Directional Forces 2012
Monday 26 March 2012
“Directional Forces 2012” brings together 16 artists from Malaysia, Taiwan, Europe and the UK to work in residency at Artoll, a specialist arts studio complex situated in a rural psychiatric clinic town near to Kleve in Germany.
Directional Forces 2012” takes its title from of one Joseph Beuys most significant works. Made between 1974 and 1977, Richtkräfte (Directional forces, 1974–77) is an installation of 100 chalked blackboards featuring the wide range of subjects that Beuys covered in his lecture presentations. The work was begun during Art and Society at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (Nov. 1974). It was subsequently shown at the René Block Gallery, New York (April 1975) and the Venice Biennale (July 1976) before Beuys installed it in Berlin in its final form.
Beuys developed the role of the artist as pedagogue throughout the 1970s, including discussion and teaching in his expanded definition of art, delivering lectures in galleries and art colleges using complex annotated chalk drawings on blackboards. Beuys thinking was highly influenced by the work of the educationalist thinker, Rudolph Steiner. Beuys theories of ‘Social Sculpture’ and the ‘Social organism as work of art’ emerge from Steiner’s theories of the ‘Social Three-folding” of ‘economy, politics and culture’. Beuys believed that art and creativity had the power to transform, and key to this was the belief that ongoing, active debate is necessary to stimulate this.
The aim of the “Directional Forces 2012” is for the artists to interrogate the pedagogy of their practice within a social situation within a series of interconnected studios, leading towards a new body of work by each artist. None of the studio spaces have separating doors, and artists are free to observe and comment on the practices of each other, without privacy. The artists live, eat and work together, sharing knowledge, ideas and creative experiences through social interaction and engagement. This is an unfamiliar situation for the majority of artists, who typically work in isolated studio spaces in cities.
The works will contribute to an exhibition on the 17/3/12 at Artoll and will be extended into a catalogue publication featuring images and text by the artists and associated writers. The project will be documented in an online blog http://directionalforces2012.tumblr.com, which will aim to capture the ‘social organism’ that transformed the practices of these artists during this period of intense working activity.
Directional Forces has been made possible through the support of Artoll and the University of East London’s Teaching Fellowship Programme and the Going Global Bursary. The project is also supported by the Professional Doctorate Degree programme in Fine Art (DFA), the longest running wholly practice-based doctorate level fine art study programme in the UK.
http://www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/specs/docfineart/
Directional Forces 2012: Artists
Martin Barrett
Martin Barrett’s practice is originally rooted in the disciplines of drawing and printmaking, although it has broadened considerably over the years to encompass sculpture, digital imaging and painting. For this residency he will be taking the opportunity to work on a larger scale to explore ambiguous compositions and scenarios.
The themes of Barrett’s work are broadly socio-political, rooted in his fascination with the glorious chaos of humanity. Barrett feels that as we create ever more complex and bureaucratic economic systems we then expect our leaders, like Sisyphus, to carry the huge weight of our expectations and entitlements to ever greater heights, stating “In reality all they can do is keep the plates spinning a little longer!”
Barrett proposes that artists, like comedians, have the forum to tell the world how it is, safe in the knowledge that nobody will take a blind bit of notice of them!
Martin Barrett is Senior Lecturer at the University of East London, and lives and works in London
Web: www.martinbarrett.co.uk <http://www.martinbarrett.co.uk>
Cedric Christie
Cedric Christie’s work explores a broad range of cultural and art historical references, often using humour and irony as subtle vehicles of communication. He incorporates and manipulates everyday objects such as snooker balls, scaffolding, and even cars creating sculptures that are meticulously and skilfully made. They become both a critical appraisal of modernism as well as a playful exploration of form and meaning. Christie's work betrays a fascination with the fluid line between art and object, manifesting the mercurial spirit inherent in embracing indistinct categories. Cedric has exhibited widely in UK and internationally and has curated a number of large scale group exhibitions including the group show Something I don't do.
Cedric Christie was born in London in 1962, and lives and works in London. He is represented by Flowers Gallery.
Web: http://www.flowersgalleries.com <http://www.flowersgalleries.com/artists/118-artists/3788-cedric-christie/#/section-work/>
Garry Doherty
Garry Doherty has established a multi disciplined creative practice, integrating two-dimensional objects, sculptural video installations, constructed photographic assemblages and “performative” actions assimilated from his spiritual practice; he has been a dedicated Muslim for the last 25 years and taught by the Grand Shaykh of the Nashbandi Order of Sufis.
He endeavours to develop a transcendent content that is displayed over a range of media platforms, each continually mindful of each other, asking questions of the relationship between the constituent parts. He states; ”the necessity to make an artwork a self conscious environment mindful of its own phenomenological being, an object of consciousness that exposes its own internal dynamic system to itself and successively transcend its own appearance.”
Doherty transforms monotheistic concepts such as “The Last Judgment,” into personal visionary ideals; he enacts the grand narrative in the temporal space of the everyday. His art works present a cycle of images depicting the making of a TV series entitled, “The Last Judgment.” His imaginary TV show introduces real places or events as if they were invited guests who are to be judged by the viewer who participates as an audience member.
Doherty’s elemental cycle engages with the concept of mankind’s never ending journey, he evokes the mythic archetypes of the past and explores the themes of human existence: Individuality, birth, death and the passing of the soul through the waters of the temporal world and into the afterlife.
Garry Doherty lives and works in London. He teaches at the University of East London and is the representative and director of The School of Sufi Teaching, London.
Eric Great-Rex
Eric makes ceramic plates. He uses the low status of ceramics as one of the readings in his practice, questioning the prejudices that surround this medium. Whether the prejudice is good or bad, it is the first filter that the work is viewed through. His ceramic plates exist not as containers for fruit, although they can be used in that way, nor as subdued decorative objects, although they rely on decoration. He undertakes to make something that emphasizes the proximity of thought and feeling in our relationship to things, an inanimate object that gives a cuddle and takes a modest art position.
Eric Great-Rex lives and works in London. He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London.
Paul Helliwell
Paul Helliwell’s work attempts to place the self within the sensual and material energies of picture making. Helliwell plays with our expectations concerning the believability and sincerity of an image; for example he uses languages that collide and emphasise the painting’s synthetic and surface qualities.
His work is a source of freedom and pleasure that transcends the emotional pain of contemporary life. He does not seek an esoteric escape from reality, but to locate the self in a moment of becoming. This ‘all inclusive’ moment is an accumulation of all that goes into the work; it is how physicality and presence is achieved. He engages the subconscious to bring past experiences into the present and manifest emotional intent.
Paul Helliwell won the East of England Award at the National Open Art Competition in 2010, he has showed in the UK and Europe.
Sally Labern
Sally Labern works in sculpture and drawing, print and live performative works. She is deeply interested in resilience and the shadow which informs the ideas within her work. She is a sculptor who makes/remake things and has a deep interest in the power of creativity to change the balance in people’s lives. Sally uses digital tools within her personal and collaborative practice: GPS, film, sound, social networking, and publishing; she uses these as the work dictates.
Pervading her practice is a preoccupation with the enquiry around the sovereignty of the artist's voice, and how this translates into collaboration with other artists, and in turn how this manifests within socially engaged practice. She currently holds a durational residency on two housing estates in East London UK funded by Arts Council England where she co-leads 'the drawing shed', a dialogical project that unfolds around the focus of mobile art structures; a mobile drawing studio and print workshop called PrintBike and collaborative art writing / Twitter.
Sally creates interventions with non artists where trust and familiarity can lead to invitations to take risks in art making where the creative spaces and relationships with participants throw up 'edges'. It is this practice that she currently refers to as 'lost', making works that are driven out of that space. When using drawing she physically works a space as well as a ‘surface’ (loosely defined this can be objects or the entirety of a papered out room/external space) and she develops large drawing/print works in contested public/'common' spaces; she currently works on a national UK artist led Twitter project around the edges of day and night.
Sally Labern lives and works in London.
Twitter @spittingstars <https://twitter.com/#!/spittingstars>
Web: www.thedrawingshed.org <http://www.thedrawingshed.org>
Ivan Lam
Ivan Lam says this about his work: “My art is no longer bounded by the shackles of consumer culture. It is never about the process of painting but the thought behind the paint. Ivan uses any medium he sees fit to convey his concept/idea. His work reflects his surroundings and the state of his thinking. The question of meaning in his work is futile because his art encompasses everything and nothing at the same time. He no longer seeks truths in his work but only constant negotiations of boundaries between art and life. Ivan’s work is not about the struggle to conflate everyday life and art, his work does not seek answers but simply to ask questions. By stating what is it not Ivan affirms what his work is about. It is through this dichotomy that his work exists.
Ivan was born in 1975 and works in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He is represented by Wei-Ling Gallery Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ivan is winner of the Phillip Morris Art Prize 2003 and was shortlisted for the Sovereign Art Prize in 2009. Ivan has shown his work widely in South East Asia and the USA and has work in public and private collections across the world.
Web: http://www.weiling-gallery.com/ivanlam.htm <http://www.weiling-gallery.com/ivanlam.htm>
Lesley Logue
Logue’s practice stems from her training as a painter and printmaker and extends to include working with photography and moving image. Her practice is driven by her interest in specific individuals and communities and their behaviour in response to generational and historic shifts in their environment.
Artoll’s setting in Bedburg-Hau, surrounded by residential houses for the treatment of the mentally ill, is a starting point for Logue to focus on the historical shifts and fragility of this location. Drawing parallels with the maintenance and repair of body and mind Logue ‘s attention is drawn to active evidence of tree maintenance and surgery on the site, pruning, chopping and removal.
Through the work Logue plays with the juxtaposition of the real and unreal, the act and the simulation, the actual experience and the experience imagined.
Logue has exhibited nationally and internationally and has work in many private collections in the UK and abroad.
Lesley Logue was born and grew up in Scotland. She studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University then went on to complete an MA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Royal College of Art. Lesley has taught at several universities in England teaching both Fine art and Design practice. Lesley teaches at the University of East London.
Sian Mooney
There is a subtle legacy in Sian Mooney's work of her previous career as a fashion designer. Within her sculpture there is a knowing understanding of fabric and a structural awareness of the body, yet this belies a more political and emotional relationship to ‘dress’ than with mere clothing design. The work is often based around body parts, legs and arms of human and other forms such as furniture, mannequins and animals are encapsulated in various material 'skins' in works that address complex human relationships and the visceral nature of sexuality.
As an artist, Sian Mooney has been exploring methods of encapsulating shape and the meaning of shape by wrapping a series of significant objects using soft materials to mould and sculpt. Folds and drapes are both considered and intuitive; some are drenched in wax and patterned whilst others rely on the original surface of the material before being committed to permanency by using a hardener. The result is sculpture that initially seems heavy and soft but is in fact the opposite. The contradiction in the reality of the object and its visual appearance hints at the ambivalence and dichotomy in the artist's own recognised state of being.
Sian Mooney is Visiting Professor to Tsinghua University China, Ghangzhou Academy of Fine Art China, Vantan Design Institute Japan, Legenda Education Group Malaysia, she represents the British Council for Fashion in Armenia and Nigeria. Sian Mooney lectures at the University of East London and lives in London.
Blog: www.mooneystudiodiary.wordpress.com <http://www.mooneystudiodiary.wordpress.com>
Mark Sowden
Mark Sowden makes Art using a wide range of processes and media. Drawing has been an important tool for him since childhood both as a way of looking at the world and developing visual ideas. He trained as a sculptor and continues to use casting and construction techniques in his work. In recent years he has extended his practice to include photographic processes. He has used digital photographs as elements in constructions and has used objects to make photograms in a way that has a close affinity with casting processes. Sowden uses Art as a way of interacting with his physical and visible environment. He describes it as a meeting place where routine understanding is challenged and a space for transformation opens up. He wants his Art to interact with its subject rather than document it. He actively encourages ambiguous states that challenge simple understanding and wants to approach making with a non-dogmatic, free spirit.
Working away form home during the residency at Artoll, Sowden will take a range of tools and materials hoping to find surfaces, objects, spaces and sights to interact with. Leaving London he does not yet know what form this interaction will take.
Mark Sowden lives and works in London
Nerys Mathias
The practice of Nerys Mathias is one of being a “Witnessing Woman”. Her subject matter is romantic relationships and images of men. These subjects are revealed through lens based media, often digitally manipulated and the product may be anything that can be digitally printed on. She is witnessing what it is to be in romantic relationships, she is a witness to being a woman.
Nerys Mathias lives and works in London.
Lewis Paul
Lewis Paul’s practice engages questions of masculine identity both subjectively and within a broader historical relationship of class (working men), family and forms of representation. Encompassing a transdisciplinary approach, Lewis produces films, photographic work and sculptural objects considering relationships between story, narrative and material.
Lewis produces highly crafted 35mm film work, for example ‘Documentary Evidence, (we are not your audience)’ commissioned by Southeast Arts, UK. 35mm film portraits, screened on 4 screens at the Odeon Hastings, UK July to August 2002. (2001-2002), represent men working with machines, reclaiming the importance of haptic skills and craft based endeavor within the frame of cinematic representation. In recent work, ‘Re-claimation Mark’ (2012) filmed across London underneath a 1978 Landrover, a study of legacy format video (dvsp) in 4:3 ratio produces a reflexive space considering the body as a tool of filmmaking, a site of geographic empowerment and a boundary point between representational modes of viewing and being seen.
Lewis considers within his sculptural practice the role of invention through possible collisions between expected modes of dress, costume and the system of fashion as outward symbols of male and class identity. Working with modified clothing and producing objects that recombine clothing tropes Lewis reconsiders ascribed material values and engages with questions of habitat, a boundary between clothing as veil, symbol and mobile metonym. Recent work re-constructing men’s suits for example ‘Principles for men’ (2010), ‘Made in Australia’(2011) and tweed jackets ‘Country Casuals’ (2012) begins to reform sartorial codes of mimesis. Aspiring to be highly crafted these soft sculptural forms reflect the role of craft and making within the tailoring tradition, but often with room for maneuver and humour.
Lewis Paul is Senior Lecturer at the Northern Film School, Leeds Metropolitan University and lives and works in London.
Dean Todd
Since the early 1990s Dean has used photography, film, video, presentations/installations and interactive art performances. Dean’s subject matter has incorporated and, in some cases, solely used crowds, groupings, other collections, clusters and assemblages of people. He has used people gatherings anywhere and everywhere: carnivals, festivals, pubs, clubs, theatres, galleries, sports events and political rallies. Dean worships places where human interaction is staged and controlled; these places have very clear protocols and highly managed dynamics. Deans strategy is to show that the controllers are out to persuade a crowd to align to a particular view or be moved in a particular way. His interest is in those mass gatherings that lie outside the norm, where controls are relaxed and the usual forms of behaviour may be distorted. His work relies heavily on the participation of others.
Dean Todd lives and works in London
Web: www.deantodd.co.uk <http://www.deantodd.co.uk/>
Hedley Roberts - Directional Forces Curator
Hedley Roberts uses paint and digital media to interrogate the complexity of romantic love and the ‘betweeness’ of relationships. Paint is handled as an expressive, performative medium that aims to capture moments of the artist’s inner dialogue and emotional state. Digtial media is used to create moving paintings that meld and conjoin figures to produce troubled, interrupted forms. Oversized watercolour portraits of flirtatious, angry, sad, confused, and unspecified individuals confront us as audience. Images of passionate kisses form psychodramatic landscapes of characters locked in moments of unbridled lust, caring embrace, or dramatic end. Each image is a moment that presages the possibility of tragedy and the loss of the innocent adolescent ideal of the endless embrace.
Hedley Roberts is both an artist and an educationalist, has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is the curator of the Directional Forces project. He is Head of Digital Arts and Visual Communication at the University of East London and Visiting Professor to Limkokwing University Malaysia and Legenda Education Group Malaysia.
Web: http://www.hedleyroberts.co.uk <http://www.hedleyroberts.co.uk>
Twitter: @hedleyroberts <https://twitter.com/#!/hedleyroberts>
Chin Wu
Chin Wu’s cultural approach to mark making is reminiscent of traditional Taiwanese brush painting techniques. He works on rice paper with a fluid mark making using ink and rake brushes. The intensity of marks command a meditative contemplative philosophy. In the performance of making the work, Chin is at one with the world despite the isolation and displacement of his cultural context. His use of colour is dramatic, contrasting reds and blacks, and making use of the white paper to inform the aesthetic of the work. Themes of gestural landscapes, water and fish make a relation between the western lyrical abstraction and eastern calligraphic marks.
Chin Wu was born in Taiwan, and has lived and worked in San Francisco, New York, Beijing, and the UK.
