The City & Guilds of London Art School 2019 MA Show opens on Saturday 7 September and runs until Sunday 15 September, with the Private View on Monday 9 September, 6-9pm. Full dates and times are below. Entry is free and everyone is welcome to visit.
Images L-R: Ema Mano Epps, States of Being; Raen Barnsley, IRL Yellow; Eleanor Watson, Scope (installation view); Nick Paton, Attle’s luck: Laura Hudson, The Baby Jesus in a Hazmat Suit
Set within the atmospheric exhibiting environment of the Art School’s historic buildings, the MA Show features an outstanding variety and quality of work, reflecting the diversity of skill and technique fostered at the Art School.
The MA Fine Art show is the culmination of an intense period of study and development over one and two years. Major shifts in working practices, critical dialogues and new discoveries in materials and methods are all present in the work of our 15 graduating students: Raen Barnsley, Joe Bucklow, Ema Mano Epps, Hugo Flores, Rachel Goodison, Geraldine van Heemstra, Laura Hudson, Ru Knox, Verde Cordero Di Montezemolo, Lucienne O’Mara, Charlotte Osborne, Nick Paton, Eleanor Watson, Tracy Whitehead, and Maddie Yuille. The Art School will be presenting a selection of small paintings by Wendy Saunders (founder of Paint Lounge), who was studying on the MA course when she sadly passed away earlier this year.
The exhibition will also feature the work of the 2019 artists in residence, Alastair Gordon, Gray Wielebinski and Taku Obata who will exhibit alongside the Artist Woodwork Fellows, James Boman and Ana Kazaroff, Decorative Surfaces Fellow, Polly Bennett and Chair of Students 2018/19, Clare Dudeney (MA Fine Art 2018), as well as an interim show by the MA Fine Art first year: Stephen Bell, Jyoti Bharwani, Clare Davidson, Suki Jobson, Lindsay Pickett, Ian Ryan, Alexandra Sivov, and Graham Treadwell.
With thanks to Winsor & Newton for their support of the exhibition.
Visitors to the MA Show, may also be interested in taking part in an historical walk around our Georgian and Victorian buildings on 14 September, 12 noon, as part of the Lambeth Heritage Festival, no booking required.
PRIVATE VIEW
Mon 9 Sept 18:00 – 21:00
OPEN
Sat 7 Sept 10:00 – 17:00
Tue 10 Sept 12:00 – 17:00
Wed 11 Sept 12:00 – 17:00
Thurs 12 Sept 12:00 – 17:00
Fri 13 Sept 12:00 – 17:00
Sat 14 Sept 10:00 – 17:00
Sun 15 Sept 10:00 – 17:00
VENUE
City & Guilds of London Art School
124 Kennington Park Road
London SE11 4DJ
EXHIBITORS
Paint is employed in a myriad of styles to create a body of work that enthrals and challenges the viewer. In Eleanor Watson’s work, diminutive oil paintings are hung over monoprints that reflect a sense of heritage and the English stately home, and suggest notions of escape and Empire.
Lucienne O’Mara uses oil on wooden constructs to look closely at perception, the fractured way in which we receive visual information, and the impossibility of being separate from what you encounter both visually and as a body.
In Maddie Yuille’s painting, moments of noticing are re-created in which interior scenes, devoid of people, become enlivened by the light falling within them. A heightened colour palette, applied in thin transparent layers to allow the white ground of the canvas to shine through, create a perfect translucency.
Laura Hudson uses visual derivé to sift through the mess of our times. Moving between drawing and painting lines are visible and metamemorial iconographies are duplicitous. The paint plays with the resemblance of things leaving an open narrative that is porous and contingent, darkly humorous and scripted with political intent.
Ru Knox’s large paintings hang poised between a spatial world of depth and form populated with suggested characters that hint at untold narratives that have an immediate confrontation with the raw materiality of painting. The paint has been blended and scrubbed in some areas, left to trickle and bleed in others, built up and scraped back again laboriously, in forceful pursuit of the final effect.
Influenced by life growing up amongst the beauty of Florence, Verde Cordero Di Montezemolo is interested in the human condition and the commonality of feeling, emotion and experience. Her work hints at the simplicity and universality of existence that unites mankind.
Meanwhile, in other work, a multi-disciplinary approach is explored to interrogate ideas and concepts. Hugo Flores’s work in paint, prints, video and sculpture addresses the fragility of memory, of shadowy and unreliable images emerging from the darkness and tests the potential relationships between materials and the images portrayed.
Spanning print, painting, collage, and sculpture, Raen Barnsley’s works appear to be digital in origin, until viewed at close range. Fascinated by the possibilities of contemporary imaging software, hard-edged abstraction, and cartography’s subjective depictions of space, her work reflects how her dyslexia affects her interpretation of written and verbal language, hinting at broken and suspended connections.
Working with painting, photography and collage, Joe Bucklow’s artworks explore the modern British landscape, particularly the desolate, forgotten, eerie or depopulated. The material process and painterly interventions to the photographic image allow a dialogue between the archival truth of the photograph, and the individual’s tainted recollection and experience.
Geraldine van Heemstra works with drawing devices and wind harps created from materials found on location. These instruments become extensions of her body, as they accompany her on walks, recording the intangibility of the elements contingent upon the interaction between human and nonhuman agencies. For Rachel Goodison, being human is epitomised by the juxtaposition of thought and behaviour, which can be at once absurd, joyful, light and dark. She sees this dialogue defined through child’s play and has created three-dimensional objects, working with everyday materials, and found objects, that encourage the viewer to see familiar things in a fresh light.
Tracy Whitehead uses collaged and cleanly cut abstract photographic images in her immersive installation, fascinated by the physical and psychic space that exists between the analogue and the digital, these two states existing alongside each other, contradictory but relational. Human form is suggested and implied, the body’s interior opened out into space.
The material properties of things interests Nick Paton. His installations can be seen as ‘material propositions’ depicting a collection of objects that have the potential to become something, or perhaps nothing at all. Materiality is also central to Charlotte Osborne’s work, investigating the unique qualities of a tantalisingly tactile set of materials like mud, toffee or wax, as the basis of the making process that will often include both durable and temporary sculpture, which then inform two-dimensional works on paper. Hybrid bodies and their biological processes that are psychologically and physically uncomfortable are the focus of these works.
Ema Mano Epps exposes the inherent properties of glass, cloth, paper and metal to demonstrate her emotive relationship to a physical experience. Tensions amongst materials in relationship with architectural space create a notion of harmony and balance set to defy logic. The result is a shared moment of calm caught in the physical and mental presence of magic.