Oh tell me where your freedom lies
You'd rather cry, I'd rather fly
Mick Finch
Nick Jones
Hilary Prosser
Diana Taylor
David Thorp
Tom Wolseley
24 May - 17 June 2023
Mick Finch
Finch currently works with an archive of some 3000 images scanned from a set of 1950s encyclopaedias entitled The Book of Knowledge. He has made 200 digital prints from these appropriated images since 2014. Since 2022 he has worked these images as video montages, exploring both their contextual resonance and their impact on the present. The screened video, Freedom Lies, has been made especially for this exhibition and explores through image montage, text and music the lyrics of the 1967 Doors song, The Crystal Ship which is a lucid reflection on distraction and spectacle and from which the exhibition’s title is taken.
Nick Jones
The attempt is to engage the viewer in as many ways as possible – visually, emotionally and intellectually. Colour, light and trompe l’oeil inform and influence much of this abstract expressionist work which is once again becoming a relevant kind of practice valuing freedom, spontaneity and personal expression. The idea for the ’tubism’ paintings is to sculpt colour that the viewer can enter into reflecting metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation.
‘There is no such thing as good painting about nothing ‘ Rothko
Hilary Prosser
Hilary Prosser has a recent MA in Anthropology and an acute interest in human interaction. 'Help' is a selection of personal ads - the handmade variety - those seen on public noticeboards around the UK over the last decade. These notices can be read individually as short stories but they also raise questions about vulnerability and exploitation. Fascinated by the language and materials used in these public requests and offers of help, Prosser has made facsimiles of these intimate, often poignant, cards, posters and flyers. She has used a variety of techniques including embroidery to reflect the techniques used to make the originals and also reflecting their different material qualities.
Diana Taylor
Working with a multi-disciplinary practice, across painting, printing, needlework, weaving, collage and 3D scanning, Taylor converges historical references from analogue and digital archives: assembling, layering, painting and un-painting. These images and processes are linked by her pre-occupation with loss, redundancy and the ruin in visual culture, with an emphasis on the collapsing of hierarchies. Screen-printing, photocopiers and analogue projectors are used as much for their visual qualities as for their inherent ability to produce failures. Images are deleted, layered and obscured, producing palimpsests; images which have been altered so that they themselves become a ruin.
Jeffrey Bligh by David Thorp
Bligh and Thorp share some similarities. Jeffrey Bligh was adopted shortly after birth with his twin sister, and from then on, he was known as David Thorp. Recently, Thorp has returned as an artist to his birth name. Everything Jeffrey Bligh does, David Thorp does too. Here Jeffrey Bligh is looking at four images of himself writing out the whole of Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka which tells the story of the transformational change of the human ‘Gregor’ into a new body.
Tom Wolseley
Tom Wolseley has worked across installation, photography and film, exploring how the processes of the urban, buildings, capital and geology are reflected in culture both personal and collective. This project explores process and transformation between chemistry, place and people in a remote valley on Exmoor. How does changing the terms of the chemical reactions, in a still designed by Wolseley, and bespoke manufactured in the UK, affect the process? The construction of a factory in the valley where he was born creates a ‘Speculative Institution’, where he explores how to manage change, as an artist, as a person and a necessity in the ongoing relationship to place. (European Social Fund supported)