Structure Texture Future is, perhaps, a tricky title for an exhibition. If you read it aloud each word jars against the next. It jams and stutters, but the terms are connected even as they are different, a repetition and a variation each time. It is the right title for a collection of work that offers up its own repetitions and variations on a shared set of themes. In some ways, it is clear how this title speaks to many of the items selected for the show: there are a number of structured installations here (aluminium tents, angular metal frames, sculptures and screens), and works with a textile component feature strongly (chiffon swatches, canvas bags, braille imprints even). But the items are also various in their forms and tones, eliciting from

I would like to thank all artists past and present of Bow Arts who have supported the important work we do in schools and local communities across London bringing high quality

art to new audiences. Marcel Baettig

Founder & Chief Executive

Bow Open Showcelebrating the best of Bow

Artists

Rosamond Murdoch, Director Nunnery Gallery,

Bow Arts Trust.

curated by Dr Shahidha Bari & Rosamond Murdoch

20 June – 5 July 2015

Nunnery Gallery181 Bow RoadLondonE3 2SJ

the viewer, I think, different kinds of reflection and engagement. Together they provide a series of deliberations on the relationship of technology to community, landscape to lived environment. For me, the works selected here gather around figurations of technology, industry and nature, and they share in common interlocked ideas of ruin and repair. This grounds the collection in its home in East London, in a part of the city that is a heartland for creativity and making, but which is also constantly building and displacing. The show reflects on what it means for artistic practice, something that is inherently generative, to take place in a culture that has distorted that notion. We feverishly seek to “generate” income, energy and communities as though such things could be accomplished easily, readily, without damage or difficulty. These works, in differing measures and degrees, reflect on the connected and contradictory relationship of technology to nature, but also cast it in a more considered idiom. Thinking through structure and texture, they ask how our modern technological reality might alter our expressions of the natural, and how the natural might absorb or refigure the technological.

Beauty isn’t exclusive to the natural, nor is the natural without human intervention and industry. In those brutal and severe structures of a city, there is a mendacious beauty,

STRUCTURE TEXTURE FUTURE

Dr Shahidha Bari

an aestheticisation that is by turns redemptive and disconcerting. As these works illustrate, the relationship of technology to nature can move from one of acquisition and exploitation to imitation. Equally, the representations of nature too can acquire, exploit and imitate the technological. This is a show full of deconstructed leaves, skies and landscapes, determinedly made so that they are no longer abstract but part of an augmented material reality.

In Daniela Sarigu’s “The Seasons of Saturn”, a delicate, patch of painted chiffon is mounted on a board, its pattern of planetary geometry framed by luminous green stripes that manage to invoke something both natural and otherworldly at once. By contrast, in “Risk of Ruin”, Eugene Perrera’s photographs offer up data instead of nature; in the flickering screens, the movement of global capital is visualised, abstracted, made beautiful and unintelligible. The merit of Leah Miller-Biot’s simple landscape, “Cold Front” is its freedom from such logic; it is, instead, starkly pastoral, abstract and elemental, its beauty leavened by a darkened sky. The meticulous polyester threadwork of Lizzie Cannon’s “Mended Leaf” suggests restitution but also irreparable damage, intimating a world which will never be the same again. In the same vein but in a different scale, Suzana Tamamović’s

canvas post bags in ”After the Flood” are stained and sodden, but resolutely rugged, bearing up the battering to which they have been subject. There is strength, actual steeliness, in G. Roland Biermann’s elusive monochrome photographs too. Austere, even clinical, the photographs are gracefully suspended from large metal frames, the elegant structure by which they are born up as important as the images themselves.

You might notice that this is a selection in which actual people, faces and figures, hardly feature at all. If there is here a diminished human presence, it might be taken as a gesture of humility, seen and felt implicitly in many of these works. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of a city more concerned with capital than community, that razes its landscapes and empties its buildings. But in imagining the world we make and ruin without us in it, we don’t absolve ourselves of responsibility, rather we see better the things we have broken and might repair. These works quietly assert this, are representative of our capabilities, over and above our identities. They reflect on our fraught human presence in a world we continuously make and mend, and which we fill with the structures we build and the textures we feel.

And the idea of touch is at the heart of this show, representative

of the ways we are capable both of making and feeling artworks. Textiles, in particular, have seemed to me to be peculiarly expressive of this idea of making and feeling, and they are foregrounded strongly here, not as a kind of nostalgia for handicrafts or homeliness, but as a figuring of the future. This is a densely textured show, variously rough and smooth, warm and cold, constituted by steels and silks, lights and layers, creases and canvas. So many of these works solicit touch. They ask for us to reflect on the future, to think about the ways we might connect, literally and metaphorically, in a city where we can feel so far apart. And it is no small matter that Bow Arts brings this collection together. In the year of its 20th anniversary, in some way, Bow Arts itself is the emblem of this show, industrious and innovative, committed to repairing from the ruins in order to generate in its corner of the city a project, a community and a thoughtful body of work that might articulate something that extends far beyond it.

- Dr Shahidha Bari

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Shahidha Bari is a writer, academic and critic, based in London. She is lecturer in Romanticism at Queen Mary University of London.Her academic work examines Islam and the idea of the East in nineteenth-century European literature and art. Bari has previously written on contemporary philosophy, music, modern art and architecture. Her first book, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations was published in 2012.Her work has featured in The Guardian, on BBC Radio 3 Night Waves, The Essay programme and BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed.Bari is a regular columnist for Times Higher Education and frequently reviews film and visual arts for BBC Radio 4 Front Row. In print, her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Observer, New Statesman and Times Literary Supplement.She is the winner of the 2014/15 Observer Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize, for a “powerful and insightful” review of the “National Theatre’s Medea”She is a trustee of the educational mentoring charity, The Arts Emergency Service.She is currently working on a cultural history of clothes.

BIOGRAPHYAglaé Bassens was born in 1986 in Mons, Belgium. She obtained a BA from The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in 2007 and went on to complete an MFA in Painting at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2011. Since then, Bassens has been establishing her practice from her studio in Bow. She has exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery, Charlie Smith Gallery, and APT Gallery amongst other venues. Aglaé Bassens was also included in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2012 and in the recent Thames & Hudson publication 100 Painters of Tomorrow. She was shortlisted for The East London Painting Prize 2013 and was a runner up for the WW SOLO AWARD last year. Aglaé Bassens took part in Painting Biennial: A Painter’s Touch at the Museum of Art of Deinze, Belgium, in 2014. Her future projects include Village Green Festival in Southend (July 2015) and Whispers, a group show curated by Adeline De Monseignat at Ronchini Gallery (December 2015).

ARTIST’S COMMENTThis year I have been particularly drawn to American imagery. This fascination stems from my current interest in the visual, non verbal power of painting. From Coca Cola advertising to Hollywood film sets, myths and image-making are central to American culture. My own work has always dealt with interrupted narratives, suspense, and stage-like structures. I also love the way images such as rodeo machines, bowling alleys and gun drawing relate to movement and gesture, much the active, gestural nature of painting itself. In my current body of work I wish to reinvestigate motifs such as cowboys, desert skies and cacti to resurrect their power as purely visual triggers for story making. With Firefly, as with my past work, I have selected and simplified the motifs that spoke to me, and rearranged them into a new painterly stage. The cacti have been turned into neon signs interrupting the purple night sky without a clear purpose. The space in the painting is both deep and flat, much like the illusion of a film set.

TITLE: Firefly, 2015

MEDIUM: Oil paint on canvas

DIMENSIONS: 130 x 170 cm

www.aglaebassens.com

G. Roland BiermannBIOGRAPHYG Roland Biermann was born in Bonn, Germany. He studied at New York University and is based in London. An examination of change and transformation in time, space and ultimately, in society, is central to his practice.His work has been shown in the form of solo exhibitions at the German Embassy London twice (2014 and 2010/11), Goethe Gallery / Hong Kong Arts Centre (2013), White Room, Capri (2013), 12 Star Gallery , London (2013), Bayerische Hofglasmalerei, Munich (2012), Goethe-Institut, Paris (2011), Dommuseum Frankfurt (2010), University of Glasgow (2008), Galerie Villa Ruh, Zingst (2007) Johanneskirche, Duesseldorf and St. Mary Bow Church, London (2005), Linhof-Galerie, Munich (2005) and kjubh Kunstverein, Cologne (2001).His works are included in the collections of the German Embassy London, ThyssenKrupp, Duesseldorf/Essen, Signy+Olaf Willums Foundation, Provence as well as private collections in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Monte Carlo, Spain and the United States.He is represented by Myriam Blundell Projects, London.

ARTIST’S COMMENTsnow+concrete is a series of mostly snow+concrete X shows a disappearing snow tristar in a concrete corner. The snow structure seems to move along the edges of the walls, emphasizing their rigid 90 degree angles, linking the walls as much as separating them. The four glass panels are wire-suspended in a stainless steel frame. Form and materials reflect on contemporary habitats: the concrete walls in the photographs, the glass panels, like windows, corresponding with each other in the polyptych and the shape and form of the frame point at a contemporary urban world, widely detached from nature and dominated by concrete, steel and glass.

In the form of triptychs and polyptychs the works are printed on non-plain, fused glass panels. Each glass panel is shaped so that it shows concave and convex areas according to the specific image. These hybrid works are more sculptural and physical than conventional photographs, almost three-dimensional, and, at the same time, due to the transparency of the glass, remain light and open. The glare and gloss of the glass suggests the idea of something turning liquid and underlines the idea of the melting of the snow.

TITLE: snow+concrete X2014

MEDIUM & DIMENSIONS:Four black & white photographs on fused glass50 x 50 cm each wire-suspended in stainless steel frame240 x 160 x 160 cm

www.grolandbiermann.com

Stephen BuggleBIOGRAPHYSteve was born in the North East and studied Fine Art at Reading University in the 1970s. More recently he has practiced at Slade School of Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, City Lit, East London Printers, the London Print Studio and the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design (CASS). He gained a MA at Central London Polytechnic and holds a number of professional qualifications.Steve gradually withdrew from painting in the late 1970s to pursue a successful business career, which spanned more than thirty years working in the public and private sectors. This included, 27 years as a Board Director, 20 years as a Board Governor in the education sector, 8 years as Chair of a large Further Education College/University and 10 years running his own consultancy company. Steve returned to painting 7 years ago and is a member of the East London Printers, the Espacio Gallery, East London, and Bow Arts, E3, where he has a studio.Steve has exhibited at The Pall Mall Gallery and was a chosen finalist in the Winsor and Newton exhibition. Nowadays he mainly exhibits at the Espacio Gallery in East London.

ARTIST’S COMMENTMy paintings are abstract and are informed by what is going on around me, particularly modern architecture with its simplicity and clarity of form. I use structure, space, depth and proportion to describe different relationships within the painting. I want my paintings to give the feeling that something is happening on the surface, behind the surface, beyond the surface. I am interested in the qualities of positive and negative space and I work with form, colour and edge to create different layers of depth inside and outside the picture plane. In Exhibit 38 basic formal elements, squares, oblongs and lines are layered, juxtaposed and weaved together to create visual rhythms and balance across the surface, behind the surface and beyond the surface.

www.stevebuggle.com

TITLE: Exhibit 38, 2014

MEDIUM: Acrylic on Canvas

DIMENSIONS: 92 x 92 cm

BIOGRAPHYMalina Busch completed her MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and BFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, US. Her artwork has been exhibited in the UK and internationally, with shows at: The Courtauld Institute of Art, London; Jerwood Space, London; Phoenix Gallery, Exeter Phoenix; Collyer Bristow Gallery, London; and Hush Gallery, Istanbul. Awards include: the Joan Day Painting Bursary (2014), the Double Elephant National Bursary for experimental printmaking (2013), the Henry Tonks Prize for achievements in drawing (2011), and shortlist for the Jerwood Drawing Prize (2012). Malina lives and works in London, where she is currently the Honorary Research Associate to Graduate Painting at the Slade School of Fine Art.

ARTIST’S COMMENTShortly after the completion of her MFA at the Slade in 2011, Malina started experimenting with folded and shaped paintings. Wanting to move away from the tradition of painting with oils on stretched supports, and curious about the relationship that colour has with the physical

Malina Buschwww.malinabusch.com

TITLE: Night-blooming, 2014

MEDIUM: Grease pencil and folded

canvas on wall

DIMENSIONS:90 x 100 x 25 cm

materials of a painting; she began to investigate the question - “What can happen when colour is allowed to determine the outcome of a painting?” ‘Night-blooming’ comes out of Malina’s interest in fleeting moments and sensations. Those moments which are not fully understood because they are only briefly glimpsed or experienced. She aims to draw attention to the unpredictable, subjective, and fluctuating nature of colour and our sensory surroundings. In her studio, Malina explores the overlaps between painting, drawing, sculpture, and fibre arts. The fluid nature of colour relationships, and how they shift according to material choices fascinate her, with each colour behaving in its own unique way as it encounters different surfaces and materials. For Malina each artwork is a small piece of a memory. Each mark or folded crease suggesting an action which has already occurred, but where its memory has lingered through the traces that it has left behind.

Lizzie CannonBIOGRAPHYAfter completing a B.Sc. in Geography at The University of St. Andrews, Lizzie Cannon re-focused her interest in human-environment interactions into her art practice, completing a BA in Textiles at Goldsmiths in 2006. Cannon has exhibited both internationally and in the UK, including at GV Art, London; Royal West of England Academy, Bristol; Mackintosh Gallery, Glascow; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; The Deutsche Textile Museum, Krefeld; and Museum of Applied Art, Budapest. She was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2007, Art of the Stitch in 2009 and Jerwood Makers in 2014. In 2012 she was one of three artists selected to take part in the residency ‘Made in Bow’ in association with Newham Archive and the Nunnery Gallery. Cannon has works held in public and private collections.

ARTIST’S COMMENTLizzie Cannon’s subtle interventions in a process of decay or corrosion, tap into the delicate transitory state of a material or object. In her series ‘Mended leaves’, holes in found leaves are painstakingly darned with thread. The colours of the thread are carefully matched to the colours of the leaves, yet paradoxically, the very process of ‘mending’ the leaves accelerates their degradation through repeatedly piercing them with the needle and once the leaf has been preserved by drying in silica, the colour fades making the darned areas blemishes on the leaf’s surface. The series was partly inspired by looking at worn 19th century napkins, darned so expertly by women in service, that the mends are barely visible. The invisibility of the darner is used here, as a way to reflect upon the human attempt to preserve nature in a way that leaves no trace. The term to ‘stitch’ is derived from the old English word ‘stice’, meaning puncture or sudden pain. Darning the leaves is simultaneously an act of reparation and destruction. Some holes are left untouched, leaving the work in a state of transition and with a beauty best explained by Leonard Koren’s (1994) description of the Japanese aesthetic, wabi-sabi as ‘a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete’.

TITLE: Mended leaf [hosta] 2012

MEDIUM:Leaf darned with polyester thread

DIMENSIONS:60 x 42 cm framed

www.lizziecannon.com

BIOGRAPHYJames Lander/Those Who Wish To Remain Anonymous are PhD candidates at University of the Arts London (2014-) with support from Chelsea Arts Club Trust. As property guardians/artists, currently in work/live residence with Bow Arts Trust, they are undertaking an extensive research project at the iconic Balfron Tower in Poplar, East London. The project uses non identical twin BALFRON TOWER/Rowlett Street Archives to investigate William S. Burroughs’ claim ‘Nothing

James Lander or Those Who Wish to Remain Anonymous TITLE:

What’s the storey? 2015

MEDIUM:Two copies of Time Out

London May 26-June 1 2015 No. 2330 courtesy of

the BALFRON TOWER/Rowlett Street Archives on bookcases courtesy of the

Balfron Tower skip.

DIMENSIONS:book cases each 92 x 42 x

29 cm

Is True, Everything Is Permitted.’ (1981) James Lander/Those Who Wish To Remain Anonymous took an MA in fine art from Chelsea College of Art (2012) with a bursary from the Artists and Collectors Exchange. Their work has been selected for exhibition at Hanmi Gallery (2013) Five Years (2008) GE Club Great Eastern Hotel London curated by Franko B (2005) and Studio Voltaire. (2003) They completed an Erasmus Socrates Exchange Residency with the class of Marina Abramovic at the Fine Art Academy, Braunschweig, Germany. (2000) ARTIST’S COMMENTThe BALFRON TOWER/Rowlett Street Archives were established by James Lander/Those Who Wish to Remain Anonymous in 2012. As artists/property guardians currently in live/work residence at Balfron Tower, they have had access to the inner workings of the Tower over the past three years; from the artistic and cultural activities of recent years, to the overlooked traces and ephemera captured in common areas such as the north and south stairwells. The aim of the research is to use the Archives as a conduit to investigate who has the right to sell Balfron Tower storeys and who has the right to tell Balfron Tower stories. Videos from the BALFRON TOWER/Rowlett Street Archives were shown at the launch of The Brutalist Playground at The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA 2015). Forthcoming publications include a contribution to the Journal of Arts Writing by Students (JAWS).

http://londonsartistquarter.org/artist-hub/users/james-lander/profile

Leah Miller-BiotBIOGRAPHYEnglish born artist Leah Miller-Biot spent her formative years in the North and North Eastern regions of Brazil. A graduate of both the Slade School of Art and Glasgow School of Art, her work is heavily informed by the experience of growing up between numerous cultures, which can be seen in the multiplicity of forms, colours, crafts and textures she employs in her work. Her exploration of the traditions of both abstract and representational painting, allows her to investigate the manifestations of an identity in constant flux through the objects and materials that form a part of her life. Recent shows include Studio- 41 Glasgow, Casa da Arte, Sao-Luis Brazil and as part of In the House a series of open house exhibitions in London.

ARTIST’S COMMENTFrom one moment to the next a cold front moved in and a dark storm cloud slumped over the view from my studio window. There is always too much information for a painter to paint, so I respond by feeling my way through it all with the tip of a brush as my guide. These paintings are brush eye views of the world immediately around me – its masses and forms, planes and protrusions, and of course colour. Colour disrupts forms, creates space and stirs up emotions; colour allows me to say something with yellow and to start a war between two greys.Simply put this is a painting about the weight of a grey cloud, how to paint the moment before a storm and the contemplation of a view beyond a windowpane. Like most of my work it is neither fully abstract nor entirely representational, but poised between the two, feeling its way around the edges of vision, thought and touch.

www.leahmillerbiot.co.uk

TITLE:Cold Front, 2014

MEDIUM:Oil on canvas

DIMENSIONS:70 x 85 cm

Elizabeth MurtonBIOGRAPHYSince graduating from Goldsmiths in 2006, Elizabeth Murton has been working in East London. Exhibitions and commissions highlights include: Art Language Location Festival, Cambridge University (2014); Drawing Connections, Siena Arts Institute, Italy (2011); Can Adaptation, Deptford X Gallery Plots (2010); Can, At Play, Southhill Park, Berkshire (2010) Rules and Regs Performance Residency, The Maltings, Surrey (2007); Module commission, Crafts Council, Somerset House, London (2009) and Effuse, Constance Howard Gallery, Goldsmiths, London (2008).Elizabeth was a lead artist for A Theory of Everything, a cross-disciplinary exhibition with artists and scientists, Core Gallery, London (2011) and exhibited in cross disciplinary exhibition, A Matter of Substance, APT Gallery, Deptford (2013). In 2012 Elizabeth was selected for the Dangerous Curves Ahead, Bow Arts Open and in 2013 awarded a Re:View Bursary from an

www.elizabethmurton.co.uk

TITLE:Crease #1, 2015 MEDIUM:Video

The Artist Information Company.The artist was interviewed on BBC Berkshire Radio (2007), Resonance FM (2007) and for Core Gallery Interview Series( 2011), as well as included in the Financial Times How to Spend It magazine (2009) and most recently for the Leeds University Degree Show Catalogue (2013). Writing includes: reporting on The Art Party Conference (2013); What is Drawing for? Drawing is for Exploring, Loughborough University Drawing Journal (2007).

ARTIST’S COMMENTWorking across a range of media, the artist explores mark-making and materials through creating structures, unpicking assumptions and playing with repetition. This body of abstract work suggest a continuation and a reveal of hidden processes. Through engaging and re-purposing materials, Murton questions their inherent potential, ability to change and the fluidity of our material world. Critical to the

core of her visual vocabulary is a truth to materials aesthetic with minimal compositions; Indevelopment (2008) and Can (2010) are constructed with used newspaper and uncovered cans respectively, re-appropriating materials and using them to be the structure and language of the work. In 2015 with a new film series, Crease #1 captures and isolates aspects of a material surface in a state of flux. The screen frames the abstract textures and forms. With the rhythmic movement it suggests micro and macro landscapes and processes inside and outside the body. The fabric has been manipulated through creating creases which could be a drawn line on a page or a ripple in water. The rhythmical movement and the reflective surface interact, creating different compositions on the camera’s lens. Much like the materiality of our word; changing in moments when objects, light, movement, environment react and at that specific time, are recorded on the surface of our retina.

Marcus Orlandi

BIOGRAPHYMarcus Orlandi is a performance and video artist and writer based in London and a graduate of BA Fine Art (hons) of Middlesex University. He uses overlooked and banal aspects of the everyday to create performances that confuse and subvert the reading of objects and relays gestures to the point of absurdity. Previous commissions

include Pre Tape for Film in Space at Camden Arts Centre, Two Reeler for The Beany Museum, Canterbury, Catch for the Mary Barnes exhibition at The Nunnery and 3:16 for The London Word Festival. Previous performances include Strip as part of the AltMFA program at Guest Projects, The Long Goodbye at Kingsgate Workshops, Never Better at The Basement in Brighton, High

www.marcusorlandi.com

TITLE:Hairpiece, 2014-2015

MEDIUM:Paper mache, PVA glue, oil paint, spray paint

DIMENSIONS120 x 100 x 80 cm

Spots as part of HECKLE at Bosse and Baum, The Descent at Floating Island Gallery and Symphony 4:3 as part of Deptford X. Past curatorial projects include CHANCE // ACTION at Kinsgate Workshops and Prop and Proposition: the body as sculpture at Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery. Marcus Orlandi is a recent recipient of the Kingsgate Emerging Artist Award 2013/14.

ARTIST’S COMMENTThe capitalist adventure of society breeds a structure we fear losing. They work their skins to the bone and show thinning hair. Over half of all usual residents with a second address in England and Wales were male. This was most evident for second addresses for work, where there were 2.6 males with a second address to every female with a second address.* Hairpiece is a direct observation of the most archetypal male, the regressive aggressive, the pathetic character: a Man with Power. He sits, proudly, as though on a podium in a car dealership, crudely made using discarded newspaper and cardboard. The flimsy medium completely undermines his handsome credibility. Referencing folk art and vaudeville puppetry, the work crosses the line between high and low brow culture and is inspired by seeing the same suited male city workers scrambling for money amidst their inevitable fall of ageing. Hairpiece is part of a continuing series that uses motifs taken from the everyday.

*source: Office of National Statistics.

Eugene Perera

BIOGRAPHYEugene Perera has a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College and an MA In Art History from Sussex University. He is known for “Art Poker” performances in which invited artists stake their own artworks in a poker game that explores the problem of value in contemporary art. He has exhibited, screened or performed works at London venues including the Whitechapel Gallery, Law Society and APT Gallery. Internationally, highlights have included t27 Kunstraum (Berlin), Sazmanab (Teheran, Iran), Galata Perform (Istanbul, Turkey) and Peanut Underground (NYC).

ARTIST’S COMMENTThe exhibited works were developed during a residency at Berlin gallery Kunstraum t27 in late 2013 and formed a visual backdrop to a live “Art Poker” performance in which a group of Berliner artists played poker with their own artworks at stake. The 2D works suggest parallels between risky art making processes, gambling and data driven financial markets. In a contemporary world dominated by “Big Data” and algorithmic processes that are blind to fragile human subjectivities, the works explore a myopic state of perception that fails to see an overall context and becomes dangerously mired in minutiae. This obsession with micro-structure can lead to catastrophic events in financial markets such as the recent ‘flash crashes’ experienced in global equity markets where billions can be wiped off the value of stocks in seconds.

www.eugeneperera.netwww.alternativerisktransfer.org

TITLE:Risk of Ruin

(squared), 2013

MEDIUM:C-print on aludibond

SIZE:120 x 62 cm

TITLE:Risk of Ruin

(cubed), 2013

MEDIUM:C-print on aludibond

SIZE:100 x 67 cm

Simon RattiganBIOGRAPHY Born 1974 in United Kingdom, Simon Rattigan is a film and video installation artist who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. He graduated with MA in fine art Chelsea school of art London. The practice of Simon Rattigan has developed through sculpture, installation, film and video his practice is one of object making, filming and collecting the over-looked fragments of daily life. His works have made use of Museum and archive loans and displays. He has had Solo exhibition ‘Falling through angles’ 2009 using an archive photograph and looking at the changing definition of art works and ephemeral objects. He has presented video works at a Whitechapel gallery screening event 2009. He contributed a video installation at the Ethnographic Terminalia in New Orleans 2010 exploring the relationship of anthropology and contemporary art. Most recently he has produced a book work published with Susak press and Spiralbound entitled ‘the compass and the pencil’ 2015. Previously lived in Glasgow and a transmission gallery member, Rattigan currently lives in London and is a Bow arts trust live/work artist.

ARTIST’S COMMENTThis work started with a discarded braille book of unknown origin and contents, it was subsequently found and separated into its individual pages forming new objects and images. In this sequence of works the patterns, codes and textures of the paper (the indentations and extrusions of the braille) are explored through pencil and liquid gestures. Drawing fine pencil lines between and around the dots also puncturing the depressions with a pin to creating new relationships of visual codes and meanings. The liquids are for and from the mouth (coffee, wine and various Teas, are spilled and brushed onto the paper, pencils and brushes connect sensory impressions with voice and thought processes. I am interested in the tactile, materiality of paper and books particularly at an uncertain time for books, their changing function and form in a digitalized age. I am interested in what is revealed and concealed in language and gesture, and what is innate to forming responses and meanings. I am fascinated by language and objects and the relationship between writing and drawing, thoughts and speech.

TITLE:untitled braille book, 2015

MEDIUM:8 framed works on paper

DIMENSIONS:8 x framed 735 x 535 mm

DanielaSarigu BIOGRAPHYDaniela Sarigu was born in 1982 in Cagliari, Italy and she graduated in 2013 with an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. In her work she incorporates the use of drawing, painting, printmaking and film. She has been exhibiting her work throughout the UK since 2009. Recent exhibitions include Creekside Open 2015, APT Gallery, and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2013, held at Spike Island Bristol and ICA London. Previous exhibitions include Jerwood Drawing Prize touring exhibition, editions 2012 and 2011.In 2013 she was the recipient of the Anthony Dawson Print Award.She currently lives and works in London.

TITLE:The Seasons of Saturn II, 2015

MEDIUM:Painted chiffon on board, Inkjet print on linen

DIMENSIONS:25 x 32 x 2.5 cm

ARTIST’S COMMENTThe Seasons of Saturn II is part of a recent series of works that explore the ideas of layering and weaving alongside the opposition of heaviness and lightness. Archival images and old works are edited and manipulated into new arrangements and combinations.The consistent use of light materials mounted on wood is a convention to create an illusion of separateness while at the same time the work wants to allude to an ideal unity of form generated by opposing forces.My practice starts as an investigation into those experiences that we commonly call sensations and explores the phenomena generated by a developed awareness of the body.I see this interest as a starting point for a philosophical enquiry that grows in the work and takes form using an intuitive approach.I like to think about painting firstly in terms of materiality and in doing so my aim is to create the conditions to grasp, by contrast, what is purely immaterial.The ideas of “body” and “liminal space” are also two recurrent concepts. In my work I like to address something that is both in a peripheral position while simultaneously containing the possibility to extend, to connect, and to touch.

www.danielasarigu.co.uk

BIOGRAPHYBorn in Bosnia, Suzana Tamamović now lives in London, where she completed her BA and MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. She exhibits in the UK and internationally. Insomnia, a group show in London, explored insomnia as an analogy for the inability to access a place of security, rest and recuperation (2005), whilst Affluenza (2009) further commented on the ills of consumerist society. Contributing to the musings of 6 women artists on a collective history of the country that once was, in 15th Extraordinary Congress performance (2014), or returning to that, now very different country in Visual Dislocation (2007), a homecoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bosnia and Herzegovina.Suzana Tamamović makes work that tests boundaries; work that contests our notions of permanence and impermanence, of location and dislocation. She works with delicacy and determination: books take flight, their pages carefully folded into birds. Ordinary objects are transformed into visual poems. A fragile dress, precisely crafted from paper, may be too frail to sustain our regard. Suzana’s piece in Leave to Remain, an exhibition exploring displacement, was installed temporarily at 19 Princelet Street, London’s Museum of Immigration. Meant to last a few weeks, it is still there, over a decade later, flowing forward into the museum’s vital and evolving dialogue with visitors from around the world.

ARTIST’S COMMENTAfter Floods is made from old postal bags, less fragile than the paper of Tamamović’s earlier work, and yet already showing signs of inevitable decay. Infected with mould, unmistakably releasing its poison, the marks of time and usage are visible, and irreversible. Some watery disaster has occurred, leaving its own traces, speeding up time, hastening the breakdown of the fabric. The interwoven threads pull apart, disconnect. Excavating the flooded studio, the artist becomes archaeologist. Searching, salvaging, recording, no longer making; no longer free to manipulate paint and paper, to control and create. Clinging to the remnants, trying on meanings, letting likenesses emerge. Folding into drowned poems. Despite their solidity, these sculptured forms seem still fluid. Their forms undulate, as if liquid with the possibility of change. We cannot know what the artist planned to change them into, or why. Did she too wonder about the connections and communications that they once held, the stories inside, the empty years ahead now that love and money are sent electronically not in envelopes? Now there is no choice, and endless choice.

TITLE: After Floods, 2014

MEDIUM:Postal bags, mould

DIMENSIONS:70 x 40 x 35 cm

Suzana Tamamović

BIOGRAPHYMy work aims to chart and reveal the visual nature of the physical and virtual internet. My artwork often uses e-waste, the detritus of our fast-moving, technological lifestyle. I am interested in the history of these things as discarded parts of the great global network, emptied of their animating spirit. By dissecting and remaking them I am exploring the relationship between ideas and the physical objects that host them, a kind of body/spirit duality.

The fire is digital; binary and pixels. It has a hypnotic effect that speaks to our deepest ancestral memories. But it’s just a simulation of a fire. It won’t provide warmth or safety. It won’t harm you if you get too close. Will it burn itself out soon? Maybe it will carry on even when unplugged because it has become self-sufficient.

A chimera is a mythical or fictional animal with parts taken from various animals, or to describe anything composed of very disparate parts, or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling. The real-world chimera manifests itself as a perpetual flame that bursts from the ground with no apparent source.

ARTIST’S COMMENTNye grew up in a quiet, isolated seaside town in Wales. Growing up she headed straight to London and has lived there ever since. Her first degree was in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, where many of her classmates went onto become YBA superstars. She took a different path and started working with computers. When the Web was invented in the early 90s she was in the first wave of creatives to get involved. Since then she has been heavily involved in web technologies and Human Computer Interaction.

Her practice is investigative and analytical, often operating in in response to materials at hand or scientific principles. She is particularly interested in the relationship between the tangible and the virtual, and interface between the two.

In 2013 Nye completed an MA in Fine Art at the Cass School of Art, with Distinction. In 2014 she was given the Islington Exhibits Artist Award for her interactive exhibition The Museum of the Shared Now. More recently she was included in Castlefield Gallery’s survey of “artist(s) who they consider to be shaping the future of contemporary art” 30 Years of the Future. She was nominated for this show by Bob & Roberta Smith.

www.nyethompson.co.uk

Nye ThompsonTITLE: Chimera, 2015

MEDIUM:Mixed media with video: video monitor, video and salvaged power cables

DIMENSIONS:H1.6 x W0.5 x D0.3 m

Adam WalkerBIOGRAPHYAdam J B Walker is a London-based artist with a practice rooted in the exploration of ephemerality and habitat, and his work seeks to engage in and question the politics of its, and his, context. After studying geography at Cambridge and subsequently art at Camberwell, he has exhibited at galleries including Tate Britain, Standpoint, APT and Vulpes Vulpes; has undertaken residencies at Nottingham Castle and with Central St Martins’ Air project; and has created a temporary installation in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Alongside this exhibiting side of his practice, he has led education projects with Camden Arts Centre, Tate and Bow Arts. The exhibiting and educational sides of his practice benefit one another, with ideas from each being explored further in the other. Especially given the themes he seeks to explore, the workshops he leads can often function as invaluable testbeds or laboratories for experimentation within which ideas which might later go on to become further developed and exhibited work are incubated. Adam is currently on the MA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Arts.

ARTIST’S COMMENTAfter Serra (2015) is one of a number of recent works which have sought to explore the idea of the exhibition as one iteration, a partial snap-shot into an artwork which is an ongoing process rather than finished outcome. The boundaries between development, logistical practicalities, exhibition, and documentation are left purposefully ambiguous with all potentially being part of the ‘artwork’. In particular, am important part of the work (which goes largely unseen by the work’s actively aware audience) is its awkward journey on public transport. Yet this, in contrast to the clean lines of the gallery context, and in connection with the associations of the emergency blankets in their tent-like form, is an integral part of the work. The title explicitly relates the work to the modernist steel sculptures of Richard Serra, but while his sculptures spoke of weight and permanence this partially tongue-in-cheek homage, bar the most skin-deep of resemblances, carries the very opposite qualities. There’s a clear mirroring (literally) in this new set of qualities (in opposition to Serra’s) of the transient, ‘pop-up’, cheap, easily reproduced 21st century patterns of labour and consumption we are all complicit in.

TITLE: After Serra, 2015

MEDIUM: temporary, mobile

installation and associated travel and construction/

deconstruction (emergency blankets, bamboo, artificial

grass, cable ties)

DIMENSIONS: variable (in its transportable

state, 150cm x 30cm x 30cm /in the pictured

constructed iteration, W2 x D1.5 x H1 m)

www.adamjbwalker.co.uk