Keir Smith: From Wall to Floor focuses on the artist’s work made in the 1970s and early 80s, a time when he made the transition from figurative painting into sculpture, experimenting first with process-based art and performance before moving into a landscape setting. Smith’s oeuvre presents an ongoing conversation between sculpture and painting. He moved back and forth between the two, using two-dimensional media to develop and document his three-dimensional ideas, and to explore qualities of surface and narrative imagery, which remained key themes throughout his artistic practice.

As a student in Newcastle in the early 1970s, under the tutelage of Ian Stephenson, Smith started to investigate the material possibilities of paint, canvas and stretcher and to work these elements into three-dimensional compositions. Later, he developed wall-based installations that harnessed the physical properties of different materials, but were often realised only, or most completely, on paper in highly skilled, polychromatic technical drawings.  In the early 1980s, he turned process into performance, creating a series of sculptures and installations documenting his interaction with the landscape, often presented as compositions or images on the ground.

The exhibition celebrates the acquisition of Keir Smith’s archive, together with works on paper and sculptures to the Leeds collection in 2012.  It is one of a number of recent additions to the collection focusing on artists who emerged in the 1970s and 80s including Helen Chadwick, Phyllida Barlow, Darrell Viner and Shelagh Cluett.

Keir Smith (1950-2007) studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1969-73) and at Chelsea School of Art (1973-75). He exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in the UK and completed many commissions for sculptures for public and landscape sites in the 1980s and 90s, including Grizedale Forest, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Henrietta House, London (Public Art Development Trust) and the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail. He lived and worked in London and Suffolk, teaching at Wimbledon School of Art.

The world’s best set, costume, props, sound and lighting designers will be in Cardiff this September for the first UK-hosted edition of a week long international festival showcasing and sharing what their creative skills add to the public’s enjoyment of the performing arts.

Peter Farley, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Design at WCA, Designer for Performance, Member of the Executive Committee of the Society of British Theatre Designers and UK National Curator, has been working as member of the International Selection and Curation Panel for this event which has received over 700 applications from 50 countries for the performance design exhibition, and over 100 competition applications from 26 countries to design the sustainable theatre.

World Stage Design (WSD) takes place every four years.  The first was held in Toronto in 2005 and the 2009 host city was Seoul. Cardiff won the right to be the event’s 2013 host against competition from several other cities, including Beijing. Its success makes it the first European/UK WSD host.

Alongside the programme of specialist and public events, WSD also makes bronze, silver and gold awards to the best entries to its design competitions.

For more information: www.wsd2013.com

Sally Waterman, Photography by Carolyn Lefley

We are pleased to announce that our current Artist in Residence at Wimbledon College of Art as part of the AA2A Programme – Sally Waterman, has been nominated as Axis Artist of the month. In the following interview Sally talks about her residency experience and the work that she has produced in her six months here at Wimbledon.

Extract from full interview on Axis website

Ruth Wilbur: You’re just coming to the end of a six month Artists Access to Art Colleges (AA2A) residency at Wimbledon College of Art. What impact has the AA2A residency had on your practice?

Sally Waterman: The AA2A residency has allowed me the time and space to really focus on my practice within a supportive, creative environment. The concentrated period from November 2012 until the end of May this year has provided me with the impetus to complete my latest body of work, ‘Translucence’, within a set time frame. And it’s been really enjoyable spending time at Wimbledon, since it feels like a proper art college – quite experimental and friendly, with a real community spirit. I’ve also benefited from having access to the black and white darkroom, where I have been able to develop my printing skills.

“The ‘Translucence’ project is an interpretation of Donna McKevitt’s musical score, which was inspired by artist and film director Derek Jarman’s writing and serves as a reflection on the fragility of life”

RW: Can you tell us a little more about this project ‘Translucence’, which you are currently working on?

SW: The ‘Translucence’ project is an interpretation of Donna McKevitt’s musical score (Warner Classics, 1998), which was inspired by artist and film director Derek Jarman’s writing and serves as a reflection on the fragility of life, investigating my personal experience of bereavement, in particular losing my grandmother, who passed away nearly twenty years ago.

When finished, there will be three videos altogether: ‘February’, ‘Against’ and ‘Wisdom’. Each video will use one of McKevitt’s instrumental tracks and begin with an epigraph, taken from Jarman’s book on colour ‘Chroma’ (1994).

The first video, ‘February’ (2011), consists of slowly dissolving photographs of the passing seascape, which I shot during a catamaran journey across the Solent, from Portsmouth to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, on my way to the funeral of a close family friend. The second video, ‘Wisdom’, is a stop-frame animation sequence, using digital snapshots taken over the last three years that document my familial relationships. The third video, ‘Against’, is a collaboration with performance artist Kate Ashman and is based on memories of my grandmother, involving a series of gestures and projected images. I aim to have the last two videos completed by the end of July.

The accompanying series of twenty image/text black and white photographs (2011-2012), which have been the main focus of the residency, elaborate upon these themes, extracting carefully chosen lines from Jarman’s ‘Chroma’ (1994) and his diary, ‘Smiling in Slow Motion’ (2000), together with literary quotations sourced from writers such as Kate Chopin, Emily Dickinson, T.S Eliot, Sylvia Plath and Christina Rossetti.

Translucence: The Voice of the Sea (After Kate Chopin’s ‘The Awakening’, 1899), 2011 – 2010

More information
Sally will be exhibiting a selection of photographs from her ‘Translucence’ series in the forthcoming AA2A exhibition at the Camberwell Space with the other residency artists from CCW, University of the Arts. The exhibition opens on Monday 8 July and runs until Friday 19 July.

Wimbledon College of Art BA (Hons) Fine Art: Painting graduate, Nicholas John Jones will be exhibiting his work in…

Hiatal

Heeseung Choi and Nicholas John Jones

Private Viewing: 18^th April 6pm – 9pm

Exhibition Opening Hours: 19^th – 21^st April  12pm – 4pm

Moments of quiet reflection seem increasingly fleeting amongst the high-paced buzz of contemporary city life. In hiatal Heeseung Choi and Nicholas John Jones, consider a gap, a transient break in a journey. The high, multi-levelled atrium is infused with instances of gentle, soft fragility that evoke contemplative spaces, offering moments of pause as you make your way through.

Nicholas John Jones seeks to create and communicate sensibilities that he considers of fundamental importance in thinking about contemporary ways of living. Various artistic media are employed to capture or create instances of resonant experience. Varying atmospheres are explored, often tending toward the contemplative or fragile. These may be set in isolation, or in tension against an alternative energy.

Heeseung Choi explores the variety of ways that space can be created or suggested. Her work presents intervals and transformations that define a mental space at the border between reality and fiction, memory and the potential present and absent.

Choi’s Whiteout series removes gravity and solidity from the objects that inform the works, creating a transient space without a specific sense of direction. The objects that provide structure for the works are absent, traces of their forms remaining in the porous skins now penetrated by air and light. Through this process, Choi causes the surrounded space to become object. Her spaces become sites that are occupied by the mind rather than a physical body.

Location

Atrium Space
32A Hertford Road
London
N1 5SH

www.barbicanartsgrouptrust.co.uk

Untitled, Freya Guest, 2012

We are pleased to announce the first Solo show of our recent BA Fine Art: Painting Graduate Freya Guest at ArtWorks Open Project Space in East London.

Title Leg Room – Freya Guest

Private Viewing 3rd April 2013 6pm- 9pm

Exhibition times and dates 4th – 6th & 10th – 13th April 12pm – 4pm

Artist’s Statement

Freya Guest makes paintings that are small and cramped. The images are cranky, and the paint is heavy-handed and strained, depicting stifled forms that are squeezed and confined into constricted spaces.

The work speaks in a fractured visual language: the handling of the paint quotes phrases from various painterly dialects, communicating nomadic influences that wander from Van Gogh to The Simpsons, and back again via Cubism, taking in some Renaissance en route.

Throughout the work, there is self-awareness and a humour that relieves the paintings of becoming overly fraught. It is a comedy that is coupled with sincerity, and which expresses genuine warmth towards the sometimes contradictory nature of painting.

Biography

Freya Guest was born in 1990 and lives and works in London. She graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2012 where she studied BA Painting. Exhibitions include Future Map 12 and Hans Brinker Budget Hotel in Amsterdam. She was the winner of Barbican Arts Trust’s ArtWorks Open 2012.

Location

ArtWorks Open Project Space

114 Blackhorse Lane

London, E17 6AA

Email: bag.trust@btconnect.com

Website: http://www.barbicanartsgrouptrust.co.uk/leg-room-freya-guest.html

Artist’s website: http://www.freyaguest.com

Into Other Bodies’, Ann-Marie James, 2013

Karsten Schubert presents Wimbledon MA Fine Art graduate Ann-Marie James’ new ‘Proserpina’ paintings in the artist’s first solo show at the gallery.

In this series, James takes the inspiration for her paintings from Bernini’s ‘Rape of Proserpina’ (1621-22) and ‘Apollo and Daphne’ (1622-25) – and, by extension, from Ovid’s epic poem, Metamorphoses. James ‘quotes and re-cuts’ her source materials, knitting her references together and creating a new symmetry of transformation, from the oral poem to the linguistic text, to carved stone and back to paper – a metamorphosis of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The paintings are accompanied by drawings made on image plates found by the artist in Richard Norton’s Bernini and Other Studies (1914).

These intricate paintings are built-up through layer upon layer of not only material, but also techniques. From the initial drawings come a silkscreen, and then, at various points, James adds layers of thick medium, expressionistic splashes of acrylic and blobs of ink. Throughout, she highlights different moments with delicate and precise drawing around a spot of paint or a stencilled limb. As Michael Bracewell writes in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, the paintings are ‘animated with drama, dense with mood and atmosphere, filled with a sense of the fantastical and the mythological; yet as images released entirely to operate according to their own internal mechanisms, these paintings and drawings describe and reveal the changing of forms with beguiling verve, elegance, and formidable intensity.’

Born in 1981, Ann-Marie James lives and works in London. After studying Fine Art at Central Saint Martins (2001-2004), Chelsea College of Art and Design (2010) and Wimbledon College of Art (2010-2012), she went on to do two residencies in the East and in the West – first at Lantana Projects in Memphis, Tennessee (2006), then at Headspace in Nara, Japan, supported by the Daiwa Foundation (2011). Her works have been exhibited in the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Switzerland, Venezuela and the USA.

Douglas O’Connell, Course Leader for MA Digital Theatre at Wimbledon College of Art, will be leading a series of Workshops, talks and events at Scenofest, part of  World Stage Design 2013 in Cardiff on the subject of Performance and Technology.

The increased prevalence of projection media and video content within the world of performance has created a new theatrical language for both designer and audience.

Through a series of workshop talks and demonstrations with leaders and innovators from the field of performance and technology, the events will examine how the medium challenges, enhances and pushes the boundaries of how theatre designers define body, space and audience.

The three-day workshop for designers will combine practical, technical and theoretical content, examining how projected video impacts upon theatre design and audience.

World Stage Design 2013, being held in the UK for the very first time will fun from the 5th -15th September 2013

For more information please visit the website.

UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTERS

An exhibition by Wimbledon College of Art students from our Painting and Sculpture courses at The Gallery on the Corner in Battersea

Private View: Thursday 14th March 6.30 – 9.00pm

Exhibition Open: Friday 15th March to Sunday 17th March

Wimbledon BA Fine Art: Print and Time-Based Media graduate, Lydia Brain speaks to Made in Arts London about her work, the course and her nomination for the Catlin Art Prize 2013.

lydiabrain.com