperte.
Noi si usa dire; siamo con l' acqua alla gola, ed io dico impariamo a nuotare.
Per questo uso le icone artistiche, esse fungono da archetipi dove c' è una parte di te che si rispecchia indipendentemente da quale parte del mondo tu sia…
Ricevi molte critiche per quello che fai?
Do you recieve criticism for what you do?
Non lo so, non direttamente, ma sicuramente sì…l' uomo non ce la fa a non criticare gli altri..purtroppo.
Ritieni che il tuo lavoro sia illegale?
Do you consider your work to be illegal?
Beh, assolutamente si…il mio fare street art è più un arredamento urbano…cura nell' usare solo sportelli malconci, quelli perfettini appena verniciati li lascio fare, cura di metterli della stessa misura dello sportello…fa in modo che vengano visti di buon occhio anche da parte delle istituzioni
Hai mai affrontato conseguenze gravi a causa della tua arte?
Have you ever faced harsh consequences for your art?
Per ora no.. incrocio le dita.
Quando trovi il tempo di trasformare le tue idee in realtà?
When do you find the time to turn your ideas into reality?
Dipingere è il mio lavoro..ma detto questo, sono istintivo, e se ho un' idea è meglio se la realizzo subito, altrimenti rimane solo un' idea.
Pensi che smetterai mai di lavorare sulla street art e sperimentare un'altra forma d'arte?
Do you think you will ever stop working on street art and experiment another form of art?
Penso che è meglio non pensare, le situazioni migliori che ho vissuto nella mia vita sono avvenute senza pianificarle troppo…la vita va da sé…la natura fa da sé.
Non avrei mai pensato di fare street art..e invece eccomi qua.
Possibilissimo che la smetta anche…
Se si, quale?
If yes, which one?
Boh??
Tutto quello che facciamo può divenire arte…se la facciamo ad arte.
1)Come è nata l'idea di far indossare delle maschere da sub a grandi opere d'arte?
È successo tutto per caso, senza pensarci, in Spagna nel ottobre 2013.
A Cadaqúes ho dipinto il Pinho, figlio di amici miei, quasi per gioco.
L'ho dipinto sullo sportello del gas di fronte all' abitazione dei miei amici. A Cadaques è comune trovare sportelli dipinti dagli artisti locali, per di più con paesaggi marini, gli sportelli delle utenze.
Rientrato a Firenze, spinto da amici, dipinto la Monnalisa, La Dama con L'ermellino e Leonardo...per poi attaccarli in strada.
la notte del 5/6 novembre 2013, i cittadini di Oltrarno del quartiere di San Niccolò si svegliarono trovando una sorpresa. Alcuni sportelli dei servizi dell'acqua e del gas erano "ricoperti" da copie di dipinti firmati Blub. Ciascuna opera aveva le stesse caratteristiche del Pinho: maschera subacquea, bolle d'aria, e un colore di sfondo "classico" BLU. La notte tra il 4 e il 5 novembre 2013, era anche l'anniversario dell'inondazione a Firenze, fu la mia prima uscita notturna, senza neanche sognarmi di cosa o che effetto avrebbe avuto dalla gente.
Solo a distanza di settimane, ho realizzato che questa azione, agiva beneficamente...
_Ti ricordi il clima di quel periodo? "Sconforto, ondate di paura, lo spettro della crisi economica, una diffusa aria di disagio e di sconforto... tutto da trasformare in resilienza*
Ecco la trasformazione di uno sportello "anonimo" e deturpato in un arredo urbano grazie ad un omaggio ad icona storica. Con l'effetto di cambiamento netto di percezione su strada, una botta di colore, una sorpresa e subito un sorriso ..._
....un attimo di leggerezza, stimolato da un'opera d'arte, che però poi può trasformarsi in riflessione ... che si può guardare avanti a testa alta, sicuri che questa crisi incombente possa trasformarsi in una grande opportunità...come lo sanno fare molto bene le crisi.
Per questo ho iniziato a fare streetart. Io dipingevo già dal secolo scorso ... ;-)
2)E la frase "L'arte sa nuotare"? Forse l'arte come possibile via di salvezza?
Subito un sorriso, un attimo di leggerezza, poi le riflessioni più profonde.
Leggi questo articolo, mi rappresenta: "lo spirituale nell'arte come necessità"
vasilij-kandinskij-lo-spirituale-nellarte-come-necessita/
Non solo, l'arte è un ponte tra noi e la spiritualita, il divino
qualsiasi forma di arte (n.b: il pane fatto ad arte) fatta con amore, produce effetti positivi.
3) e tue opere prediligono, come collocazione, i piccoli sportelli che chiudono contatori enel e affini. Perché questa scelta?
Perchè l'arredo urbano di Cadaques, meritava di essere provato anche nei centri storici dei comuni toscani.
Degli sportelli anonimi, malmessi, danneggiati, arruggini, ... inosservati. Lo sai che nel cortile di Palazo Vecchio ne conti 13, di cui almeno 4 assolutamente selezionabili per realizzarci un Blub?
Pensa ad una coppia De Medici, posizionata sui due sportelli divisi dalla fontana, nel cortile secondario.
Ecco, un omaggio alla mia città, l'amministrazione lo gradisse, me lo sentirei di lasciarlo.
4)Come scegli i personaggi a cui far indossare il boccaglio?
Scelgo personaggi archetipi dell'arte, facilmente riconoscibili, che hanno manifestato un talento nella loro esistenza. Esseri umani che hanno comunicato attraverso l'arte, al mondo.
5) Nell'ottobre del 2016 il Comune di Firenze aveva approvato nuove e più "tolleranti" regole in materia di street art: 30 spazi liberi per i murales e i graffiti e anche spazi d'arte, dove il Comune con bandi ad hoc avrebbe permesso di realizzare grandi opere sul modello di quelle di Blu, Banksy, Keith Haring. A tutt'oggi il regolamento è fermo lì, non è stato attuato. In principio la difficoltà di individuare le aree, processo non ancora concluso e da cui per il momento è stata tolta l'area Unesco. Sono poi saltate fuori complicazioni legali: in caso di aree pubbliche da mettere a bando occorre rispettare le regole di sicurezza sui cantieri, prevedere sgravi per il suolo pubblico. Procedure non banali dal punto di vista burocratico. Cosa ne pensi?
... penso che smontare due sportelli di Palazzo Vecchio, e farmeli recapitare sia impresa da poco.
Riceverli indietro e montarli di nuovo, sia ugualmente fattibile.
Ecco, una volta visti montati, diciamo lasciati visibili al pubblico per un breve periodo, qualunque decisione venisse presa (lasciati o smontati e messi in un armadio chiuso) la accetterei senza fiatare. A fare l'omaggio, però, ci terrei davvero.
Allo stesso modo, mi farebbe piacere che anche la querelle con Clet, si concludesse con tanto buon senso.
Che il Comune chieda l'autorizzazione per collocare l'uomo comune su ponte alle Grazie e che il Comune accetti in dono l'opera dall'artista. Clet è un artista francese che ha scelto di vivere a Firenze, Clet è un amico.(Petizione, raccolta fondi per pagare multa etc etc)
IL rapporto tra gli artisti e la città direi è morboso. Pochi conoscono la città come gli artisti che la percorrono in lungo ed in largo. C'e grande rispetto per Firenze, nostro patrimonio prima che patrimonio dell'Unesco.
Tra gli artisti, è innata l'attenzione per l'intervento mirato (Vai al sasso di Dante, pensa al David di Anche vicino all'Accademia) ed il dibattito ull'uso delle colle vegetali è aperto da oltre un anno.
Poi, in qualche strada come via Toscanella, In alcuni stretti chiassi, nella Firenze nascosta, alcuni interventi sui muri
graditi e richiesti dagli abitanti e dalle attività commerciali. Piccoli tratti cittadini, strade buie e prive di interesse, pensa a via del gomitolo dell'oro in zona mercato centrale.
Mi vien voglia di chiederti se Firenze merita un percorso di street art ...
6)Nelle strade del centro di Torino invece delle panchine e fiorere antiterrorismo sono state Adottate barriere artistiche con opere di street artist. Cosa ne pensi? Questo sistema non poteva essere adottato anche a Firenze?
Geniale e replicabile ovunque. Resilienza.
7)Come definiresti la scena della street art fiorentina?
"Il nuovo Rinascimento"
#UNITYWANTED https://www.instagram.com/p/BNwv2fWFuF5/?taken-at=190660801387118
ed ancora #carlabru (quella della locandina del queer) #8Nian8 #Incursionidecorative #Animelle tutte giovani/o meno giovani donne
Grande rispetto e stima per tutti, compresi coloro che non approvano il mio stile di streetart (Informo che il Courbet di Piazza Ognisanti, Il Leonardo di Piaza felicità, tutti gli angeli di Oltrarno, sono restaurati a mano...)
Così come i salvataggi di Presto di San Martino e via Maffia, li ho fatti volentieri....
8)La mostra espone opere di street art di contenuto queer. Che rapporto c'è tra street art e il tema dell'omosessualità? Non mi sembra che ricorra come argomento di opere di street art, o è vero il contrario?
Il rapporto che c'è tra la streetart, o arte in generale, e l'umanità in genere...con o senza omosessualità.
E poi...non sapevo che si dovesse seguire un argomento per fare arte/streetart/musica..ecc..ecc..
Cmq, espongo Armani, Freddie, Leonardo da Vinci ed il personaggio nuovo, tutti personaggi queer...
(O forse non ho capito la domanda?)
9)Raccontaci la tua opera che sarà esposta alle Murate?
Metallica/colorata!!
10)C'è chi definisce la street art eccesivamente "machista". Che ne pensi?
Mah....non ho pregiudizi. Ahahah
11) Tu hai fatto il grande salto: come Clet, disponi di una galleria dove è possibile acquistare le tue opere. Perché questa scelta? Per i duri e puri la street art inizia e finisce per la strada, non in opere da mettere in vendita.
Sì certo, un salto nel vuoto ... hahaha
Fino al 2015 ho ciondolato, si dice a Firenze.
Dal 2015, sospinto dalle persone, aiutato da estranei entusiasti di questi miei istintivi interventi, ho iniziato a mettermi in gioco davvero. Ma non esattamente come Clet, anzi.
Io vendo le mie opere da solo, dipingo un solo originale per soggetto.
Dal 2015 ho iniziato ad uscire da Firenze, ed ho eseguito interventi in numerosi comuni toscani, da Sansepolcro a Pontremoli, passando da Arezzo, San Gimignano, Monteriggioni, Lucca Pisa. Poi sono uscito dalla Toscana, sono Passato dalla Sardegna al Piemonte, Dal Veneto all'Emilia Romagna, alla Puglia. Ho visitato Alghero, Torino, Rimini, Foggia Venezia Ferrara Burano. In alcune città dove passo, mi appoggio e lascio in una galleria, copie delle mie opere.
12)C'è chi sostiene che esporre opere di street art in una mostra significa snaturarle. Tu che ne pensi?
Per me street art è condividere, a mie spese, una opera che sarebbe appannaggio di un solo unico acquirente.
L'opera che presenterò domani, è a New York da oltre 5 settimane...., non presento l'opera alle murate per venderla, l'opera è già venduta. Partecipo perchè invitato, perchè il soggetto yankee del quadro, merita una "presentazione" a Firenze... perchè ancora una volta, mi auguro di incassare sorrisi a raffica per le strade della città...
1. Come le è venuta l'idea delle maschere da sub?
Tutto è nato nella tarda estate 2013 in Spagna a Cadaques, per caso, accogliendo una richiesta di una famiglia
del posto. Ebbi una ispirazzione, favorita dal luogo incantevole, il buon vino con la luna che si rispecchiava nella baia.
Dipinsi in uno sportello della loro recinzione esterna l'immagine di un bambino riccioluto con la naschera da sub
ispirandomi al loro figlio.
Rientrato a Firenze, per gioco, ho mascherato la Gioconda, poi la Dama con l'ermellino, infine Leonardo da Vinci.
La mia prima triade di opere.
Su stimolo di amici, scansionai le opere ed una notte, in loro compagnia, per la prima volta, le attaccai
negli sportelli esterni nel quartiere di San Niccolò a Firenze, il quartiere degli artisti. Era il 5 novembre 2013
nella nostra semplicità era un modo per ricordare l'alluvione ed il salvataggio di Firenze e delle sue opere
dalle acque che avevano sommerso la città. "L'arte non affoga" divenne quel giorno "L'arte sa nuotare".
2. Qual è stato il suo primo lavoro?
Ho mascherato la Gioconda, poi la Dama con l'ermellino, infine Leonardo da Vinci.
La mia prima triade di opere.
3. Da allora come mai niente più dipinti realizzati direttamente sui muri?
Ho sempre dipinto su tela, mai sui muri.
Il confine tra arte e streetart (comprensiva del vasto mondo dei writers) come quello tra centro e periferia della città, è spesso soggettivo.
Personalmente fin dall'inizio ho scelto gli sportelli, uso colla totalmente vegetale, prediligo sportelli già "conciati male"
imbrattati e realizzo coperture di misura precisa.
Fa piacere vedere che spesso ora le opere di altri artisti non sono piu sui muri.
Credo che l'esperien<a di Firenze dimostri che è possibile creare un dialogo tra istituzioni ed artisti
In questo senso ho appreato la creazione di un regolamento sulla streetart dedicato ed auspico che anche a Firenze ci siano strade dedicate, un pò come a Barcellona ed in altre città europee.
4. Personaggi storici, quadri famosi, artisti, attori del cinema, perfino calciatori: lei rappresenta davvero di tutto. Come sceglie i suoi soggetti?
....
5. Cosa vuole esprimere dando ai suoi personaggi una maschera da sub?
Nonostante le difficoltà, la crisi , se riusciamo a valorizzare il nostro Paese e le sue bellezze, se ci ispiriamo alla nostra cultura secolare, è possibile andare avanti, migliorare e trasformare la crisi in opportunità. L'invito è quello di porsi di fronte alla realtà, con un altro spirito, di imparare a vedere oltre, sempre con un sorriso.
6. Continuerà con le maschere o pensa che troverà altri modi per esprimere il suo messaggio?
Si, la maschera come mezzo per trasformare le nostre paure ed ansie in fiducia e positività.
7. Prevede che saremo ancora "con l'acqua alla gola", come i protagonisti dei suoi dipinti?
L'acqua alla gola non fa paura, se l'arte sa nuotare....
8. Crede che la gente conosca i suoi lavori più perché li ha incontrati per strada o grazie al web?
Credo che le persone, si interessino a Blub solo dopo averlo incontrato per strada. I social sono per me solo un modo per far sapere che ho realizzato una nuova opera, ma mi rendo conto grazie al contributo dei miei amici di Blubfriends di aere molto seguito nel web. Fa piacere.
9.Qual è il futuro per gli artisti emergenti? Strade fisiche o digitali?
10. Perché ha sentito la necessità di esprimersi legando direttamente i suoi lavori ad un luogo? Cadaqués, Roma e poi Firenze (mi scuso se ho dimenticato qualche città) Come mai questi sono i luoghi dei suoi dipinti? Quanto la influenza la città in cui si trova?
Nella mia prima risposta, trovi il "Fil rouge". A Cadaques, in vacanza, il primo Blub. A Firenze perchè è la mia città.
La mia ambizione è quella di visitare tante città in molte regioni.
Firenze il mio teatro naturale poi Cadaques Londra, Bruxelles Roma Sansepolcro Torino Foggia Lucca Pisa
11.Protetto dal suo anonimato, le è mai capitato di appostarsi per vedere la reazione delle persone?
Se sì: com'è andata?
Se no: pensa che un giorno lo farebbe?
Non mi sono mai appostato. Camminando per strada, mi capita spesso come comune cittadino di incontrare persone ferme a scattare una foto, a commentare il soggetto e non ti nascondo che mi fa sempre molto piacere, vedere le persone sorridere ed apprezzare, divertendosi.
Talk us about your personal experience, about some troubles you've had to fight with in some point of your career, such us prohibitions or complains of the administration of the cities you've made an artwork in. Have they ever been removed from the support?
I am born as an artist, I paint for years on the road and only for a few years, by chance,
I also become streetartist. I am very careful when I work, I like to improve, not to get worse.
For now, the administrations do not complain, though, in some cases they will ring and congratulate.
It happened without thinking about it, in Spain in September 2013. It started in play. It went on for a game back in Florence. This time thinking about it, I started in the night between 4 and 5 November 2013, the anniversary of the flood in Florence.
Art can swim ...
The motivations over time have increased. At first a game, then a tribute to my city, a message of hope in a complicated, difficult time, crisis.
The desire to tear a smile on my fellow citizens, the desire to convey the thought that crisis can become an opportunity.
Knowing how to express on the road, as a study, demonstrates the artist's multi-faceted ability. Come on, the streetart. The study, academic or self-taught, is always at the base of the works.
My experience is communal, regional, national, and European. As far as I'm concerned, I have never considered streetart vandalism in Florence, although some posters are removed by building owners, or some works on the walls are being wiped and the walls repainted.Many wall paintings in Florence are still respected for years. It depends on the type of intervention, the area of the city, the invasiveness of the work.
A multiple question that I try to answer clearly. If the work or artist deserves it, it is also fair to bring it and expose it to a museum. That said, the road itself can become a museum, and the work gets the proper protection where it is located. For example Keith Haring Murale Tuttomondo/ If you think so well, I'm trying to make the reverse. I'm trying to bring the most famous works from museums to the streets.
I have in mind a great collaboration project with museums and their book shop, which would answer a number of multiple requests. As soon as I start I will talk to you with pleasure.
I know that behind a graffiti there is a character study. It is a form of art that respect, passage. Your TAG is the first way to express yourself. All right. To be artists though, then it needs to evolve. After the affirmation of your ego, what do you have to say?
Everything that emotions deserves. The difference between the two forms is just one. Learning about academic art, you know that you will meet it, often travel to see it. Street art, takes you by surprise, is unexpected. You do not know the author, you have to inform.
Right from the start, I carefully chosen where to put my works. The selection of the road, and in the street, of the most suitable door has always been important. In the last year and a half, leaving Florence, I have always carefully prepared my art insemination in other Italian cities. Urban furniture, tribute to a character dedicated to that city, education to the beautiful, joy of the children in search of them around the city. In Firenze I'm not the only one to use posters, many other streetartists use this technique and many of us use natural herbs. Florence is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
No. There are two distant things.
Yes, I know attempts to regulate streetart. In Florence a few months ago, the municipal administration approved a regulation dedicated to streetart. Me and other artists are in contact with some of the administration's representatives and we are discussing how to select some downtown streets, now degraded or available to welcome works. Another argument on the table, only the windows and the doors closed of palaces not bound by the superintendence. The idea is to apply the Barcelona model, suggested by Rebobinart, with whom I have been in contact for about a year.
Yes, sure. I will paint in Barcelona at the end of this year. Rebobinart, they are currently working on a project called "Wallspot" (previously "Murs Lliures" which means "Free Walls" in Catalan). "Wallspot" is a system (website + phone application) which manages the walls on which it is possible to paint legally in Barcelona. The artists choose a wall in the list proposed by the application and the system gives them a booking. Then, the artists can used the software to upload pictures and to share their works. This system is available for everyone. Their objective is to democratize the urban art and to extend internationally this system.
In order to understand better their project, I invite you to watch this video
'Tea and Coffee will be served'
A survey in space and time
J A Braithwaite Tea and Coffee Merchants, Dundee.
Trading for 150 years.
The architect Sarah Wrigglesworth has informed the way in which Will Knight has developed his ongoing investigations of domestic, commercial and industrial buildings through recording, measurement and drawing by hand. She comments that, 'To capture something as large as a building on the size of a piece of paper, architects work to a reduced scale, using symbols and codes to represent the world'. She has considered, as Will has, 'How to use the conventions of architectural drawings to describe space as a lived experience rather than as a static or predictable moment of perfection'.
In it's 150th year of trading, J. A Braithwaite is a family owned and run independent business, a Tea and Coffee Merchant located on Castle Street, Dundee. The project seeks to carefully record the shop's rich interior, a space that has evolved and adapted over time. The study seeks to sensitively capture the site as it is today, between it's past, and before it's future; and in doing so, to inform and enrich both. The timeline seeks to record the span of history the shop has traversed, through the prism of a single family, and business, in the context of a city, country and world.
In isolating the shop from its context through the act of drawing and writing, might we also be able to celebrate this space in isolation, as architectural form, as a stage set for life; set apart from history, politics, economics, trade and nostalgia, development and potential, and yet simultaneously and conversely, see the interior as symbolic to all of these. A product of now; a comma in time to inform and instruct in the narrative of Dundee.
Will completed his Masters in Architecture at Glasgow School of Art's Mackintosh School of Architecture in 2014. During his studies he developed his drawing and recording process through conventional architectural means, whilst also depicting space as a lived in and inhabited experience.
After graduation he worked in both commercial and creative Architectural Practices while pursuing drawing practice.
Since 2016 Will has focused exclusively on drawing projects, exhibitions and private commissions including Stravaigin Restaurant, Glasgow, and a recent residency with the Royal Drawing School at Dumfries House in Ayrshire.
‘Which Wife are You?’ by Lydia Morrow represents an ongoing body of work that looks at the artist’s attempt to reclaim her identity as a new mother. Exploring the shift of focus from one’s self to one’s child, Lydia shows baby jumpers for her son which were made in an attempt to gain back structure, sanity and a sense of self through art and design practice. Finding herself in a struggle to relate to either of the titles ‘mother’ and ‘artist’, Lydia attempts to visibly take ownership of her postpartum body through the creation of wearable artworks.
Biography: Born in America and raised in Scotland, Lydia Morrow studied Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of art. Considering her processes of crochet, embroidery, and dressmaking as a more effective form of mark-making than those of her degree, she embraces craft and design as aspects of her fine art practice. In 2018 Lydia has featured in the Royal Scottish Academy’s ‘New Contemporaries’ exhibition and Peckham Craft Weekend, a part of London Craft Week. Having recently had a baby, Lydia has spent the last year and a half exploring her role as an artist and a parent, wrestling with the upheaval that pregnancy and motherhood has had in her life and work.
For more information, please visit the;
Artist's Statement
Self-identity is ambiguous, and often only the fabrication of the selfie.
The photographic element of my work explores how our pain influences the formation of self-identity. These wounds construct negative habits and patterns, illustrated by the strings. The resulting form is often complex and painful.
The second layer of the work is the object of colour; the construct of the identity that we feel at the moment.
Our true self-identity lives somewhere between that which we know and that which we do not know. It is a messy construct.
For more information, please downoad the attached PDF or visit algroenart.com
Artist Website and essay:
Artist's Statement
Playing With Soft Hands is an exhibition of new sculptures and paintings by Valerie Norris. They are a continuation of Norris' ongoing practice and consider ideas around femininity, feminism, care and fragility.
The sculptural works in particular were made specifically for the Nomas* Projects window spaces, however in both these and in the paintings the artist is also thinking through cultural and societal notions of display, desire, value, love and identity.
The works evolve from an accumulation of found objects, imagery and text which are gathered by the artist from a wide variety of sources including popular culture, charity shops, the natural world, literature, poetry and everyday detritus. From this, a complex web of chance relationships, themes and associations builds organically to form a personal visual language. Improvisation and intuitive decision-making are used to experiment with and explore the spaces between the physical world, language and imagination.
Valerie Norris was born in Paisley and lives and works in Dundee. She completed both a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Printmaking and a Master of Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Previous exhibitions and projects include You hardboiled I softboiled, Rhubaba, Edinburgh; Bust Out, Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie (part of Glasgow International 2016); L’Heure Bleue, Meadow Mill, Dundee; Marble dusting / Fixed satin, Meadow Mill, Dundee; Bluette, limited edition publication commissioned by Dundee Contemporary Arts; Trusted Time, HALLE 14, Leipzig, Germany; Studio Jamming Group Critical Writing Residency and 12-Hour Jamming Symposium, Cooper Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee; Axisweb Writing Scotland programme 2012, in partnership with CCA, Glasgow and this is tomorrow; Closer to the lips, word perfect, Glasgow Project Room; I take into my arms more than I can bear to hold, Generator Projects, Dundee; Works on Paper and Other Works: Alex Frost, Valerie Norris, David Shrigley, Sue Tompkins, Glasgow Project Room.
Artist Website: www.valerienorris.tumblr.com
Artist's Statement
Pictures of greasy food, certain ceramic figurines, the eighties. I get a large part of my inspiration from an eclectic mix of things, things that are slightly repelling and therefore exquisite. Being fascinated is the starting point of my artistic practice, that and honing in on the overlooked. Attentiveness can reveal surroundings that are rich in strange and fascinating details. From the thin clear plastic bag dancing in the air on a summer afternoon, to a neatly placed pair of shoes in the middle of a busy road (the why of which I'll never know).
Photography is one way to extract this richness; words are another. I use words to build new 'spaces' (i.e. texts) that can be read or performed. I like that words are immanently portable, the ultimate building material. By installing texts in the urban environment, for example, I'm making linguistic spaces that raise more questions then they answer. They become points at which to wonder; they become points at which to question (and therefore potentially remake) one's surroundings.
Bio
Claire Yspol works across writing, photography, intervention, artist publishing and more, to playfully interrogate the complexities of being among objects and other systems. Her work has appeared in the Artist’s Book Yearbook 2018/2019 and in East Bristol Contemporary's Rung Magazine. Born in the Netherlands, Claire attended the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam and has received an MFA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Scotland.
Artist Websites:
Generations
Vagner Mendonça Whitehead (USA/Brazil)
November 6, 2018 at 10:00 am until November 30, 2018 at 4:00 pm
A five channel video work for public space, Generations, by Vagner Mendonça Whitehead brings together videos made in roughly ten-year intervals, presenting two unintentional similarities (1998 and 2009), one intentional reaction to current times (2018), one reflection of a time past (1973-93), and one speculation of the future (2039). All videos present the same head-and-shoulder figure of the artist, as an antidote to our ever-present talking heads on video screens. Intended to be seen in a public space, Generations is displayed in chronological order (left to right, 1973-2039), although viewers will encounter each video-channel randomly, depending on how they approach them, much like encountering someone at different points in their lives.
About the Artist
Vagner Mendonça Whitehead’s practice encompasses traditional and newer media art-making, curatorial projects and creative writings on visual culture. His artworks display accidental and forced intersections of personal experiences, histories, geo-locations, languages, and found artifacts, and manifest themselves through traditional and new media pieces, presented extensively in group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums, as well as film and video festivals, nationally and internationally (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Canada, China, Cyprus, Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Russia, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom). His writings unravel similar media/visual encounters in the form of critical and poetic essays.
Recent art projects have dealt with metaphorical representations and interpretations of flight and flying; his most recent published essay unpacked the “selfie” as a cultural phenomenon for sighting, siting, and citing.
Supported by Texas Woman’s University College of Arts and Sciences
Image Credit: Vagner Mendonça Whitehead
Artist's Website: * vagnerwhitehead.com
Cactus Ed Takes Flight (A Re-incarnation in Consciousness)
Faith Limbrick and Aaron B. Casey
Artist Statement:
This here highfalutin specimen of desert literature, known here forth as Cactus Ed Takes Flight (a Re-incarnation in Consciousness), was inspired by the legendary desert rat, desert anarchist and desert sage, Edward Abbey (Cactus Ed), whose writings, musings and ramblings constitute some of the finest desert literature of the post-bellum era. A slayer of sacred cows, an iconoclast and a man of startling contradictions, Ed Abbey’s calls to arms and engagement in the face of excessive industrialism and destruction of wilderness have proven prophetic, and like the best literature, have only become more relevant with the passing of time (Abbey died in 1989). He often wrote about the turkey vulture, that sage scavenger of desert skies, suggesting that if he were to be re-incarnated, a feller could do a lot worse than a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura). Epochs spent ridin’ the thermals would allow for ample time to contemplate and observe. A visceral existence, and a useful one at that, cleansing the land of carrion and death. In The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey imagined the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam. He believed that the dam had destroyed a desert Eden as well as the heart of the Colorado River. Cactus Ed Takes Flight (a Re-incarnation in Consciousness) is adapted from the as yet unpublished novel This Land Will Eat a Man Alive by Aaron B. Casey (pen name A. J. Buffoon). I like the idea of the turkey vulture being able to soar into outer space, perhaps as an omniscient observer, able to see the forest for the trees. Our species’ myopic destruction of the planet as well as our anthropocentric world view must be checked. We need to look at the Bigger Picture and perhaps lift our gaze beyond cityscape, feed lot, steel tower and screen. To reconsider our current endeavor towards self-destruction and ecological omnicide. We need to learn, in the words of Aldo Leopold, to think like a mountain.
Faith's bio:
Faith Limbrick (b.UK) is an artist and filmmaker based in Edinburgh. She moved to Scotland to study Intermedia at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 2012. Her work involves prop making, sound design and paper sculpture. Her work investigates the functions of the imagination, its relationship to buildings, landscape and narrative. From 2015-17 Faith was a committee member at Rhubaba, an artist led project space in Edinburgh. She was involved in collectively programming the gallery’s project space alongside running the studios
Aaron's Bio:
Aaron B. Casey is a sometime desert rat currently based in Edinburgh. He writes essays about wilderness and the American Southwest, weaving history, folklore, myth, natural history, geology and the occasional polemic about industrial civilization, with tales (tall and true) from the road, the trail and yonder desert mountain overlooking the cities on the plain.
Artist's Website: * faithlimbrick.co.uk
Miriam Mallalieu
Artist Statement:
My art practice explores the idea of ‘making sense’. I am interested in what knowledge is and how things are understood, looking specifically at methods of catalogue, organisation, archiving and curation, and significantly, the structures of power that this knowledge creates and upholds. My work explores the conflict within organisation: to order things in one way is to disorder them in another. I am interested in the subversion of ideas of truth, and exploration of alternative understandings in art of time, linearity and logic.
My practice is usually sculptural monuments to the ordering of material: things are arranged, they are placed into sequence and they are observed. Often the material is fragments or remains: paper, spiderwebs, dead insects, dust, bits of rag - things that are overlooked. They are placed into frames or boxes, elevated into inscrutable objects of importance.
Biography
Miriam Mallalieu is an artist based in Dundee. She has just started a practice-based PhD at Dundee University after receiving the Queens College Scholarship. Miriam Mallalieu completed an MFA in Art and Humanities from DJCAD in 2017, and a BA(hons) in Art, Philosophy and Contemporary Practices in 2012. Mallalieu has exhibited regularly in Scotland, particularly at Hidden Door festival in Edinburgh between 2013-2017, and internationally in Europe and the US. Mallalieu has received many prizes for her work, including the John Kinross Scholarship in 2017 and the RSA Prize and Watters-Maclane Medal from the Royal Scottish Academy in 2013.
Artist's Webpages:
Mhairi Cormack
Artist Statement:
Mhairi Cormack is a contemporary artist from Glasgow currently based in Dundee. Cormack graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 2018 with a degree in Fine Art.
Drawing upon her own experiences with mental health, Cormack explores the idea of escapism, creating alternate worlds through the medium of collage. This ongoing series of work invites the viewer to look through the window into the mind of a stranger. The juxtaposition created between opposing elements in her work represents Cormack’s variety of thoughts, which combine into a mesh of ideas and feelings.
Cormack’s collages are constructed from a mix of materials, including found imagery, magazines and personal photographs. This brings a new dimension to her practice as she plays with texture and depth, whilst also acknowledging the multiple connotations of her pieces. Ultimately, Cormack aims to showcase the fantastical, suggesting that immersive practices can help within the world of mental health.
Artist's Webpage:
Sue Beveridge
Artist Statement:
‘Cut Stitch’ is a series of 5 cross-stitches by Sue Beveridge on the theme of Female Genital Mutilation (F.G.M.) It is based on the idea of samplers that mothers traditionally make when their children are born. Using these engaging and exposing pieces in a non-confrontational way, she is aiming to raise public awareness about the issue of F.G.M.
They feature British and African images highlighting the cross-cultural issues found with F.G.M. Three of them are challenging some commonly held myths about F.G.M. and the other two show the cross-stitch in its original state and then in a distressed form.
This latter one was the subject of a film that Sue showed as part of her final Masters exhibition at DJCAD in 2017. It shows her ripping up the writing with a razor blade and a needle.
She would like to thank Julie Fielding , Sam Phillips and Suzie Marr with their help creating and sewing the cross-stitches.
Sue Beveridge is a socially engaged artist. She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art with a degree in Sculpture in 2012 and an MFA in Art, Society & Publics from DJCAD in 2017. Her aim is for her art to be transformative, not only for herself but for the viewer and participants and for it to make a positive difference to people’s lives. Her work falls into two strands. The first area of her practice is responding to the human rights issue of Female Genital Mutilation, the subject of this exhibition. Her second area of interest is in working with bread dough, specifically looking into the benefits of using bread dough as art therapy. This combines her previous work as a counsellor with her experience of this medium. She has conducted workshops with special needs and socially deprived clients and plans to continue exploring the value of bread dough therapy.
Poster Image Credit: Jonathan Liddell
Artist's Webpage:
Sekai Machache
Artist's Statement
Unhu: ‘I am because we are and since we are, therefore, I am’ (1)
The traditional Shona society celebrates connectedness and cohesion. The society does not elevate the individual and does not see him/her as solitary and unbound. Unhu is a social philosophy that embraces the ethical values of generosity, consideration and humanity towards others and community. Mutual assistance, humility, industriousness, co-operation, hospitality, solidarity and social cohesion.
Unhu is a culmination of three separate series: Kin, Mashavi and Invocation. Each series denotes fractured aspects of self that have been carefully and slowly reintegrated into a cohesive whole. An expression of a self that is imbued with a new understanding of the significance of the collective.
Kin explores themes of belonging and is accompanied by the following text:
Kin Awareness of a systematic categorisation that leads to Disdain occurs cause “all skin folk ain’t”, affiliated, interconnected. Confrontation occurs when relations break down and Blood begets blood begets direct confrontation Are we the same? Or are we individual players Do we inhabit the same flesh? Or is that what we have been classified as Kin
This is the first time that any images from Kin have been exhibited.
Mashavi
Mashavi is a series of photographic images that developed out of the continuation of an ongoing project of analysis and investigation into what it means to be a practising black artist in the western art world. In Shona culture ideas of consciousness are underpinned by the concept of spirit. Wondering spirits of people who died far from home are referred to as ‘shavi’. These spirits are neither good nor bad but are able to possess the living and can influence their lives in a positive or negative way.
The word ‘Mashavi’ is the plural of shavi and indicates the presence of more than one spirit or points to a duality within the individual psyche. My undergraduate dissertation titled Blackness in Contemporary Art questioned whether blackness is a hindering factor in the creative process of artists of colour. Mashavi illustrates this question visually with the shavi (or spirit) representing a splitting of the psyche in reference to W.E.B Dubois’s notion of double consciousness.(2)
This first instalment of this ongoing series was made in collaboration with artist Bryndis Blackadder who helped me to capture the images and software engineer/designer Antanas Budvytis who helped to composite them.
Images from the series were displayed at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh and Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries as part of the Jill Todd Award in 2015.
They were subsequently displayed at St Andrews Museum and Kirkcaldy Museum respectively in the Ethics in Aesthetics: Living in a Material World exhibition.
Invocation
Society sees black women as strong, powerful, brave, angry and difficult while failing to see their humanity or allowing for them to be seen as vulnerable, gentle, open and compassionate like their white counterparts. There are parallels that can be drawn here with the Hindu goddess Parvati and her dark aspect/incarnation of Kali. Symbolically invoking the goddess Kali in this photographic series was a way for me to bring to the fore the contradictions and inherent biases that are present in societies’ representations of black women.
Using colour, form and performative hand gestures similar to the Mudras used in yoga and meditation I intended to process these ideas through a figurative incantation. An open palm facing upwards can denote fearlessness and protection while a downward facing palm means charity and compassion. The series of photographs follow a pattern of 7 stages that form a story from the beginning of the invocation to the final meditative pose that denotes a sort of equilibrium and embodiment of peace.
This series was first exhibited at the Institute Moreira Salles in Sao Paolo Brazil in November 2018.
1 John Mbiti quote
2 The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B Dubois
Artist Bio:
Sekai Machache (b.1989) is based in Dundee, Scotland. Her work is a deep interrogation of the notion of self. Having been born in Zimbabwe and raised in Scotland, she has a particular interest in W.E.B Dubois’ notion of Double Consciousness, which expresses the psychological challenge of having African heritage whilst living in the West. Working in a multi-disciplinary practice, Sekai works with a wide range of media including but not exclusive to photography. Her photographic practice is mostly formulated through digital studio based compositions utilising body paint and muted lighting conditions, to create images that appear to emerge from darkness. Sekai is a founding and organising member of the Yon Afro Collective.
Artist's Webpage:
ARTIST'S TALK. Sunday 27 October, Platform Arts, Riverside Drive, Dundee, DD1 4BX, 4.00pm-5.30pm
Kathryn Rattray
Artist's Statement
‘Inside Outside’ amplifies the voices of women who are, or have been, involved in the sex industry in Scotland. These are voices not often heard in the mainstream press, and often drowned out on social media.’ (http://www.insideoutsidescotland.info/)
Gold is Kathryn Rattray’s latest installation for Inside Outside Scotland commissioned by the Nomas* Projects, Dundee. This multi-media installation is simplistic yet breathtaking, merging the ideas of light, weightlessness, falling, spinning and decomposition. A reflective and thought provoking trajectory which allows the viewer to slip into the mind of the mask. The masks’ white innocence hauntingly gaze out at you. Muted and silenced, all they can do is sway and spin. Like a mind dealing with trauma, each window holds a secret.
The installation begins with a white mask encased with soft white feathers, ethereal they hang heavenly, they are both weightless and frozen in time, protecting and shielding. A gentle reminder of who has gone before us and like the memories of your podgy hand as a child, blowing a feather into the wind carrying wishes, hopes and dreams.
The central windows are made up of three blank masks doused in coloured lights. The vacant masks hang like butchers meat waiting to be picked, wrapped taken home and stripped to the bone. These impressionable masks are naive to the industry, prime targets, ready to be groomed and dehumanized as they hope for the better life of an empty promise.
Painfully, the corner window represents the pimp, the hustler, the dealer and the trafficker. The golden mask of deceit is used by these people as they execute the lure of riches to strip the mask bare. Bound, tied, cold and hungry the masks are forced into a life of abuse. The golden mask floats above the checkered floor, which is a nod in the direction of the elite who wield power and control to buy the masks as a commodity to use, abuse and sell for their own gratification.
The Mirrors allow you to be part of the installation and interact vicariously as you look inside looking outside, a narcissists dream perhaps. The golden mask is crowned with fresh blood red roses that will slowly wilt and decompose, this is symbolic of our fragility. The less you care, the less you nurture the faster decomposition sets in.
Finally, there are white masks floating around the golden mask, it’s a representation that with every human involved in prostitution their human rights are negated, they are metaphorically flogged and hung by the sinister perpetrators of their crimes wearing the golden mask.
Artist Bio:
Kathryn Rattray is visual artist from Dundee. She works as a freelance photographer and is an emerging installation artist in her own right. Kathryn obtained a BA (Hons) in Marketing and Management from the University of Abertay in 2000 and on graduating spent the next two and half years living in Tokyo. Kathryn is self-taught in all aspects of her photography and artist's practice.
Over the past decade Kathryn has worked extensively across her home town of Dundee where she has established herself as a photographer working in the arts. During this time Kathryn has created a diverse and extensive portfolio as well as being commissioned to undertake a large body of commercial and private client work. Her photographs have been represented online, in art magazines, books and other media. The arts are her passion and she excels when engaged in this field. Her style is bold and contemporary with an exceptional use of colour and her admiration of the changing nature of light is central to how she creates her work.
In May this year she was invited by Swiss Art Expo Art Fair to exhibit with the ARTBOX/PROJECT in Zurich, this saw her exhibit for the first time outside Scotland. Her next trip with the ARTBOX PROJECTS to Miami this December, where she will be exhibiting her work in Wynwood Art District of Miami as part of Miami Art | Basel 2019.
Kathryn lives in Dundee with her two children Daisy and Jacob, she spends her free time filling their lives with the adventures, they can often be seen together as she photographs events within the city.
Further Information:
Valentina Bonizzi
Artist's Statement
The two video works by Valentina Bonizzi exhibited at Nomas* Projects show the results and the failures following the persistent attempts of the artist in trying to preserve a story, being that of a small bird or family album’s photographs.
Opaque Documents is an inedited video installation resulted from the work that Bonizzi conducted in Palestine between 2014 and 2016. Concentrated around the mapping of the presence of photography in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp – where the artist lived and worked with the program Campus in Camps and the resident community – the work explores the personal as well as a political relationship with photography in context of conflicts and territorial occupation.
Is It Yours? (2014) Is a 2’ film shot with a mobile phone at the check point between Bethlehem and Jerusalem which sees as the main protagonist a small bird trapped in one of the border patrol facility.
About the Artist
Digging into archives and communities, Valentina Bonizzi’s work highlights issues of social justice in relation to the politics of time in specific contexts. Bonizzi holds a Master from Glasgow School of Art and a PhD (AHRC funded) from DJCAD, University of Dundee. Bonizzi has received awards from Creative Scotland, Arts and Business and the Arts and Humanities Research Council by which she has been nominated for the “Best Research in Film Award” in 2016. She is the 2019 recipient the Gjon Mili biennial award for best art work at the National Gallery of Kosovo. She took part in exhibitions in galleries and museums such as: the National Galleries of Scotland, British School at Rome, Stills Gallery in Edinburgh and Fondazione Fotografia Modena, Cooper Gallery, Dundee, Zeta Gallery in Tirana. She has presented her work in a number of institutions such as the Ramallah Academy of the Arts, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, CCA in Glasgow, Villa Romana, Florence and MAXXI, Rome. In 2017 she was invited at the first edition of Autostrada Biennale in Prizren, Kosovo.
Opaque Documents was made with the support of Creative Scotland Artist Award.
Opaque Documents
Video Installation
5’ loop
Is It yours?
Video
2’ loop
Further Information:
Jill Skulina
Artist's Statement
The work of Jill Skulina portrays emotional strength and transformation through candid and vulnerable narratives. Goddesses, madonnas and celestial beings depict out-of-body experiences and disconnection from reality; as well as revelation, transcendence and liberation from what has come before. Her work shows memories of life events: memories which may be inaccurate, misremembered or one-sided; which traverse timelines, with imagery appearing at times incongruous to the narrative of each piece. The work makes no attempt to ‘correct’ the memories or straighten the timeline.
In this new work made for Nomas* Jill was asked to investigate the story of Mary giving birth to Jesus, with particular focus on the biblical interpretation of events, and how her own experience as a mother affected that reading. Addressing the theme of The Incarnation, Jill has been working with historical interpretations of events, memories and written accounts; the role of translation and re-membering. Wholly Expletive is comprised of 5 ceramic vessels each telling a small part of a wider narrative around pregnancy and the birth of Jesus. Themes include teenage pregnancy; being the mother of a teenage girl; childbirth; and omnipresent notions of virginity and patriarchy. Jill has stripped back the story of the nativity and left only the main characters as she sees it: Mary, Jesus and – like any good parent who wants to support her daughter – Mary’s own mother. The male characters of the narrative have been deemed unimportant by the artist.
Bio
Jill Skulina is a Dundee based artist working out of WASPS Artists Studios; she graduated with a BDes hons in 2003 and an MFA in 2007 both from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. She is a Professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists and in 2016 received the Visual Artist and Craft Makers Award Fife, Development Programme. Jill regularly works in the wardrobe department of Dundee Rep Theatre and Scottish Dance Theatre; teaches classes at V&A Dundee and Dundee Ceramics Workshop and is a volunteer for Bliss a charity for premature and sick babies.
Artist's Webpage
Wooosh on Tour | Lewis Bissett
Temporary show in Partnership with Wooosh Gallery, Dundee.
Artist's Webpage
Michael Coppelov
Artist's Statement
Mick Dundee – a solo show of new paintings by London-based artist Michael Coppelov jokingly takes its title from the merging together of an abbreviation of the artist’s first name – Michael, Mick, with the location of the show – Dundee, in order to create the name of the lead character in 1986’s blockbuster ‘Crocodile Dundee’.
Film, and its ability to provide the viewer with a window into a microcosmic world, has always played a key role in Michael’s artworks. Each of his paintings can be read as a stand-alone miniature world, subject to its own rules and order. Writing about the artist’s most recent solo show, ‘poetic. trucks. flood’ (Husk Gallery, London, 2018) Sarah White, writing for Ambit magazine posited that ‘The allure of film and of fiction has always been in part due to the way it meets the needs of the viewer to entertain belief in a different world, and of the artist to exercise the creative autonomy which brings an alternate world into being’.
Michael Coppelov has exercised this creative autonomy to present five new paintings of invented landscapes – each one filled with the artist’s choice of either text – from the safety information sheet found within a Kinder Egg; buttons – like a section from an aircraft’s cockpit or a network of conjoined scorpions. Painted from an isometric viewpoint which references early 90’s computer games such as Transport Tycoon or Theme Hospital, the viewer takes on a game-player/film-watcher perspective.
Acting, in this way, like a computer or TV screen, one becomes aware that only a small section of a much larger whole is being viewed at any one time. This isometric system, free from the usual pictorial constraints of horizons or perspectives, can be potentially extended into infinity in any direction beyond the edge of the canvas. One could simply be looking at a tiny part of a much larger whole, like the sprawling chaotic hospitals of Theme Hospital, or the mega-cities of Transport Tycoon. Moreover, the whole landscape in Michael’s paintings is saturated with information. This mass of controls or information traps the viewer within the limits of the painting, like Jorge Luis Borges’ novel, On Exactitude in Science, where the whole landscape of an empire was covered in a 1:1 scale map.
Bio
Born in Lancashire in 1983, Michael Coppelov lives and works in London. He attended the Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford University (2005) and then completed an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2008). He has won numerous prizes and awards including a two-year scholarship from the Leverhulme Trust. He has recently been Artist-in-Residence at NES in Iceland and, more recently, at Husk in London. He is currently on the Studio Programme at Turps Banana.
Artist's Webpage
Reflections Upon Nuclear Materiality, Gare Loch Duality and the #UndesiredLine is the next chapter in an ongoing project which B. D. Owens began in 2018.
In this installation, he reflects upon the dualistic and complex reality of living in close proximity to the Faslane Nuclear Submarine base.
Artist's Bio
B. D. Owens is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Shandon, on the Gare Loch. In 2017, he graduated from the Art, Society & Publics MFA Programme at DJCAD, University of Dundee. Previously, he studied at Concordia University (Montreal) gaining a BFA in Sculpture. Since 2012, he has shown his sculpture, text-works, performance, video and sound works in Canada, USA, Scotland, Germany and online. His writing has been published in two anthologies and on the eco/art/scot/land blog. During the 2019 NEoN Festival, he presented his paper ‘Watching Me, Watching You; Reflections Upon Surveillance, Gare Loch Duality & the #UndesiredLine’ at the NEoN Re@ct Symposium in the V&A Dundee.
Artist's Webpage
News from Heaven is taken from the title of an 1641 weather report. Brought into a contemporary context, the work incorporates typography and graphic images from recent news publications referring to climate change, COVID-19, political unrest, and economic fallout. THe work considers how the mass of text and images generated by news cycles confronts us in everyday circumstances and frames our understanding of current events.
Artist's Bio
Chris Connarty (DJCAD Graduate 2019) with the support of Visual Artist and Craft Makers Award. This work at Nomas* Projects coincides with work exhibited at Sharing Not Hoarding (Slessor Gardens, Dundee) until August 27, 2020.
Artist's Webpage
WARDROBE by Kate Clayton
Artist's Talk Details
Kate will be giving an artist's talk online, please join us using Zoom.
Sunday 27 September, 4.00pm to 5.30pm
The zoom link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83569944698?
The ID is: 835 6994 4698
The password is: Nomas
We look forward to welcoming you!
Artist’s Statement
I am a performance artist based in Glasgow. Within my practice I work collaboratively, collectively and individually. My main focus is on the visibility of older women, claiming agency for the over-60s, Other themes include intergenerational friendship and the collaborative process. My work often involves artistic personas performed in different contexts and environments: public spaces, such as buses and cemeteries, galleries, domestically, in cabaret and within the landscape.
The exhibition at Nomas* is an opportunity to present the costumes that have been an integral part of my solo work for the last four years: Silver Swimmer, Art Scrubber, Bus Pass and Pearl Compost. The artist’s presentation scheduled for September 27 will be a chance to talk about the inception and development of this work. In particular I will be introducing my current earth-based collaboration with artist Sophie Seita. In times of covid, ‘Pearl and Theory Make Compost’.
Artist’s Biography
I graduated with an MFA (Art, Society and Publics) from DJCAD, Dundee, in 2014. Since then I’ve moved to Glasgow in order to be part of the large, loosely connected art community to be found there.
Being selected for three residencies has been important for my development. Those were: ‘Between Menopause and Old Age, Alternative Beauty,’ a residency run by Rocio Bolivar for LADA; the ‘Emerging Older Artists Residency’ at Cove Park; and ‘CAMP, Live Art (Both Pronounciations)’ with Ann Bean in the French Pyrenees. Each residency proved to be a crucible for collaboration.
For the last four years I’ve also been part of the women’s group XSexcentenary, of which I’m a founder member.
For more details of performances, exhibitions and other activities, please see the artist bio page of my website.
Artist’s website
Artist’s Talk
This will be presented online via Zoom on September 27 at 4pm. All welcome.
Acknowledgements
The photographs that appear in WARDROBE were taken by Duncan McLaren, Frank McElhinney and Yi-Chieh Chiu. The Bus Pass costume was designed with and made by Ross Fleming.
Beneath the Heavens by Kaori Homma
Artist's Talk Details
Kaori will be giving an artist's talk online, please join us using Zoom.
Sunday 25 October, 4.00pm to 5.30pm
The zoom link is: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89639157893?
The ID is: 896 3915 7893
The password is: Nomas
We look forward to welcoming you!
Artist’s Statement
Beneath the Heavens
Kaori Homma is an artist originally from Japan, based in London exhibiting in UK and internationally.
Homma is a co-founder of Art Action UK, a platform for artists' creative and critical responses to global crisis. She is also an Associate Lecturer at CSM and CCW at University of Arts London. Homma’s works are regularly exhibited at Royal Academy, and in both public and private collections, and has been awarded Parker Harris Award 2017, Aqua Zero Award, Spain 2012, International Drawing Award, Budapest 2010, British Women Artists, 2010.
The series of work “Beneath the Heavens” were produced for Nomas Project during the summer of 2020 during the lockdown. Focusing on the feeling of entrapment brought upon us when our world shrunk so rapidly. The feeling of entrapment is also accompanied by uncertainty and foreboding sense of turbulent future where we might be hearing the beginning of the end of anthropocene chiming in the skys above our head. Our sense are muffled as we are cocooned under our limited horizon, and yet our gaze wonder beyond the horizon, even though we are not sure what we are searching for.
The images seen in Homma’s work are etched by fire, not by a pigment sitting on a surface. A technique normally associated with secret correspondence used in the past, called “aburi-dashi” in Japanese. Invisible Ink made with lemon juice is used to render images, slightly altering the delicate balance of paper, once exposed to the fire in the process of making, the images are burnt into paper as an integral part of its structure. The resulting image contains a level of fragility and notion of death within it by nature, which is amplified by the installation of the urn and ashes of the remnants of pieces of art works which did not quite make it to the final stage of fire etching.
Artist’s website
Given To Chance:Indeterminacy/Share Commissions
Panel discussion with artists from GIVEN TO CHANCE: INDETERMINACY/SHARE COMMISSION, at Nomas* Projects
Going Viral
2020, Neural network generated video and web application
Derek Curry & Jennifer Gradecki, USA
“Going Viral is an interactive web project that allows viewers to share algorithmically generated informational videos about COVID-19 that feature social media influencers and celebrities that have spread misinformation about the virus, including its origins, treatments, and preventions. The generated influencers deliver public service announcements or present news stories that counter the misinformation they have spread. The videos were created using open source conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) that were trained on images of influencers and their facial features. The video was then generated using the facial landmarks of a new speaker, resulting in a glitchy, indeterminate celebrity speaking the words of an expert. The Going Viral website describes the false claims made by each influencer and links to official sources of information regarding the virus. Viewers are invited to share the videos on social media to help intervene in the current infodemic that has developed alongside the coronavirus.”
Derek Curry and Jennifer Gradecki - goingviral.art
Curry is an artist-researcher, Gradecki is an artist-theorist, both based in the USA.
Study for Sponge Project
2020, 2-Channel video
Dina Kelberman, USA
“An in-progress large-scale appropriation/ assemblage piece in which thousands of ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) sponge videos are collected from hundreds of Instagram accounts and arranged to form a smooth and unsettling transition from soothing to violent. Despite all being produced for the same purpose (to trigger a pleasant tingling sensation in those with ASMR sensitivity), the often unconsidered aesthetics of each video push each towards one or another end of the soothing/violent spectrum. When amassed together these videos heighten each other to create an overwhelming sensation of peacefulness or aggression. In this project, I approach data-mapping as a way to create and evoke an emotional response in addition to simple representation.”
Dina Kelberman - dinakelberman.com
Multi-media artist based in Los Angeles, CA.
Future False Positive
2020, AI generated, single-channel video loop
Martin Disley, Scotland
“There are three modalities in which artificial intelligence (A.I) operates: pattern extraction (training), pattern recognition (classification), and pattern generation (prediction). Future False Positive probes what happens when the loop between pattern recognition and pattern generation modalities is closed. Using a dataset of autonomous vehicle training clips as source material, the artist trained six generative neural networks, one on each camera angle, to predict what happens after each training clip ends (pattern generation). Throughout the videos, an object detection and classification algorithm (pattern recognition) surveil both the present and ‘the future’ for objects deemed relevant to an autonomous vehicle such as pedestrians and other cars.
After the final frame of the original clip, the generative frames begin. Even as all predicted ‘futures’ melt into the same reconfigured pixel data, the object detection algorithm continues to classify with confidence. In the vision presented here, of a ‘future’ generated by A.I, all roads lead to a recycled past that is legible to the pattern recognition algorithm. An A.I can’t generate a pattern it hasn’t already seen, so nothing truly new can be created, and in this vision, we’re left bereft of a real future.”
Martin Disley - martindisley.co.uk
Artist and technology researcher based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
DriMing (Greater London, randomized)
2020, Videos from Google Street View scraping algorithm
Enorê, Brazil/UK
“DriMing (greater London, randomised) is a web-based artwork that draws from the Google Street View API to create a bot that wanders through its database, registering in short videos the different paths it goes through; and each path is completely randomized within the boundaries of Greater London. The project is inspired by the ideas of agency and automation — what would happen if, instead of me and my own body, I entrusted a piece of code to travel through distances I could possibly not achieve? The presence of the error message and the ghostly, somewhat delicate nature of these images, both allude to and contrast against their fabrication method; and eventual inaccuracies in the calculation of routes give it a surprisingly pleasant sense of driM in movement.”
An archive of the wanderings can be viewed at drifting.someartwork.com, where it ran at one path per hour during one month.
Interdisciplinary artist from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, currently based in London.
sequencer (not yet available)
2020, video / digital
Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo
“sequencer (not yet available) is a series of three short silent works generated through a layering process that begins with animations live-coded in a homemade digital system and passes them through vintage analog and emulated video processing systems. Paired with totally-rad palettes from late–20th century California, the result is imbued with fuzz and longing — for home, the past in the present, and one another. To watch, to let go and inhabit these spaces, is to seek union with others in a space of digital promise and yearning, a space that does not seek to anticipate and categorise, but to encounter you as an individual soul.”
Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo - art.sarahghp.com
Video artist, programmer, and data designer who lives in New York and Berlin.
The Divine Treatment
ARTIST’S ZOOM INTERVIEW: Sunday 13 December 2020, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Artist's Statement
I am interested in Dada, concrete poetry, asemic writing, collage & visual poetry.
I love letters, not so much for the words they make but for the absolute beauty of how each letter stands, often overlooked by what the word is trying to convey. I love altering images, hyperbole & the juxtaposition of unusual forms & shapes. I was tormented at school trying to get perspectives right. No one knew I was dada. I like to write letters back to front and do ridiculous sums in solidarity with others with dyslexia and dyscalculia. My approach is intuitive rather than rational & explores areas of the unconscious.
Dawn is a visual poet. She has three small books published ~ Fisherwoman, The Penman, a Serious Writer & Remnants of the Red Ribbon Sect.
Dawn has been published in many magazines such as Utsanga, Sonic Boom (cover artist also) Ragged Lion Press, Experiment-O, Marsh Flower Gallery, Timglasset 6, 2 Call, Simulacrum Press & Otoliths. She posts much of her work regularly on Facebook.
Wear and Tear
ARTIST’S ZOOM INTERVIEW: Sunday 31 January 2021, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 824 1179 0078
Passcode: Nomas
Artist's Statement
Rhona Jack is a multi-disciplinary artist whose artistic practice is formed by a combination of sculpture, printmaking and fibre art, often blurring the lines between art, craft and design. She has a particular interest in industrialisation and the subsequent death of industries, examining the role of the individual within them. By presenting craft processes in a gallery setting, the maker is brought to the forefront, highlighting the eradication of the individual within mass production. The hand of the artist is always present throughout Jack’s work, and the tactility of materials is of high importance. Every inch of the work has been handled, and the hours spent making are recorded in every stitch, every knot, every joint, every interwoven strand. Her work is made primarily of reclaimed materials that long to be touched, and hold within them a history of touch.
Artist's Bio
Rhona Jack lives and works in Dundee. She graduated from the city's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 2017 and is currently a Committee Member of GENERATORprojects. Recent exhibitions include 'Women in Print' (Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, 2020), Platform (City Art Centre, Edinburgh, 2020), Reduct (Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2020), Satellite (Summerhall, Edinburgh, 2018), Inside:Outside and An Isolated Process (both Merz Gallery, Sanquhar, 2020).
Artist's Website
Border Crossing
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 28 March 2021, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 862 0101 0151
Passcode: Nomas
Artist statement
Uli Jaeger is a visual artist based in Kent/UK and Baden Wurttemberg/Germany. Her work explores the liminal spaces where art and play meet within the context of the everyday. During the past two years her practice has evolved from sculpture to print making (primarily etching and monoprints).
Uli is a member of Haller Akademie der Kunste (Germany) and participates in the Morphe Network (UK).
What happens when a word kisses a thought of yours?
a sound, a shape
anchored
aaaaaaAaaaaaaa
hemmed in, cornered
perpendicular maybe
eeEEeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEee
ignored, overlooked, superfluous
marinated in the here and now
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
playing, playing, playing
overheard, overlapped
0oooooooooooo0
repeat
chancing it, curious
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Crossing the border!
Me as Venus
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 9 May 2021, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 829 5241 2916
Passcode: Nomas
Biography
Chris Miller is 69, and based in Hornchurch, Essex (or East London- whichever you prefer!). Over eight years ago, he had a brain operation that left him with stroke like symptoms that affected his right side – his walking, writing, and face. Before then he had been a science teacher, a youth worker and a community worker, mostly in east London. This included spell working for Frontier Youth Trust, and as a community worker for an ecumenical group of churches and the United Reformed Church and the chair of a Christian youth project. He was chair for three years of the Docklands Forum, which was the main organisation representing community groups in London Docklands during the 1980’s. After his stroke, he started to every week go to Headway East London, a charity for those with a brain injury. Art wasn’t something he did – his secondary school told him he wasn’t any good. But at Headway’s Submit to Love Studio he was gently persuaded to start expressing himself in his art.
Artists Statement
I describe myself as an outsider artist -in painting, pottery, & drawing. My work is often an exploration of the inner changes in my body resulting from becoming disabled, and a form of expression, a way of communicating with, and fitting into the wider world. I often use the visual language of the art of the past to express my condition – replacing famous images with images of my disabled body. As well I like to write short pieces on my art, short pieces about my art, and the art of others art and disability. I am currently studying for a MA in Health Humanities at University College London. I have made and reviewed art for the Autograph gallery website. Along with Headway East London, I have been part of exhibitions at the South Bank Gallery, “Could be Good” Enclave Gallery Deptford, and the Stratford Arts Centre. I have given talks on art at the Royal Academy, the Science Museum, the Wellcome Collection, the Tate Gallery and the Turner Contemporary Gallery Margate.
Further Info
Short Films
Chapter Three - The Story of the Hammer
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 27 June 2021, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 875 7039 5747
Passcode: Nomas
Statement
Martin Crawford’s work explores our connections to each other through the objects we encounter, and questions traditional anthropocentric ontology in favour of a more egalitarian view of matter. He draws out abstract narratives from things, materials and places, to remind us of our profound connections to each other and our environment. Working intuitively to access the dormant pasts of objects and materials from junkyards, donations and scavenging, and by using processes such as destruction, remaking, metamorphosis, embellishment and combination; Crawford works in a form of bricolage, creating states in which the imagination can deeply connect with the objects and the matter that forms them.
The works magnify the powerful sensation generated by commonality in the objects, and flit between abstraction, storytelling, memory and imagination. Standing apart from linguistic explanation, they are experienced intuitively: finding a space where every imaginable past of object and viewer can exist simultaneously. Here the viewer can reflect on their own object identity, and in seeing that their story is unlike any other, they can also see that it is the same as every other.
Bio
Martin studied English Literature at St. Andrews and Glasgow Universities, before completing his teacher training and working as an English teacher and head of department in schools in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Hong Kong. His undergraduate dissertation in Surrealist poetry sparked a love of art that grew to the point it could not be ignored, and he returned to University to study for a BA in Fine Art at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee.
Artist's Website
Still. Here.
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 15 August 2021, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 848 8446 4830
Passcode: Nomas
Artist's Statement: Still. Here.
Still here now. What does it mean to remain? The dance between life and death is a profound journey. To not be seen in the midst of the multitudes fighting against death and to be seen in the midst of the layers of continued life and survival is part of the path of remaining. The exhibition, Still. Here. are five new portraits which illustrate the stories and reflections of the people who have been infected or affected by HIV/AIDS and whom Ruth Naomi Floyd has had the honor of serving and walking alongside for over 25 years. They remain.
Bio
Ruth Naomi Floyd is a photographer specializing in black and white portrait images. Ruth uses silver based films with 35mm and 4x5 inch view cameras to capture her images and uses traditional wet darkroom technology as well as digital printing on archival papers to produce her final images. Ruth has received awards, prizes and grants for her photographic images and her work is included in permanent and private collections. She has exhibited her photographic images in the United States and Europe and her images have been published on the covers of magazines, and in brochures and music compact discs. Ruth is passionate about the intersection of the arts with culture and community. She has shared her knowledge of the arts and culture in universities, seminaries, art centers and performance centers and also participated in cultural exchanges in the United Kingdom, Madrid, Hungary, France, Poland and Africa. Ruth continues to make the city of Philadelphia her home, where for over twenty-five years she has been devoted and active in providing compassionate care and spiritual support to people infected and affected by HIV and AIDS in Philadelphia and Africa.
Artist's Website
Bio
Emelia Kerr Beale is a Nottingham-born artist and recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art, who is currently based in Glasgow. They work across drawing, sculpture and textile to process the complexities of illness and centre experiences of discomfort, pleasure, anxiety and joy. Through the use of recurring motifs, they consider the ways in which imagination and repetition can be coping mechanisms. Their research is rooted in feminist disability studies and queer theory, as well as lived and embodied experience.
As a person with ADHD, they believe neurodivergent ways of making and thinking are meaningful artistic approaches, and their work is often informed by impulsivity and a necessity of means. They are passionate about rejecting gendered neuro-normativity and resisting notions of ‘productivity’ under capitalism that permeate language around neurodiversity at every level, and therefore a lot of their thinking is around rest and the rested body.
They have recently shown work at GENERATORprojects, Dundee, and Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, undertaken residencies on the Isle of Eigg with the Bothy Project and at Hospitalfield, Arbroath, and received commissions from Tonic Arts and Disability Arts Online.
Artist's Website
How many times must a man look up?
Like many I felt a need to create something in response to living through the pandemic. Much has been said about our health care services and our politicians; heroes have been hailed and villains vilified, there has been clapping and jeering, survivors have been embraced and those lost have been mourned. Gaps between people have been magnified, social spaces sterilised and barriers have encroached everywhere. Distance became the status quo and difference appeared in the cracks.
This triptych of flags is an attempt at addressing the cracks and closing the distance. Declarations of identity and autonomy that everyone has the capacity to care, to heal and to suffer, these are not job titles to define individuals, they are basic human tenets.
The flags have been stitched together from deconstructed hospital garments; patient’s gowns, medic’s scrubs and health care worker’s tunics. The materials themselves broken, repaired and re-appropriated. Everything has changed yet still familiar. The lines from Dylan’s 60 year old song resonate like words penned by a journalist surveying the terrain of the past 18 months. The song became a motivating mantra for me and was the catalyst that flags blowing in the wind could in some way disseminate a message of unity, solidarity and humanity.
Hans K Clausen, 2021
Artist Biography
Hans K Clausen is a graduate of Leith School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art. In 2012 he received an Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop new graduate award and won London’s Degree Art Prize for Sculpture. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and developed a strong interest in, and reputation for, collaborative and socially engaged art. He has held several artist residencies in health care and education settings and was an NHS resident artist at North Edinburgh Arts from 2015 – 2018 where amongst other projects he created The People’s Museum of Memory and Myth www.pmmm.co.uk winner of a Building Better Healthcare Award in 2019. Hans is a studio holder at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, the Hospital Exhibitions Manager for Tonic Arts – Edinburgh and Lothians Health Foundation, the Community Artist at St Columba’s Hospice, and an Art and Design Teaching Fellow at University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Open Learning.
Artist's Website
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 12 December 2021, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 868 4810 4229
Passcode: Nomas
Artist's Statement
Be Still and Know
Cast Glass, Bronze, Plaster
Shown first at Truro Cathedral in the ‘Create to Commemorate’ exhibition 2016.
There is a little book, in Truro Cathedral, that lists the names of all the children in that congregation over many years that were still born or have died young. A book for the families to remember those whose lives mattered even though they did not live them as long as many of us would. Still birth, not often spoken about, these lives are worth commemorating and worth remembering.
Each plaster vessel was made to represent a child, unique and made beautiful. Viewers were invited to scoop a small amount of water from the larger glass bowl and decant it into one of the smaller ones as an act of remembrance for a child or baby they have known and loved; an act of quiet reflection and reverence. The vessel then absorbs the water into itself and slowly the water evaporates out into the air.
In thinking about the coming season and the Christ child, it brought up a thought, that Christ was a baby. He did not come to the Earth a fully grown adult with a quick wit, a fully formed theological message, ready to lead and gather followers.
Why does this matter? Whether you are a believer in the Christian Christ or not, it must be noted that it is pretty crazy for a God to show up as a baby. Someone that needs to be cared for by someone else, that cannot support itself or care for its own needs. If nothing else I feel this narrative shows how much value is in human life, that God chose to start his son’s life at the beginning and not skip ahead. Ultimately, he cares enough about those born and unborn, those that have died or are alive, to send his son to the Earth, to live and breathe as we do and to die for the sake of us.
Artist's Bio
Sarah Koetsier Ceramicist, Artist
Sarah was born in Canada but is very much a third culture kid having left Canada at a young age and lived abroad since. She has settled in Scotland with her husband Jonathan, an oil painter, after studying Contemporary crafts at Falmouth University. Her practice since finishing university in 2016 has been primarily ceramics based. She works from her studio in the East Neuk making a range of hand thrown functional and decorative porcelain pots. Her work focuses on lively surface decoration, clean designs, and the contrast of textures and colours. Each pot is individual and decorated by hand with coloured underglazes and oxides.
Artist's Website
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Monday 28 March 2022, 7.30pm - 9.00pm online
Meeting ID: 837 7812 0643
Passcode: Nomas
Statement
Border Patrol
During lockdowns, the border hedge gained new purpose as a metaphor for self-isolation and shelter as the world contracted to the limits of our more basic unit- the home. This series of suburban landscapes began in March 2020 during the permitted daily lockdown excursions in the ‘bungalow belt’ of Edinburgh and has continued while coronavirus restrictions remain in place to varying degrees in Scotland. Stay-at-home notices may lift but our gardens show we have chosen to remain hidden from our neighbors, living our lives in privacy, and limiting and inviting relationships with others by choice and on our own terms.
Artist's Bio
Kieran Dodds (b. 1980) is a non-fiction photographer known for his research-driven photo stories and portraiture mostly recently seen in two books- Gingers (2020) and The Church Forests of Ethiopia (2021). His personal work considers the interplay of environment and culture, tracing global events through daily lives. This is the first time Border Patrol has been exhibited having been published in Smithsonian magazine (US) and The Guardian (US).
Artist's Website
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 8 May 2022, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: ** 889 1286 8623**
Passcode: Nomas
Statement
Felling
From 2020-21 Newcastle City Council’s parks management company undertook the felling of trees across the city. Some were deemed dangerous, too close to roads or paths and too expensive to manage, others were diseased with great holes in the centres of them.
The argument presented by the management company was that every tree cut down would be replaced. Yet this fails to acknowledge the meaning particular trees hold for local people, and the role they play in local ecosystems.
The prints on display at Nomas* are based on tree rubbings taken from trees that have been felled to make way for new development in Shieldfield, Newcastle. These six cherry and plum trees were cut down just as they were about to blossom in 2021. The prints question what ecological resources are lost through the capture of economic value from land.
Artist's Bio
Julia Heslop is an artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She has a BA in Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art, a Master of Fine Art from Newcastle University and a PhD in Human Geography at Durham University. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in Architecture at Newcastle University. She works interdisciplinarily across the boundaries of art and architecture and her work often takes the form of large scale architectural installations, painting and printmaking and video. The potentials for deep participation in re(creating) environments and landscapes are at the centre of her practice and she often works in participatory, slow ways with groups and communities. She uses her work to ask questions about the ecological impacts of development, land and property ownership, housing precarity, urban planning and local democracy.
Artist's Website
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Monday 20 June 2022, 7.30pm - 9.00pm in person and online
Meeting ID: 868 7011 8435
Passcode: Nomas
Nomas* Projects Graduate Prize Winner 2021
Statement
‘Something for Nothing’ takes its name from a 1940 video made by American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, in which he explains the impossibility of the perpetual motion machine.
This body of work aims to share ideas I’ve been having about the connections between mechanical invention, unseen labour and human development. In particular the invention of the pottery wheel, its erasure of female potters in neolithic societies and its connection to early agriculture. I want to explore the notion that the process of invention is a by-product of the perpetual motion machine of human thought and creativity.
Artist's Bio
Miriam Seddon is a ceramic artist living and working in Dundee. She graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in 2021 and currently serves as a committee member at GENERATORprojects. Her work is centred around craft, care and societal analysis.
Made with the support of the Visual Art and Craft Makers Award.
Artist's Website
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 21 August 2022, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online via Zoom
Meeting ID: 864 0189 8261
Passcode: Nomas
Artist's Statement
08.03.22 "I wish you to enjoy flowers again!"
My brother wished it to my mum and I on International Woman's Day. Usually he buys us flowers and nice presents on this day. Now we are all miles apart, not even able either to buy flowers, neither to receive them, neither even to think about presents. The idea of enjoying beauty felt inappropriate that day. The only thing we were focusing on was surviving...
Art heals. Art helps to talk and share. I've always been the one who carried a small sketchbook with a pen. Now it is turning into a digital version, but the concept remains: observe, feel, document.
On the 24th of February, life changed significantly. Even being safe myself, I stopped doing everything I used to. I already experienced that feeling during the Revolution of Dignity in 2013/14, the annexion of Crimia the same year and the long lasting war since then in Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
This strange feeling of responsibility to synchronise your whole life with political changes in your country. Being settled in London for a few years hasn't separated me from the same feeling about my home country. Art saved me again. An emotional rollercoaster which pushed all anxiety feelings to the limit had to be balanced in some way. Inhumane behaviour of occupiers, contrasting sacrificing of Ukrainian heroes more honorable than any Marvel movie ever seen, constant worry about friends and family... I just kept drawing.
Artist's Bio
Alina Potemska, visual artist and illustrator, board game designer, Doctor of Arts.
Alina Potemska was born in Kyiv and graduated from The Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. She specialises in visual arts and games. She designs board games and researches effective methods for transferring the cognitive function of books to games. She consider game and art as a helpful tool in understanding the world. She captures daily scenes in life drawings and illustrations.
She has exhibited in solo and group shows in many countries, including the UK, USA, France, Poland, and Ukraine, introducing the different sides and similarities in illustration and games.
Artist's Webpages
Forgive them their Debts: Prints from a Creative Practice Research Project exploring Sabbath Economics.
Artist’s Statement
Lou Davis is an Edinburgh based printmaker and artist. She is drawn to pattern, repetition and complexity. Each work begins with drawing; creating rubrics to follow which turn simple ink lines into complex structures. These drawings are then developed into screen prints, lino prints, and more recently, watercolour paintings. Lou’s work explores topics of justice, economics and wellbeing. Her current work looks at economic trends and policies in the light of historic understandings of debt, wealth and economic inequality. Lou’s background in mathematics, theology and community work come together in the prints she produces.
Bio
Lou developed her artistic practice alongside a career in community arts development. Beginning in 2005, she worked with community groups, charities and religious organisations who are using arts to foster community cohesion and aid mental health. She has exhibited drawings, prints and mixed media work throughout the UK. Since 2015 she has focused on printmaking, and in particular work in relief printing with lino and in screen printing. Lou studied printmaking at Leith School of Art, is a member at Edinburgh Printmakers and is about to complete a creative practice PhD in Theology at the University of Glasgow, using printmaking as her primary research medium.
Artist's Website
THE ART OF CRIME
Textiles Made In and Out of Prison Exploring (In)justice and Reconciliation
ARTIST'S ZOOM TALK: Sunday 13 November 2022, 4.00pm - 5.30pm online
Meeting ID: 869 9787 5524
Passcode: Nomas
Artist's Statement
Zannah is a textile artist and designer based in London. She is motivated by the power of art to help individuals understand themselves well as heal and build confidence.
After completing an MA in Design at Central Saint Martins she focused on ways to improve the wellbeing of vulnerable populations and volunteered at HMP Thameside prison, with the Saint Martin’s Design Against Crime Research Centre. In prison they co-designed anti-theft bags with prisoners, and seeing the rehabilitative and creative potential within this context, Zannah got a job at HMP Thameside as a Textile Officer. She designed a project aimed at reducing violence and increasing empathy where prisoners made fidget quilts for Dementia charities and weighted blankets for children with Autism. Many prisoners are highly creative and said how being creative in a social context was good for their minds and so would often open up about their struggles. As a ‘side hustle’ prisoners made patchwork cushions and quilts to give out on prison visits for their loved ones using fabrics that reflected their cultural identities and personalities. This exhibition is a combination of my work alongside prisoners exploring themes of (in)justice and reconciliation through textiles.
Bio
Zannah started studying Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art, followed by Textiles at Bath School of Art and Design. On graduating from Bath she received commissions from the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Anthropologie and English Eccentrics, but found being a free lance artist isolating. She wanted to share the joy and power of creativity with vulnerable populations, having been inspired by her quilter aunt who this year was awarded an MBE for 23 years volunteering in prisons with the charity Fine Cell Work. After her MA at Central Saint Martins she was offered to do a practice-based PhD but was keen to gain more experience working in prisons to understand how to help individuals within a complex and flawed criminal justice system. During Covid she worked at HMP Wormwood Scrubs as a Health and Wellbeing Practitioner and set up a prison enterprise Rise & Bloom which is an ongoing project.
Currently she is working in the community with ex-offenders experiencing substance misuse, but intends to return to prison to offer creative workshops once again.
Artist's Instagram Pages
Incarnari - God Made Flesh
The title is a concoction of terms from the etymological roots.
The phrase 'God Made Flesh' was chosen because it could be understood in different ways.
While this exhibition intentionally takes place during the season of Advent, it isn't really an exhibition about Christmas as such but rather an opportunity to respond to the subject of The Incarnation of Christ. This topic is one that has featured prominently in the history of Western Art. It's a very strange concept - otherworldly actually - when you stop to think about it. At Nomas* we were intrigued as to how artists today would respond to the subject in light of its art historical position, changes in religious beliefs and values and where it might sit in contemporary culture around issues of feminism, sexual identity and orientation.
The beginning of The Gospel of Luke, Chapters 1 & 2 was the recommended Bible source material as well as The Gospel of Matthew from Chapter 2.
There are of course hundreds of references and paintings on the subject in art museums throughout the world and online.
Post-Op
Artist Statement:
“Post-Op” is a selection of pieces taken from a larger collection of body prints made in 2020. Completed over the course of 12 months, this series of prints explores artist Shelby Scattergood’s first year following bariatric surgery.
Scattergood was encouraged to undergo a sleeve gastrectomy following acute liver failure, a rare medication side effect, in 2018. Scattergood chose to record the experience in a series of stomach stamps as a personal commentary on the controversial procedure. Often sold in the United States as a “magical cure to fatness” bariatric surgery (excluding Lap-Band) is a procedure in which a person’s stomach is partially amputated in order to drastically reduce one’s weight. Finding the experience fraught with unexpected challenges and harmful rhetoric, Scattergood seeks to spark an honest discourse over the surgery’s effectiveness and ethics.
Bio:
Shelby Scattergood is an American-born portrait artist currently working and residing in Guardbridge, Scotland. She received a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) in 2016. She has exhibited throughout the United States in galleries such as the Jones Carter Gallery, the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art, 21c Durham, and VAE Raleigh. This is her first exhibition in Scotland.
The Owner of the Fish
ذوالنون
Window 2
Sonboor is the
name of a sea.
In its heart there is an old fish
Window 3
whose shining scales are stained glass
and in its belly you are appointed to priesthood.
Window 4
The fish has four windows on each of which
a man’s story is recounted
(An extract from Nassim’s Testament)
Window 2
صُنبور
نام یکی
دریاست
در قلبِ
آن ماهی‌یِ
پیری هست
Window 3
که فلس
می‌رخشاند از
شیشه‌های
رنگی وُ
در بطن
او تو را
کهانت سپرده‌اند
Window 4
ماهی
چهار پنجره
دارد که هر
یکی
وامی‌گوید
حکایت مردی را
‘The Owner of the Fish’ (Arabic/Persian ذوالنون) takes its title from a chapter in Vahid Davar’s elegiac epic poem, ‘Ahd-e
Nassim’ or ‘Nassim’s Testament’. In that chapter, the speaker depicts a
sea, the depths of which house a four-windowed fish in whose belly his deceased
friend, Nassim, is appointed to priesthood. Each stained-glass window on the
fish’s body relates the story of a man who has lost either a son or a brother. The
priest enshrined in the fish may conjure up the biblical Jonas, who is called Zun-nun (the Owner of the Fish) in the Quran (21:87).
‘Nassim’s Testament’ is also a self-elegy through which the poet salvages
himself from a violent migration. Davar arrived in
the UK in 2013 as an asylum seeker, where he faced the need to remake himself. Throughout
different phases of his out-of-placeness, the poet has needed to reidentify and
reintroduce himself as an asylum-seeker, a refugee, an émigré, a migrant, an ex-pat,
and so on, each word being the other’s shadow.
Hunting for his shadows, alongside composing lyrical poems, Davar has also been drawing mirror self-portraits to
examine himself from different angles, resisting a flat self-image. Together
with his lyrical poems, which have a confessional aspect, the poet’s
self-portraits mirror a protean self which keeps slipping through the ego’s grasp.
Not being exact likenesses of their prototype and each other, with their
gleams, these self-portraits might call to mind one’s fleeting impressions of a
fish flickering in dark water. Exhibited in the middle of the portraits is a fish
from one of Davar’s manuscripts, bringing to the
surface a flash of the fish which haunts the depths of the poet's unconscious.
Bio
Vahid Davar is the author of
two volumes of poetry in Persian and a poetry pamphlet in English entitled ‘Something
the Colour of Pines on Fire’ (Matecznik, 2022). His
writing has been anthologised in Britain and Germany, and several poems have
appeared at exhibitions of text and image in the British Museum, NYU Abu Dhabi,
HELDENREIZER Contemporary, Munich, and FACT Liverpool.
‘The Owner of the Fish’ is Davar’s
first solo exhibition of drawings and poetry.
Artist's Website
Artist Statement:
Charlotte Maishman is Dundee based artist and DJCAD alumna, graduating from the Fine Art course in 2022. Following on from her DJCAD Degree Show Exhibition "The Fragility of Structure: Body and Mind", which featured a sculpted 70kg porcelain building, Charlotte has spent the past year pursuing her craft at Dundee Ceramic Workshop.
“Beneath the glaze” is an exhibition created for NOMAS Gallery, featuring wheel-thrown porcelain, supported on steel plinths and suspended with steel cables. The installation incorporates symbolic imagery and metaphor, inviting the viewer to consider hidden depths and shades of grey, as repetition conceals untold details.
Porcelain is built of more than its nature, but of all its experiences, holding memory in its body. It is fragile, yet incredibly strong, a complex contradiction beyond initial recognition, much like ourselves. As we endure in this journey, we are all tentative, crumbling clay. Made of flesh and bone, built of positives, negatives, and many unknowns... all deserving exploration beyond first appearance.
Bio:
Having grown up living on an off-grid sailboat in the middle of the River Dart in Devon, Charlotte has been surrounded by the daily utilising, mending and making of functional creative design. This experience has given charlotte a confidence in practical making with various materials, leading her to combine contrasting elements in installation which explore the themes of the human experience as multifaceted, contradictory and complex.
She left her South Devon home after school, to pursue creative digital media for North Devon film company Maniac films followed by Plymouth college of art’s (PCA) communications department. During her time filming for PCA , she was inspired by the creativity on the campus and became interested in new artistic mediums such as ceramics and metal work, which encouraged her to make the leap to study Fine Art at DJCAD and pursue her own creative artwork.
At DJCAD Charlotte learned how to weld from Metal technician Jason Shearer as well as how to sculpt porcelain through Ceramicist and Potter Sean Kingsley. These newfound skills featuring in her installations in following years.
With a background in creative digital media, Charlotte used her films and projection mapping skills alongside her sculptures in installation work. Her 2nd year installation “untitled” was selected to feature at Alchemy Film Festival 2018, and her 4th year work resulted in receiving the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) Barns-Graham Travel award with her collaboration partner Guendalina Rota. The duo have recently spent a few weeks in Italy to produce Artwork for the award, which will be featured at RSA in 2024.
During the summer of her 3rd year at DJCAD, an opportunity arose to work with friend and Joiner Phil Messeder as an apprentice joiner. This experience provided a foundation of valuable skills, which led to gallery installation work at The Cooper Gallery as well as a technician position within the DJCAD woodwork department after graduation.
This new knowledge has also had a profound effect on her degree show, in make and installation. "The Fragility of Structure: Body and Mind," exhibition features the study of space, both architecturally and metaphorically. It’s main feature was a 2.5sq steel cube supporting a 70kg mass of extruded porcelain beams, constructed with steel bolts, forming into a skeleton of a house (the weight of an average human body) . Through her studies, Charlotte has explored poetic exploration of the human body and mind through contrasting materials and chiaroscuro visuals, using black and white to highlight, texture, form and contrast in themes. From this degree show, Charlotte was awarded the opportunity to exhibit at Nomas* Projects in 2023. Following this, Charlotte exhibited for the Nodal collective in the Dundee Botanic Gardens, reshaping the house into a explosion of beams suspended from trees. The second saw the Porcelain house reimagined for a Dance production in theSpace, Dundee 2022. This performance “Split the dark with a crack of light” was a collaboration between Charlotte and Dancer/Choreographer Jennie Frazer, which responded to the fragility and strength of 5 year old Addy, battling the degenerative disease, Battens. The sculpture of suspended beams hung over the dancers heads, and were framed with 6 metre long black and white silks, printed from Charlotte’s photography.
After the 2022 degree show, Charlotte also started work as a technician in DJCAD, splitting her time between the Contemporary art Woodwork department and the Audio Visual department. As well as moonlighting creative endeavour, where she has begun to explore porcelain in more detail by pursuing traditional making in throwing at Dundee Ceramics Workshop, with the generous teaching of porcelain potter George Buchan.
See more about Charlotte's work on her Instagram and website.
Artist's website: charlottemaishman.com
Instagram: @charlottemaishman
With special thanks for all support in making and opportunity over these last few years from: Phil Messeder, George Buchan, Tanith Marron, Sean Kingsley, Jason Shearer, Malcolm O’Connell, Alan Grieg, Kevin Henderson, Steph liddle and David McCulloch.
Artist Statement:
For Some The Clouds Become Solid Ground is an installation of relics, memories and documentation from the performance He Whom You Shall Love Is Absent by Sarah White, with tyroneisaacstuart. Performed first on 15 April 2023 at The Swiss Church London (supported by the Arts Council DYCP fund). The performance was developed in collaboration with artist duo Gardner and Gardner and many of the objects seen here were offered into the work by them.
He Whom You Shall Love Is Absent is a 1.5 hour improvised dance performance exploring faith and doubt, belief and disbelief. The acts of attention, listening and contemplation are foregrounded as sites for sense-making of the unknown or not-yet-fully-known. The title of the work is taken from Simone Weil’s text Gravity and Grace, ‘to put our life into that which we cannot touch in any way…It is impossible…. That is what is required.’ The pieces developed for NOMAS Gallery make allusions to the divine-bodily apparitions in religious paintings, where the heavenly and earthly realms intersect with one another.
This exhibition is part of a group of performances and installations across Dundee by Sarah White and tyroneisaacstuart for Art Night 2023
Artist's Bio:
Sarah works across performance, installation and writing, and is currently studying on the MA Creative Practice: Dance Professional at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Having previously studied at Chelsea College of Art and Aberystwyth University. Sarah's research centres on collaboration, improvisation and theological enquiry as sites for meaning making. Notable projects include working as artist-in-residence with The Koppel Project, London, and exhibiting and publishing with Siobhan Davies Dance. Most recently Sarah received funding from the Arts Council DYCP for her performance work.
In 2022 Sarah launched the Agnoscis Journal which publishes writing across art practice, theory and theology. Sarah is a Visual Arts Programme Curator with Morphē Arts and has worked as an artist mentor with the charity since 2012.
Artist's website: www.sarahwhite.org.uk Instagram: @sarah_white16
Statement Endosode, is a visual exploration of the unseen realities of living daily with endometriosis, the way this shapes a person enduring it. Made over a 3-year period looking at moments of high physical pain and its consequences. This work invites the viewer into an intimate conversation of this invisible condition experienced by the artist.
Bio Ciara Menzies is a London-based photographer and visual Artist. She splits her time between the ‘big smoke’ and her native Scotland. Making work that follows the ups and downs of life, focusing on light-hearted stories to the more complex and deep stories that people carry. She has worked on symposiums with Edinburgh University, delving into topics like the integration of refugees within Scotland and exploring Art and the Sacred. Additionally, she has been involved in community art projects aimed at fostering creative expression in a deprived area of Dundee. Her background is rooted in education, and she is primarily self-taught in arts, although recently, Ciara completed an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography at UAL. Commercially, her work primarily focuses on portraiture and brand storytelling. However, her documentary work has taken a turn towards medical advocacy. Making mixed media work, 1 in 10 , exploring the lives of individuals dealing with chronic pain and photo series on the role of hospital chaplains. Currently, she is engaged in a broader project Period Pouch that examines the culture of shame surrounding menstruation and the diverse subcultures that exist globally around periods. In addition to these projects, over a year she explored the lives of young Scottish gamekeepers and the lives they lead.
To see more of her work, connect and follow online, www.ciaramenzies.com | @ciara_menzies
Statement
Ellipsis is a body of small silhouette paintings responding to the war in Ukraine. The series is conceived as an act of lament for events which I found myself deeply emotionally involved in and affected by. When the full scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, I felt unable to continue making the work that I had been making. Several months later, I turned to news photographs of the conflict and began tracing and simplifying them to the point where they were often just pieces of jagged horizon, or the outlines of figures. Images full of detail and pathos became shrouded and ambiguous. Tracing round the stencils, I made a series of small silhouette paintings, some in acrylic on board and others in acrylic or rabbit skin glue on unprimed canvas. Some of them used unusual materials as pigments, such as aluminium oxide abrasive powder, tea leaves, pollen and metal powders. Some had threads and embroidered elements added.
I have titled the series ‘Ellipses’, because I saw the war as a rupture, absence or discontinuity, like something had dropped out of the world. There was a sense of disbelief, as of something out of its correct place in time, when the war started. War suspends and there is something unsayable about war. At the same time, war is exhaustively documented, in grainy drone footage and pin-sharp images by professional war photographers. Endless images and endless overwhelming detail. When it comes to actually mourning war, and not just documenting it, you come to what can’t be said or shown. I wanted the series to be about the sadness I felt.
An ellipsis marks something that’s missing, or a trailing off, or something that is understood but not necessary to say. In mourning, a lot is left understood but not said. There is an enormity that even the sheer mass of photographs and videos cannot begin to grapple with and the only way that I can think of to approach it is to say less rather than more, to focus on the feeling and the absence. A kind of unsaying or trailing off of speech. An ellipsis has an end and a hope - there is more beyond the absence.
Bio
I studied illustration at Glasgow School of and the Royal College of Art between 1996 and 2001, and have pursued an independent fine art practice since then. I work across a range of media, including printmaking (woodcut and monoprint), painting and sculpture. I often use words, either singly or in texts, as a way to grapple with experiences, particularly of landscape/place. My practice incorporates notions of curation, repetition and a love of words. Many of my works are large in scale and consist of smaller units which are tiled together to produce the final installation. I have also produced figurative work, including a series of large scale woodcuts inspired by photographs of nineteenth century whalers.
Statement
Robert McKee (1968-1994)
Look Up
Thirty years after he died, the work of much-loved Stewarton artist and musician, Robert McKee, was showcased at a retrospective event attended by more than 150 friends and family.
Robert, who passed away in a diving accident aged 26, was a talented student at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee. He created prints which spoke of the lives of the city’s homeless men and women who he spent time with and got to know.
His exceptional body of work, including sketches, paintings, and prints, reveal a deep concern for an issue that continues to impact society today.
Three decades on, the McKee family felt that the time was right for Robert’s life and work to be celebrated and brought his portfolio down from the attic.
The exhibition, organised by friends and Robert’s younger brother and sister, Brian and Karen took place in John Knox Church, Stewarton on 17th November; it was the first time Robert’s work had been on public display since his degree show in 1990.
The sale of prints of Robert’s work have already raised over £6000 to be split between two charities dear to the McKee family’s heart, Shelter and Macmillan Cancer Support.
Cully studied at the same time as Robert and they were close friends. Nomas* Projects are proud to exhibit a selection of his work, in his memory, at our 5 poster gallery on South Crichton Street, opposite Dundee train station.
His work representing and sharing stories of the lives of homeless people in the city is sadly as relevant today as it was in 1990.
Exhibition on display November 17th 2023 – January 26th 2024
Statement
All four of us artists have a brain injury and are members of a supported studio called Submit to Love, a supported studio that is part of Headway East London. Headway and the Barbican London mounted a major well received exhibition at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery in July and August 2023. All of us had artworks in this exhibition and also were part of steering group very involved in the curation of the exhibition.
CHRIS MILLER, had a stroke 11 years ago, which affected the right side of his body, his walking, his writing hand and his ability to speak. Before this he was a science teacher, a youth and community worker for a local authority, Frontier Youth Trust and the United Reformed Church. Before his stroke art was something he was told at secondary school he wasn’t good at. After his stroke, though, through Submit to Love, he took up making art using pottery and acrylic paint, and has had artwork in various Submit to Love exhibitions over the past 9 years.
MIKE ANTHONY HOYLE In 1983, I was 18 years old and living in a small Yorkshire village. I was spending a year building up my photographic portfolio, before studying for a degree in photography. I was riding a motorbike, that was involved in an accident, which left me in a coma for six weeks.
After my brain injury, when I came round in Leeds General hospital I became confused and disruptive, believing I was in prison for something I could not remember. Had I killed someone? Nobody would tell me. I was on strong anti-epileptic medication which made me slow and drowsy. I remember throwing a television out of the window because I could not turn it off.
I went on an arts foundation course in York art school, but I could not concentrate, so I returned to my Yorkshire village, and photographed and printed an exhibition about motorcycle culture for the Spectro Gallery in Newcastle-upon-tyne, and living in the Dales for The Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal, Cumbria.
In 1984 I came to London to do my Film and Photography Degree, and later at Headway East London I joined with other brain injury survivors in exhibitions at the Autograph gallery in Shoreditch and plasticine sculptures at the Differently Various exhibition Barbican Curve Gallery (2023).
In London I went on various rehabilitation courses for people with brain injuries, and here it was suggested I followed a religion, so I became a Quaker. This gave my life meaning and focus, and I exhibited my photographs at the Quaker Centre, and I later published a book of photographs called WIDER VISIONS with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).
MIKE POOLE was a trained graphic designer in content marketing until his stroke in 2015. Headway then gave him the opportunity to paint, where his creativity was sparked by a client brief. Now he looks at an empty canvas with a rough idea of the texture and colours he wants to explore, then he sees what happens. Since his stroke he has completed an art foundation course, has had two solo exhibitions, He is looking for a gallery in 2024, and is a practicing Anglican.
BILLY MANN was a magazine journalist – first at the NME and later at the Guardian. When he had a stroke 10 years ago he started to make art at the Submit to Love studio, where he has experimented with various art practices but found his niche in digital painting using an iPad. More recently, he has started drawing with stitch, featuring in exhibitions at the Barbican, Autograph and Burgh House galleries in London. He sits on the Advisory Board of Art et Al (an organisation dedicated to the promotion of neurodiverse art) and runs the Golden Lane Stitchers group in his community in central London.
Artist's Statement
Lamps
Joseph Donald is a Dundee based artist, musician, and maker. With a helping of humour and absurdity he investigates the work/play relationships inherent in creative practices - allowing for great swathes of investment in professionally justified silliness. Through painting, sound and forays into fine joinery, he uses found/waste materials to create objects where play meets function, and being meets belonging.
‘Lamps’ continues earlier enquiries that began in painting: aiming to witness and consider the moments when objects become finished, complete, or justified. Through becoming lamps or shelves, paintings garner mock functionality as a new means to achieve this state. This introduces issues of design and gives products licence to both work and entertain. By pondering the conflict between art objects and the domestic, paintings have morphed into constructions that can be taken into peoples homes, often claiming to aid in some basic task during their stay.
Artist's Website
Artist's Statement
Three certainties:
This series of small paintings have grown from my fascination of working with copper and brass plates in my printmaking practice combined with my interest in exploring the possibilities of the miniature.
One of the certainties for me begins with my little ‘Glow’ paintings. These paintings started from a group exhibition I was involved in based on the theme of ‘Equinox’. They began as a series of just four paintings, but now have reached number 27 in the set. Their origin is quite simple; I live in Wormit, Fife, where for much of the winter months we see little of direct sunlight due to the layout of the hills behind the village. For me the Vernal Equinox signifies a time of hope after a long period of darkness. It is the moment where the light and dark are in momentary balance before the light starts to grow. The brass plates are roughened and painted upon, then reworked, scraped, or sanded back to reveal the bright glow of the metal’s surface. The reflective areas catch the light uniquely depending on time of day or angle of view, encouraging the viewer to search for the optimal point of the ‘glow’, seeking out the light.
The second certainty in this exhibition is simply that the clouds will keep rolling, changing, and drifting by. Where I find the Glow paintings a sign of hope, the tiny skies for me are a symbol of constant flux and (beautiful) unpredictability. Thermals, winds, sunlight, and moonlight act to continuously reshape them. Perceived colours can go from deep purples to violent reds, all changing or shifting within an instant.
The third certainty is the sad truth of humankind’s urge, need or desire for war. According to Wikipedia, since the year of my birth in 1982, there have been over 200 conflicts in this world, some of which still continue, some will re-ignite. These little paintings have a working title of both ‘the human-made glow series’ and ‘the atrocity series’. They are tiny images that depict moments of massive explosive impact within cities and towns. They are frightening (yet distant) horizons depicting the horrendous realities of our kind. The brass plate that previously denoted hope in the Glow paintings is now completely covered by paint, hidden beneath an unnatural, artificial glow.
Artist's Bio
Robert is an Irish artist who lives and works in Wormit and Dundee, Scotland. He studied Fine Art Printmaking at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin and received his MFA from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), Dundee. During his studies, his primary art practice has involved painting, printmaking and more recently has moved into the realms of emerging digital technologies including CNC milling, 3D scanning and 3D printing. He currently works in DJCAD teaching Art, Design and Architecture students how to utilise new technologies withing their making practice and he previously spent seven years working at Dundee Contemporary Arts Print Studio focusing on his interests in combining traditional and emerging printmaking technologies.
Artist's Website
Context
PKN16 Cully and Owen Daily from CreativeDundee on Vimeo.
Welcome.
Nomas Projects is a four window gallery space, based in 9a Ward Rd, Dundee, run by local artists, Cully McCulloch and Owen Daily.
This experimental project provides a platform for Contemporary Art in a broad range of media.
Inititally, in partnership with The McManus Gallery, artists' talks and events will be held in The McManus Education Room, offering the public opportunities to meet the artists and hear about the issues in their work. These events will be held every four to six weeks.
It is hoped that this project will contribute to the growing cultural life of the visual arts in Dundee, by showing strong contemporary work from around the UK and abroad, and offering an opportunity to investigate the role of art in society.
* Greek nomas, nomad- ‘roaming in search of pasture’, from the base of nemein ‘to pasture’.
The gallery is in the windows of 9a Ward Road, Dundee, DD1 1LP.
Associated talks and events will be held in The McManus Gallery, Education Rooms, Albert Square, Dundee, DD1 1DA