‘Devotional Songs’, Rosie Edwards
HS Projects is delighted to present Devotional Songs, an exhibition of new and recent work by the 2022 Mark Tanner Sculpture Award recipient, Rosie Edwards.
Devotional Songs is an installation of loosely assembled elements that have all been wrapped in twine, by hand, by the artist. On display, here are forms born of the artist’s most recent findings: pop–up laundry baskets, a bundle of hula hoops, a discarded hose, cardboard tubes, empty yarn cones. The serendipitous encounter with such objects outside their intended context, reveals them in a new light. Freed from the limitations of their previously assigned function, they are released into the realm of pure material – of sculpture. The finding of these ready-made ‘gifts’, insights a glimmer of the miraculous which causes a stirring in the artist: a sort of spiritual communion in which objects appear to proclaim an answer to a question not yet had, and which seem to propose a challenge – which the artist devoutly obliges.
The wrapping or winding of these components in twine is a repetitive process. It is a disciplined, ascetic act: the optic pattern drawn across each surface is evidence of time spent in communion. The continuous rhythm of winding, though laborious, calms the mind. As the optic pattern begins to form, one enters into its groove: surface thoughts and worries slip away, allowing the mind to dance and play unhindered, creating a transcendental charge between the object and the maker.
Devotional Songs can be seen as a ‘combined intention’, or Sankalpa, formed not by the heart and mind but between the artist and objects. This installation sees a departure from the artist’s previous plaster sculptures. Made largely at home, after dark, they have a different energy, a greater intimacy. The individual structures, which make up this installation, are sculpturally light, insubstantial, their improvised nature and simple phrasing more akin to dance or drawing than sculpture. The collective hum of these quiet voices, chimeric and vibrating – as if in the process of transforming – is perhaps a calling towards a lighter way of being.
Edwards sees her sculptural practice as a collaboration with found objects, pure geometries and external limiting factors. She seeks to outsource creative decisions by following the prompts held within the objects and forms she encounters, which impart their own formatting or logic. Operating within this guise of extreme neutrality (quashing her own intentions), she follows their leads. In doing so, Edwards challenges the power of Objective Chance to reveal its teaching and gives voice to the poetry of its code.
Rosie Edwards studied BA Fine Art Textiles at Goldsmiths College, London (2002-2005) and MA Mixed Media Textiles at Royal College of Art, London (2010-2012). Recent solo exhibitions include: Genetic Material, Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Exhibition, Bury Art Museum and Sculpture Centre / Standpoint Gallery, London / Cross Lane Projects, Kendal (2022) touring solo show; A Real Job, Wearite clothing factory, Tottenham, London (2018); Light Materialty, Second Home, Hanbury Street, London ((2014); Everything Must Go!, Thomas Brothers DIY, Archway, London (2014); Hoard, A Million Miles a Minute; Windows project, Archway, London, Commissioned by Arts Council England and A.I.R. (2013).
‘Devotional Songs’ is at Howick Place from June 2023 to December 2023.
‘Arachnophobia and Other Tales’
HS Projects is delighted to present ‘Arachnophobia and Other Tales’, a multi-media exhibition of new work by BA students from Reading School of Art comprising painting, film, sculpture and installation.
The themes the artists are exploring are multi-faceted and touch on a multitude of contemporary issues from imagined realities, nostalgia, fragility, desire and grief to diaspora, identity and the male gaze. They offer multiple narratives that invoke the human condition and become witnesses to the complex reality of our contemporary era.
Ariel Kwong’s Domain Film, 00:10 explores immersive experience, through digital sculpture and animation to create a space of contemplation in between the virtual and reality, a set of 3D image and calculated geometry in the flow of the smoke. The film shows the artist’s interest in the trajectory of transformation in art media within art history and explores the materiality of media through a digital work.
Cerys Cartwright is interested in the relationship between memory, experience, and imagined realities, manipulating her personal connection to them through her practice. Her paintings Falling Flowers are an attempt of holding onto a memory: a series of graphical floral shapes represents both the memory of the object, the gift giver, and the refusal to let any object she deems precious go to waste.
Holly Jones’ practice explores the boundaries between reality and fantasy via the lending of space in the modern world for bodies of work that could seemingly only appear in dreams. Her work is made to be experienced, not just viewed, regardless of whether the reactions from the physical encounters are positive or negative. In her soft sculpture Arachnophobia the ridiculousness of the fabric is juxtaposed with the freakiness of the creature, exploring this fine line between repulsion and charm.
Diaspora, identity and hoarding behaviours underpin Jasmine Khatani’s film Home based in her Nan’s house and featuring elements of a typical Indian household, layered with the collections of useless items kept within the house. Using heavy layering of film and audio throughout the film, Khatani meshes together Indian relics and sentimental objects and juxtaposes them with the repeated imagery of plastic bags – an object made for disposal, repurposed.
Megan Hill’s video The Orb uses humor to explore the ironic and relentless nature of the desire to attain a certain mental or physical thing which, once achieved, does not provide everything we had hoped for, leaving us chasing something else, into an endless cycle. The character is searching for a great new idea for an artwork, once attained, however, the magnitude of it starts to diminish, and she starts thinking of other wants and desires. The once brilliant idea seems dull in comparison, illustrated by opening the orb of desire and it being merely a regular watermelon.
Serge Fradin De La Renaudiere practices a categorical fidelity to the boundless – an inherent longing for a formless state, in which lies balance. So that the line that is interwoven through the substance creates a seamlessness within the chaos of such work; being the synchronous dichotomy between that of an ugly and conversely, a lovely – in which the equilibrium is formed as ‘nothing is so opposed to the beautiful as the disgusting’.
Tilly Flory’s practice has guided her to a deeper understanding of the experience of grief. Her painting Shrouded in Folds was made to represent the experience of life becoming internalised while one processes grief, as well as a transition from the person they were before to the person they become after encountering loss. Grief is similar to that of a caterpillar entering its chrysalis and emerging as something changed, perhaps more complex than it once was.
Jasmin Geary’s work focuses on the human condition and how society dictates this, finding more joy from a strikingly melancholy portrait than a picturesque landscape. Carou-sell Yourself exists as an oxymoron, partnering nostalgia with vulgarity to represent the uneasiness of the male gaze in today’s society. There is a fine line between a celebration of life and a freak show; to which the audience is left delicately tight roping.
‘Arachnophobia and Other Tales’ is at Thames Tower, Reading, from 12th December 2022 – June 2023.
‘The Slack Shallows’, Fiona Curran
HS Projects is delighted to present ‘The Slack Shallows’, an exhibition of new work by Fiona Curran.
The title of this exhibition The Slack Shallows is taken from a passage in J.G.Ballard’s novel The Crystal World (1966). The novel charts a journey by the character Dr Sanders into the heart of a forest which is undergoing a radical transformation through a strange process of crystallisation. Everything in the path of this mysterious virus/disease is engulfed and transformed by a technicolour encrustation of jewel-like crystals. All organic and non-organic matter has become frozen and petrified by the crystals in a process that appears to have no end. Throughout the novel the crystal world continues to spread, it exerts a seductive lure on everyone who comes into contact with it. Several characters find themselves moving towards its luminosity rather than away from it, and those who resist being absorbed by it feel a strange sense of listlessness when they escape back to the ‘old’ world.
Fiona Curran works with painting, textiles and site-specific installation, exploring the poetics and the politics of landscape space and the impacts of screen-based technologies on the diminishment of our sensory engagement with the world. The presence of a heightened colour palette within her work, alongside assembled, collaged and layered surfaces, seeks to both mimic and counter the fractured, illuminated and seductive spaces of the screen, whilst immersing the viewer in a more physical and material engagement with colour and space. Ballard’s crystal world becomes an analogy for our contemporary moment where we increasingly inhabit a world mediated by the interface of the screen. Experience becomes a complex assemblage of direct and indirect experiences of space and place where interior and exterior, figure and ground and real and imagined are blurred.
Curran’s works, however, seek to navigate between the “slack shallows” and the “endless glimmer” in order to reveal a recurring utopian impulse, formal idealism and sense of escapism. She is interested in abstract fields of colour, in the use of framing devices and forms of enclosure. Materials are stacked and folded or lean precariously against a support. Structures often appear to be in the process of being built, woven or stitched together, or perhaps in the process of being dismantled, falling apart, or abandoned, it’s not clear which. New forms are assembled from old in an ongoing process of change and transformation.
Fiona Curran read Philosophy at the University of Manchester before studying at Manchester School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and teaches at the Royal College of Art. Recent commissions include: Bright shadows point, Eddington, Cambridge, (2021); Your sweetest empire is to please, National Trust Gibside, Gateshead; The grass seemed darker than ever, Kielder Castle, Kielder Forest, Northumberland. Selected solo exhibitions include: Jump Cut, Still Life, Broadway Gallery, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, (2021); Beach Fatigue, Carslaw St*Lukes, London, (2013); Waiting For The Perfect View, Touchstones, Rochdale, Manchester, (2012). Group exhibitions include: Lovely View, Way Out East Gallery, University of East London, London (2022); Continuities, Paul Hughes Fine Arts, Wiltshire (2021).
‘The Slack Shallows’ is at Howick Place from December 2022 to June 2023.