Fine Art students’ residency at CAST, Helston

BA(Hons) Fine Art students Ella Schlesinger and Nicholas Sanderson recently secured one of Falmouth School of Art’s studio residencies, at CAST, Helston, where they have been working together for the past month. The result is England your England, an installation comprising sculpture and video, to be shown to the public at an open studio event to mark the end of their residency.

Ella says, “The piece presents a search for a more democratic and honest space to create a conversation about Britain. We see a massive emphasis put on verbal and written language: in other words, the tyranny of the spoken and written word. With the cultural weight of the English language and its global historical context, it leaves us with a predefined and therefore limited platform to connect with and express our individual selves. We want to challenge this vacant gap these words leave and how, using the language of materials we can reown the identity to our country. Humans, as multi-sensory organisms, are constantly reacting against spaces and places, objects and feelings, so why do we settle on such a single faceted form of communication? And how can we create a more immersive and inclusive form of communication through art?

 

 

 

Highlights of a visit to the Venice Biennale

 

Venice Biennale, Hew Locke – photo: Richard Christensen

BA(Hons) Fine Art and BA(Hons) Drawing students recently returned from a study visit to the Venice Biennale.

The visit gave students from the two courses an opportunity to spend time with those on a different course at Falmouth, and the group fit much into their time. 2017 graduate Abbie Hunt, who was supported by Falmouth School of Art and the British Council to undertake a British Council Venice Fellowship, had been in touch with the students to make recommendations based on her experience of working at the Biennale for a month. And exhibiting in this year’s  Diaspora Pavilion were Falmouth Visiting Professor of Fine Art, Hew Locke and fellow Falmouth alumna Libita Clayton.

BA(Hons) Fine Art student Richard Christensen provided his response to some of the highlights, and some great images of the visit:

Venice Arsenale, photo: Richard Christensen

‘Our arrival in Venice was inauspicious, late on Monday evening with a biting wind which made for an uncomfortable ride in the vaporetto to San Marco.  The wind continued into Tuesday, together with plenty of rain, and found its way into the exhibition spaces of the Arsenale, where there were few warm spots for retreat.  But by Wednesday the wind had gone, and for the rest of our stay the city was pleasantly autumnal.

Much of the Arsenale site consists of a long series of halls which must once have been the dockyard workshops.  The exhibitions here were organised into loosely defined themes (‘the Common’, ‘the Earth’, etc)…the openness of the themed pavilions created both variety and dynamism, with a multitude of thought-provoking and visually arresting works in all media.

Venice, British Pavilion, Phyllida Barlow – photo: Richard Christensen

The British pavilion had a painting-sculptural installation by Phyllida Barlow called ‘folly’.  Energetic, exuberant, more than filling its space and spilling outside the building, it was certainly not lacking in ambition.

An area of undoubted strength at the Biennale was the consistently high standard of video art.  Video is now clearly in an age of maturity, with professional production values and themes which speak to their audiences with clarity.  Several works at Venice are operating at the boundary with cinema in terms of the scope of their ambition and their technical standards.

Although there was little live performance art at the Biennale, the one piece which I saw was remarkable for its power and intensity.  The German pavilion was an almost empty space apart from a raised glass floor and glass panels separating some of the rooms.  The audience, on entering the building, hardly knew what to expect.  The four performers, initially positioned around the main exhibition hall, moved together and then separated in successive bursts of energy and slow deliberation, in a loosely structured narrative of encounters and separations.

Venice, German Pavilion, photo: Richard Christensen

At times there was intimacy, at others the threat of violence.  Even though much of the performance took place in and among the audience, at no time was there any interaction with it.  And despite the intensity of the piece the expressions of the performers were impassive throughout – indeed, this impassivity was what gave it much of its power.  And at the end, when the four performers disappeared, their wordless drama, maintained over an hour and a quarter, left the audience exhausted by what they had seen and experienced.

Two and a half days in Venice could never provide much more than a taster of what the Biennale had to offer.  I could easily have spent a whole week or more there taking in the art.  And as for the city… I’m sure I could devote a whole year there just to exploring its endless maze of alleyways and canals.’

 

The Venice study visit is one of a number of optional overseas trips offered to undergraduate students of Falmouth School of Art during their studies. BA(Hons) Drawing have also in recent years visited Amsterdam, and BA(Hons) Fine Art have previously visited Berlin.

Jessica Warboys, Falmouth alumna – talk at Falmouth and solo exhibition at Tate St. Ives

Hill of Dreams 2016, Performer Oliver Baggott, Video, High Definition, colour, sound; 11 minutes
© Jessica Warboys and 1857

Jessica Warboys,
Sea Painting, Dunwich, October, 2015
canvas, mineral pigments
Courtesy the artist & Gaudel de Stampa, Paris.

In association with Tate St. Ives, artist Jessica Warboys, who graduated from BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth in 2001, joins us for a talk on 29 March, to mark her first solo show at a UK national gallery, at Tate St. Ives this Spring.

Warboys works across painting, performance, film and sculpture; her work is informed by personal or collective memories – historical, mythical or fictional. In her Sea Paintings, Warboys explores the connection between painting and performance, submerging damp, folded canvas scattered with coloured pigments into the sea, and allowing the movement of the waves to ‘paint’ the canvas.  The show at Tate St. Ives will feature films, sculptures and paintings, including two specially commissioned works:

Sea Painting, Zennor 2015, was made on the Zennor coast near St Ives.

Hill of Dreams 2016, is a new film that draws from Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen’s book of the same name, that relives his memories of rural Gwent, where Warboys was born a century later. Hill of Dreams has been commissioned by Tate St Ives, Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy and Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway and will tour to each of these venues throughout 2016−17.

Warboys currently lives and works in Suffolk and Berlin and has enjoyed wide international exhibition success, including solo exhibitions. After graduating from Falmouth she completed a Masters of Fine Art at Slade School of Art in 2004. Her work was recently included in British Art Show 8.

Register Here for Jessica Warboys’ talk on 29 March, 6pm, Lecture Theatre 1, Falmouth Campus. Please note the later than usual start time.

Jessica Warboys at Tate St. Ives runs from 31 March to 3 September 2017.

Reflections on first year BA(Hons) Fine Art exhibition

At the start of this term, the end of their first study block, BA(Hons) Fine Art students worked together towards an exhibition in their studio buildings. The exhibited work demonstrated experimentation and showed the development of work throughout the first ten weeks of the course. The range of practices and approaches reflected the diversity and individuality of first year students.

Exhibiting student Charlie Ash, said, ‘The exhibition provided an opportunity for students to display work in an open and informal setting; with multiple first year spaces across the campus being organised and curated among studio groups. The exhibition confirmed how much I value being on a Fine Art course which supports a wide variety of art practices – there is something exciting about seeing painting, drawing, sculpture, performative and time-based work (and everything else) occupying the same space. I think a self-organised open studio exhibition is a good format for first year students as there is no pressure to include fully finished work, but it is an insight into the practices which everyone is engaged in – beneficial both as a participating artist and a viewer’.

 

 

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Fine Art students from other years, and staff from the course and across the university joined exhibitors for a well-attended opening event. The project was the first of many opportunities for students to share and exhibit their work for peers and more public audiences as they progress through the course.

Student Olivia Brelsford-Massey shared her experience of being involved in this exhibition: ‘The first year exhibition – although most of us felt like we didn’t know what to do – turned out to be a success! I found it helpful, as it’s easy to crawl into hole as an art student (that hole being the studio space), and bringing our work into the larger context of an exhibition made it easier see what everyone had been making this past term, and opened up conversations about our work and ideas. The opening night was a lot of fun, some of the students had put together food and drink and posters and invited their pals/significant others to have a look around – all of this was organised in a short space of time so kudos to everyone. All in all, putting together the exhibition as well as the work itself felt like a vital part of being an art student and I’m looking forward to the next one!’

BA(Hons) Fine Art alumna, Katrina Cowling’s solo exhibition opens February 10th at The Henderson Gallery, Nottingham.

Katrina Cowling graduated from BA(Hons) Fine Art at Falmouth in 2013 with a first class honours. In 2012, during her time on the course, she was the recipient of the Cornwall Denis Mitchell Sculpture Award. Now based in Leeds, this is her forthcoming show in Nottingham.

Falmouth School of Art Guest Speakers announced for spring 2017

The Falmouth School of Art Guest Speaker Programme resumes in February with a series of events featuring acclaimed artists and illustrators…

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Artist Joey Holder starts the season with a talk on 8 February. Working with scientific and technical experts, Holder makes immersive, multi-media installations that explore the limits of the human and how we experience non-human, natural and technological forms. Mixing elements of biology, nanotechnology and natural history against computer programme interfaces, screen savers and measuring devices, she suggests the impermanence and inter-changeability of these apparently contrasting and oppositional worlds: ‘everything is a mutant and a hybrid’. For a recent exhibition – against the backdrop of the emergent field of computational biology and the Google Genomics project – Holder invented ‘Ophiux’, a speculative pharmaceutical company, imagining its use of genetic sequencing equipment and biological machines to collect data from humans and to sample data from other organisms. She explains: ‘It seems as if everything has become a branch of computer science, even our own bodies probed, imaged, modelled and mapped: re-drawn as digital information’.

On 15 February artist Chantal Joffe will be in conversation with Falmouth School of Art’s Director Dr. Ginny Button. Joffe’s figurative paintings usually depict women or girls, from catwalk models, porn actresses and literary heroines to mothers, children and loved ones. Her paintings question expectations of what a feminist art might be, often pointing to how appearances are constructed – whether in a fashion magazine or the family album – and to the choreography of display. Sometimes shown in groups but recently in iconic portraits, her images of women draw loosely on a range of sources such as photographs, magazines and even reflections in the mirror, using distortion to make her subjects seem more real. Her paintings achieve a psychological and emotional force, prompting reflection on ever-changing human relations and the endless complexity of looking.

1 March sees a return to Falmouth of Illustrator, author and Falmouth Honorary Fellow Posy Simmonds. Simmonds’ work includes many books for adults and children, including Literary Life, Lulu and the Flying Babies and Fred, the film of which was nominated for an Oscar. Working across a range of formats and contexts, Simmonds is probably best-known for her series of weekly cartoon strips commissioned by the Guardian since 1977. Gemma Bovery, her reworking of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary into a satirical tale of English expatriates in France appeared first in the Guardian before publication as a graphic novel in 1999. Acclaimed by the critics for its wit and wickedly sharp observation, it was made into a feature film in 2014. Her prize-winning graphic novel Tamara Drewe also became a very successful film, directed by Stephen Frears.

Falmouth School of Art’s new Visiting Professor of Illustration delivers his inaugural lecture on 22 March. Graham Rawle is an internationally admired writer and collage artist whose visual work incorporates illustration, design, photography and installation. He has produced regular series for The Observer, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The Times and among his published books are The Card, The Wonder Book of Fun, Lying Doggo, and Diary of an Amateur Photographer. His collaged novel Woman’s World, created entirely from fragments of found text clipped from vintage women’s magazines won wide critical acclaim, described by The Times as ‘a work of genius…the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade.’ He is perhaps best known to some for his long running ‘Lost Consonants’ strip, which first appeared in the Guardian in 1990.

We finish the 2016-17 Guest Speaker Programme with a TateTalk at Falmouth by Fine Art alumna (2001) Jessica Warboys. Warboys works across painting, performance, film and sculpture. Her talk is in association with Tate St. Ives, which in March will present a major solo show of Warboys’ work. The show will feature films, sculptures, large scale paintings, and Sea Paintings commissioned for the show and created along the Cornish coast. In her Sea Paintings, Warboys explores the connection between painting and performance, submerging damp, folded canvas scattered with coloured pigments into the sea, and allowing the movement of the waves to ‘paint’ the canvas.  Her work is informed by personal or collective memories – hystorical, mythical or fictional. Warboys currently lives and works in Suffolk and Berlin and has enjoyed wide international exhibition success, including solo exhibitions. Her work was recently included in British Art Show 8.

Registration is required for these events, and is open now: http://falmouthschoolofart.eventbrite.co.uk

See all Falmouth University events on our website: www.falmouth.ac.uk/events

Midas Exhibition 2016 opens 11 November

Recent work by Linda Straehl (video still)

We’re getting ready for the 2016 Midas Exhibition at Newlyn Art Gallery, featuring work by ten artists, selected from their BA(Hons) Fine Art degree shows at Falmouth Campus this summer.

The exhibition runs from 12 November to 7 January, and includes work by Ella Caie (film), Finbar Conran (kinetic and sound installation), Tanya Cruz (sculptural video installation), Robert Davis (large kinetic sculpture and other works), Joe Fenwick-Wilson (painting and sculpture), Nicholas Griffin (painting), Zoë Pearce (painting), Bharat Rajagopal (painting), Isabel Ramos (video installation), and Calum Rees-Gildea (painting).

In the lower gallery, last year’s Midas winner, Linda Straehl, who graduated in 2015, will present a new video work.

A preview evening on 11 November (7-9pm) will include food from Cornish Fusion Fish and Food, as well as a pay bar. We are pleased to be enabling a group of current BA(Hons) Fine Art students will be attend the preview and an Artists’ Talk at 11am on 12 November, also open to the public (free with the cost of admission).

For more than ten years, Midas Construction, through the Midas Award, with Falmouth University, Newlyn Art Gallery and Anima-Mundi (formerly Millennium, St Ives), has provided recent graduates with funding for materials, mentoring and an exhibition in their first year after university.

A number of those exhibiting this year were featured by ArtCornwall talking about their work earlier this year: read more here.

Artist Tania Kovats to talk at Falmouth

“I think all artists are witnesses. And sometimes you have to be a responsible witness”.

Tania Kovats joins us in Falmouth on Wednesday 2 November. Her work explores our experience and understanding of landscape. Since receiving the Barclays Young Artist Award at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1991, Kovats has become known for her sculptures, large-scale installations, temporal works and drawings.

Evaporation, Tania Kovats, solo exhibition, installation view, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester (2015)

Rain II, 2015, ink on blotting paper, framed, 59.7 x 54.3 cm, 23.5 x 21.4 in

Kovats’ interest in drawing is reflected in works including British Isles and All the Islands of All the Oceans. She is also author of The Drawing Book – a Survey of drawing: the primary means of expression (2007), and Course Director for MA Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art, London.

Perhaps best known for her large-scale works in the public realm, Kovats produced Tree (2009), a wafer thin longitudinal section of the entire structure of a 200-hundred-year old oak, permanently inserted into the ceiling of the Natural History Museum. For Rivers (2012), installed in the landscape of Jupiter Artland outside Edinburgh, Kovats collected water from one hundred rivers around the British Isles, housing the collection in a specially constructed boathouse. A major solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, Oceans (2014), explored her preoccupation with the sea.

Kovats’ practice has seen her undertake residencies in the Galapagos Islands and the Astronomy Department at the University of Cambridge, travel to the Arctic as part of the Nowhereisland project and to points on the globe where seas meet, from New Zealand to northern Denmark, for her work Where Seas Meet. Tree (2009) resulted from six months exploring South America with her husband and son.

All the Sea (detail) 2014, Tania Kovats, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

This year, her exhibition Evaporation (2016) at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester again focused on water. The exhibition was commissioned by Cape Farewell, the organisation which provides a cultural response to the issue of climate change. Evaporation also included All The Sea, previously shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; 365 bottles of water from the world’s seas, collected by Kovats in large part through an invitation to the public to help her to bring all the seas together in one place.

Tania Kovats will give a talk on her work and practice at Falmouth School of Art, 2 November 2016 at 5pm, Lecture Theatre 1, Falmouth Campus. Booking required, click here to register. 

 

 

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After completing her MA at the Royal College of Art in 1990, Tania Kovats (b.1966) won the Barclays Young Artist Award at the Serpentine Gallery in 1991. She has been the recipient of many awards such as the Henry Moore Drawing Fellowship (2004-5), Visiting Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Oxford University (2006) and the Cape Farewell Lovelock Art Commission (2015). She has been nominated for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery: 6th Edition (2015-17) and completed a residency in the Astronomy Department at the University of Cambridge. Kovats has shown extensively in the UK and abroad, with solo shows including those at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield; Peer Arts, London, Newlyn Art Gallery, Cornwall and the Museum of Science & Industry in Manchester. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections including the Arts Council, The British Council, Government Art Collection and the V&A. She is represented by the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.

AnOther interview with Tania Kovats, December 2015

 

Fine Art Alumni selected to exhibit in the Delamore Arts & Sculpture Exhibition

Camilla Laing-Tate, who graduated from BA(Hons) Fine Art in 2015 has been selected to exhibit in the Delamore Arts exhibition which takes place annually in May at the beautiful Delamore House in Devon.

Selected artists had to apply to take place in the exhibition with successful entries formally selected during a meeting of the Trustees of Delamore Art.   More than 100 leading sculptors and painters were selected from a tough range of competition.

Camilla has been given a space within this idyllic setting on the fringes of Dartmoor and has been asked to produce a site-specific installation.  Camilla is using her recent experiences of travelling around Peru and Italy to respond to the brief.

The Delamore Arts and Sculpture Exhibition takes place in a traditional Dartmoor agriculture estate house and gardens.  According to Delamore, the exhibition presents the largest collection of artist’s work in one place in the South West.

Delamore House will be open everyday throughout May from 10.30am – 4.30pm with admission at £7.50 and under 16s free.  Contact details are below:

Delamore House, Cornwood, Ivybridge, Devon, PL21 9QT.  Tel: 01752 837663. Website: Delamore House

Conrad Shawcross – Guest Speaker

Falmouth School of Art is delighted to welcome Conrad Shawcross to give the final School of Art Lecture this term, on Wednesday 2 December, Lecture Theatre 1, Falmouth Campus.

The Dappled Light of the Sun, by Conrad Shawcross, 2015. Weathering steel, dimensions variable. Installation view at Chatsworth House. Photography © Sotheby’s

Born in London in 1977, Conrad Shawcross studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, and the Slade School of Art, London.  Drawing on his fascination with technologies and natural forces, with geometry, philosophy, physics and metaphysics, his machine-like sculptures often combine the appearance scientific rationality with a mysterious and sometimes melancholic ambiguity. Attracted by failed quests for knowledge, he likes to appropriate redundant theories to create ambitious structural and mechanical montages, using a wide variety of materials and media.

A number of his works pay tribute to great pioneers and analysts, and consider specific historical moments. For example, Paradigm (Ode to the Difference Engine), 2006 references the life of Charles Babbage, Space Trumpet, 2007 is inspired by the history of early acoustic mapping, while Slow Arc Inside a Cube, 2008 was inspired by scientist Dorothy Hodgkin’s discovery of the structure of pig insulin. More recently, Shawcross has developed the scale of his practice, taking on architectural spaces with work that combines epic scope and poetic grace.

He has been the recipient of many residencies, awards and commissions, and has exhibited widely nationally and internationally. For example, he was Artist in Residence at the Science Museum, London (2009 – 2011), collaborated with the National Gallery and Royal Ballet for the Cultural Olympiad (2012) and exhibited at the ARTMIA Foundation, Beijing (2014). In 2015 in London alone he produced a new series of permanent sculpture for Dulwich Park and a site-specific installation for the Royal Academy’s Annenberg Courtyard.

Guest speaker – artist Krijn de Koning

Booking is now open for Falmouth School of Art’s next guest speaker event.

We are delighted to welcome artist  Krijn de Koning on Wednesday, 25 November at 5pm (Lecture Theatre 1, Falmouth Campus). Booking is free, but required. (Click here to book).

Krijn de Koning was born in Amsterdam in 1963. He majored in audiovisual design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, before attending Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem in 1988. He subsequently studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastique in Paris.

De Koning makes site specific sculptural and architectural constructions that interrupt the environment of a given location, often profoundly changing audience perceptions of place. Typically brightly coloured and built using simple materials, his playful, mostly temporary interventions connect inside and outside spaces, inviting alternative interpretations, uses and experiences of the spaces and places they inhabit. He works across a range of scales, drawing on modernist traditions such as geometric abstraction and Minimalism as well as architectural concerns.

Dwelling, (for Margate / for Folkestone), de Koning’s first commission in the UK, was realised in 2014 for the Folkestone Triennial. This colourful, architectural labyrinth constituted an artwork presented simultaneously in two outdoor locations (the walkway adjacent Margate’s Turner Contemporary and inside a Victorian grotto on Folkestone seafront), exploring de Koning’s fascination with the notion of repetition and seriality in conceptual art practice, and the specificity of place.

‘Land’ (2013) for Edinburgh Art Festival

‘Observatorium Keizersrande’ (2014)

Falmouth Alumni Hew Locke marks sealing of the Magna Carta

Hew Locke, an Alumnus of Falmouth School of Art, has recently opened a permanent artwork on 15 June 2015 commissioned by Surrey County Council and the National Trust at Runnymede, Surrey, UK.

Hew Locke with The Jurors, Photo Tom D Morgan 2015

The Jurors is a permanent piece installed to mark the 800 years since the sealing of the magna carta which took place at Runnymede.  The installation, which visitors are encouraged to sit on and gather, discuss or debate around, consists of 12 bronze chairs, each individually decorated with ‘panels of images and symbols relating to past and ongoing struggles for freedom, rule of law and equal rights’.

To find out more about the artwork a specially created webpage has been set up and can be viewed here: http://artatrunnymede.com/

Tate Talk at Falmouth: Nicolas Deshayes

Pause Collective – Falmouth Fine Art graduates at Manchester’s Kraak Gallery

Pause Collective is a group of three 2014 graduates of Falmouth’s BA(Hon) Fine Art. They have recently held a group show featuring work by ten 2014 Falmouth Fine Art graduates at Kraak Gallery in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, and we’re pleased to share with you their write-up of the exhibition…

The opening night was a busy and vibrant event, with several other artistic events happening that weekend in the city. Falmouth alumni gathered to support the event, as well as Manchester residents and art students from local colleges. The Kraak Gallery is in the heart of the busy city and the artists were carefully selected to interrupt the speed and activity outside and to create a still and quiet moment. The exhibition felt like something of an unexpected discovery; the gallery is somewhat tucked away, and once people arrived, several commented that they did not want to leave. It was a space of sanctuary amongst all the clamour of the city, inviting the audience into its contemplative silence.

On entering the space, you were immediately met with Ashley Sheekey’s strikingly minimal piece Entrance, Exit, a corridor-like sculpture made up of white ceiling tiles. This piece acted as an entrance to the rest of the exhibition, first leading on to the melancholic landscapes of Ryan Joucla and Helen Carter. The landscapes of both Carter and Joucla are ambiguous and cannot be immediately placed, but rather require the audience’s time and attention to journey through them. Lizzy Barnes exhibited delicate prints embossed with architectural shapes that, at first glance, could have appeared to be blank sheets of paper. Round the other side of the space, were Emily Naish’s animations of a bee struggling against the raging sea, caught in a lighthouse beam.

Rose-Marie Caldecott showed her piece Drafting Illusion; flyaway prints on Japanese paper hold a landscape that disappears amongst abstract marks, all trapped beneath a resin block. This sat between Matthew Cotton’s Automated Drawing series, drawings made up of hundreds of delicate circles to create hazy abstract formations. The final wall showed Emily Cranny, Alexander Heath and Lucia Jones. Cranny showed drawings that make use of brighter collage among the mesh of graphite marks; Jones exhibited iPad constructs, where she has worked into photographs digitally with painterly sensibilities. Heath’s paintings, East of Eden, were inspired by John Steinbeck’s novel, and depict large scale semi-abstract figures in bold colours and shapes, but the pieces still retain a quiet attention to detail, with a focus on the surface of the canvas.

The works all held greater depth than could be perceived at first glance. To really experience the work required a full mental immersion; a quiet escape from the busy world outside. These quiet works, that might sometimes be overlooked, were given an opportunity here to speak and be heard. Entering the space was an escape but at the end of the day, we all had to exit back to the loud and bustling reality of Manchester, but hopefully carrying a piece of that quiet with us.

pausecollective.tumblr.com

The Midas Award 2014

Midas Award Shortlist – Calum Armstrong, Laura Adams, Diana Bechmann, Guido Lanteri Laura and Jon Doran

Five artists were selected from this year’s degree shows at Falmouth University for this group exhibition, which runs at Newlyn Gallery from 18 October to 15 November. The shortlisted artists, Laura Adams, Calum Armstrong, Diana Bechmann, Jon Doran and Guido Lanteri Laura will present their work in the upper gallery.

Last year’s winner, Marc Messenger, will present Existed, a solo show of miniature sculptures, inspired by Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. Each piece is created from a mix of materials including wood and steel, combined with natural elements such as flowers, moss, and seaweed. The installation, comprising one hundred sculptures, will be in the lower gallery.

Work from this year’s shortlisted artists includes Mindscape, an atmospheric animation by Laura Adams set in a dark and mysterious building where strange occurrences take place. Calum Armstrong’s architectural sculptures, made with clay, sand and straw, will buttress the gallery walls and push up against the ceiling. Diana Bechmann’s intricately carved plaster sculptures feature life size figures, shrouded and bound in fabric. Jon Doran’s series of paintings feature young people finding their way through woodlands, paused at the fork in a path or tentatively stepping into a stream. Guido Lanteri Laura’s film Modo Del Abeglia, features his alter ego, Jean-Pierre Lanteri, performing gravity-defying actions in the forested mountains of his ancestors.

The 2014 winner, announced on Friday 17th October at the private view, will receive a year’s supply of art materials, professional mentoring and a solo show at Millennium Gallery in the autumn of 2015, providing the opportunity to present work in a high-profile professional venue.

Private View & Award Ceremony Friday 17th October 7.30 – 9.30pm

Guest Speaker – Richard Deacon

Celebrated sculptor Richard Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales in 1949, spending part of his early childhood in Sri Lanka. For his degree at St Martin’s School of Art (1969-72) he concentrated on performance-based work before gaining an MA in Environmental Media at the Royal College of Art (1974-77). By the early 1980s his enigmatic, ambitious sculptures were gaining national and international recognition and since then his work has been exhibited extensively in numerous solo and group shows around the world. Significant public commissions of his work include, for example, Between the Eyes for the Yonge Square International Plaza in Toronto, Let’s not be Stupid at the University of Warwick and Building from the Inside, Voltaplatz, Krefeld and the cornice on Eric Parry’s new building in Piccadilly, London.

Describing himself as a ‘fabricator’ Deacon emphasises the construction of the finished object, often highlighting or exposing the way in which an object has been made. His appetite for experimenting with different materials is voracious, as if each sculpture were defined by contrast to its successor. As he explained in an interview in 2005, “Changing materials from one work to the next is a way of beginning again each time (and thus of finishing what had gone before)”. For Deacon the process of making is a two-way conversation between artist and material that transforms the workaday into something metaphorical.

Hugely influential, throughout his career, Deacon’s work has garnered impressive awards and honours, including the Turner Prize in 1987, the Robert Jakobsen Prize, Museum Wurth, Kunzelsau, Germany in 1995, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the Ministry of Culture, France in 1996, and in 1999 he was made a CBE for his significant contribution to the arts in Britain. He represented Wales at the Venice Biennale (2007) and has participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale (2012) and documenta 9 (1992). He has undertaken professorships at the London Institute, the Hochschule für Angewande Kunst, Vienna, the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris and is currently Professor at the reknowned Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. From 1992 to 1997 he served as a Tate Trustee. He recently had a retrospective at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany (2011), while Tate Britain exhibited a survey of his work from February-April 2014.

Wednesday 23 April 2014 5-6pm – Falmouth Campus Lecture Theatre

Pablo de Laborde Lascaris Wins International Emerging Artist Award

Falmouth alumnus Pablo de Laborde Lascaris has won the prestigious International Emerging Artist Award (IEAA) for 2013.

An established sculptor at just 28, since graduating from BA(Hons) Fine Art in 2011, Pablo moved from coordinating the Breakfast graduate exhibition in London to winning an Artist’s Residency at Christ’s Hospital School in West Sussex, to obtaining a bursary with the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

His latest achievement, the IEAA, represents excellence in contemporary art and offers emerging artists valuable international exposure alongside exhibition opportunities. Since receiving the accolade Pablo has enjoyed exhibiting across the globe: from Dubai’s FN Designs gallery, to the Vue Privée gallery in Singapore and latterly joining the Galerie Gourvennec Ogor in Marseille as an Associate.

Pablo won the coveted IEAA for his Cube, made whilst studying at Falmouth. The mixed media piece composed of different woods, grains exposed, and filled with 100kg of sand, poses queries regarding the relationship between two materials in a piece suggestive of time, movement, and displacement.

A prolific sculptor, Pablo’s latest work is set to form a pivotal role in the Marseille-Provence European Capital of Culture 2013 celebrations, showing at the Swab Barcelona Art Fair between 3-6 October before informing a solo exhibition at the Galerie Gourvennec Ogor.

Didier Gourvennec Ogor, gallery owner and President of Marseille Expos explains, “Pablo will be exhibiting from 31 October at the Galerie Gourvennec Ogor in a solo exhibition. He will have the opportunity to invest in a space nearly 200m by 4.7m high. This is a difficult exercise for artists in general, but I am sure he will take advantage of this great opportunity… I am very excited by this new collaboration with such a promising artist.”

(C) Pablo de Laborde Lascaris