Formed mainly from loose materials – such as soil, plaster of Paris, powder paint, and soap powder – Karla Black’s sculptures are poised between fragility and robustness. She works with such unstable and impermanent materials ‘not because they easily change and decay but because 'I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’ Whether earth-bound or suspended in space, her works are, as she explains, ‘actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating’ and she emphasizes that she prioritises material experience over language as a way of learning and understanding. Despite their psychologically loaded titles, her sculptures are the result of ‘a need to just grab the world.’
VARDA CAIVANO
Varda Caivano’s abstract paintings are explorations into colour, texture and mark-making. Describing her works as ‘thoughts or monologues, moments that grow over time’, she points out that they also demand ‘time and interaction from the viewer to reveal and unfold. I never know what's going to happen.’ Though there are suggestions of images in her paintings, form is ultimately elusive and deceptive. ‘Painting for me is a way of questioning images, where visible objects with a secret depth appear to reveal a kind of irrational truth,’ she remarks. ‘The paintings operate as a bridge, a transitional space that evokes an inner world.’
DUNCAN CAMPBELL
Duncan Campbell’s works combine traditionally different styles of filmmaking. Documentary portraits of complex historical figures, composed of archival footage and animation in cinéma vérité style, are integrated into more abstract scenes, influenced by avant-garde writers and artists. By combining them, Campbell intends to ‘allow this difference rather than homogenise it.’
Bernadette (2006) is Campbell’s study of the turbulent relationship between the Northern Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devlin and the media during the 1970s, disclosed through the contradictory press coverage of her as a martyr, victim, and troublemaker by broadcasters who championed and later targeted her.'
CULLINAN RICHARDS
Cullinan and Jeanine Richards create mixed-media installations that foreground the aspects of art and exhibition-making that other artists might wish to conceal. Tools of the technician’s trade, such as tape, touch-up paint and plastic sheeting, feature prominently in their work, along with old newspapers spattered with accidental drips of paint in the studio.
In the grand stairwell of Nottingham Castle Museum, plastic sheeting forms a thin membrane between the walls and the canvases on display. The paintings include two images of young women on horseback performing high dives into a swimming pool, an apparently popular spectacle in Atlantic City in the 1920s.
LUKE FOWLER
Composition for Flutter screen (2008) is a collaboration with Toshiya Tsunoda, an artist and composer who works with field recordings that seek to capture the sounds of objects. The sculptural installation features a flimsy handmade screen which is subjected to a series of interventions. Fixed images - a moth, a meniscus, a candle flame - projected onto it are caused to move because the screen itself is in constant motion, blown about by electric fans. From time to time, bright light and amplified sound interrupt the choreographed flow of the work, revealing the mechanisms of its illusions.
ROGER HIORNS
Roger Hiorns investigates alchemical transformations of ideas, actions and materials. Organic matter and chemical compounds and processes – brains, fire, crystals, sperm and drugs – are introduced into man-made structures, among them buildings, engines and street furniture. His crystallisations of copper sulphate have produced encrustations of ultra-blue on car engines and, most spectacularly, invaded a council flat in South London.
In Glasgow, Hiorns places a generic municipal bench in the gallery. At unspecified intervals, a flame will flare at one end of the bench, occasionally tended by a naked young man. Elsewhere in the gallery space, a thin slit in the wall becomes a receptacle for bovine brain matter.
DAVID NOONAN
The complex imagery in David Noonan’s large-scale monochrome works is sourced from archival photographs, film stills, textiles, books, magazines and ephemera. This tapestry reproduces a densely layered collage, in which images and patterns are superimposed in a play of positive and negative, subterfuge and camouflage. The resulting tableau possesses a disquieting dream-logic of its own. For Noonan, it evokes a time he spent in an Ashram in India and the parallel reality of that experience: ‘there is a guru sitting in the middle and an arm offering her flowers. And the peacocks: there were peacocks all around the Ashram...
MAAIKE SCHOOREL
Maaike Schoorel’s atmospheric figurative paintings give up their secrets slowly. These apparently abstract, predominantly white-on-white (or, in one case, black-on-black) canvases contain elusive, barely legible images that emerge, fleetingly, the longer one looks, like forms that can only be made out once the eye has adapted to bright light or darkness. Intent on slowing down looking and intensifying the process of perception, these works also address the ephemeral nature of memory and the difficulty of fixing a person’s image in the mind. Based on photographs that Schoorel has taken of herself, each of these self-portraits – once glimpsed – recalls an archetypal pose from historical art.
EMILY WARDILL
Emily Wardill's films examine the combined force of rhetoric and melodrama in media and politics. Her work upsets the rhythm of traditional filmmaking through exaggerations or strategic diversions in script, set and editing.
Gamekeepers without Game is based on a play, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), 1635, by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Wardill relocates this story of prodigal children and patricide to contemporary London. Here, a father tries to reintegrate his daughter into the family home, after nine years of her life in social care. The artist says she wanted to shoot the film like airline food, so you have this sense that everything is separate and nothing ever touches.
