A mixed-media exhibition in London by three emerging Artists. Donations from the event for Cancer Research UK (not Kickstarter funds).
THE BASICS:
We are raising funds to facilitate a new mixed-media Fine Art group exhibition project, “Written on the Skin”, earmarked for mid-2017 in London, UK.
Money raised from this Kickstarter campaign will facilitate the event, and should we be successful then we will be taking donations at the event to support Cancer Research UK.
(Please note that this kickstarter campaign is not raising funds for the charity, but to enable us to put together a week-long exhibition event in London, including an evening private view event.)
THE FINANCES:
We are aiming to raise £650.00 GBP based on estimated costs of the project:
THE EXHIBITION CONCEPT:
“written on the skin”
Helena Collins | Alexandra Linfoot | Jamie Shaw
Exhibition concept, project manager and lead curator/designer Jamie Shaw.
VENUE TBC | DATE TBC 2017
“This is my skin. This is not yet skin, yet you are under it” -Iain Thomas.
“You have outgrown this skin. Stop trying to hold it in. Stop trying to hold it together. Let yourself break.” -AVA
Written on the skin is a self-curated group exhibition project by three emerging London-based artists. Taking as its point of departure the idea that the human body – with all the fragility, resilience and multiplicity of the flesh – is a site for expression and exploration; the exhibition introduces practices which variously explore notions of safety, difference, innocence and emotional exposé. The project brings together artworks across a range of media – including painting, sculpture, installation and text: these practices are in places complimentary but simultaneously distinct. Softly painted figurative renderings and autobiographical texts exploring queer sentimentalities contrast both installation works whimsically assembled using the detritus of domestic life, and figurative sculptures in the classical tradition which unpick traditional notions of perfection.
When considered together these works, in places visually complimentary yet occasionally oppositional in approach, sketch out a delicate and malleable narrative concerning the ideologies of vulnerability, femininity, sentimentality and feelings of minority and disassociation. These are expressive artists committed to translating their bodily and emotional experiences and for whom their concerns are, emotionally and metaphorically, written on the skin. Their texts – as paintings, sculptures, installations or writings – aim to further our imaginings of the internal architecture of the human condition.
HELENA COLLINS is interested in the artist’s body as muse. She works primarily with sculpture as a medium for the tentative and material exploration of form and context related to the physical and psychological vulnerabilities of the human body. For Collins breakages, slippages, separations and medicines represent a re-evaluation of traditional notions of the human form as represented in traditional canons of representation. She sees the act of sculpting as a ‘physical working through’ of her emotions.
ALEXANDRA LINFOOT is interested in the heightening of the domestic space through the constructs of Fine Art. Linfoot takes items, objects and materials which are commonplace and traditionally overlooked in domestic settings and elevates these through the act of assemblage, dismantling and redirecting traditional associations. In her sculptures, where peripheral elements usually orbit a singular ‘main event’, the everyday household object becomes a site for contemplation and reflection on the aesthetics of personal experience, femininity and the sanctity of the spaces we reserve for ‘home’.
JAMIE SHAW treats art practice as a realm of personal expression related to contemporary lived experience, believing that the personal is political. He works with intention to create intimate, sentimental musings concerned with expressing desire, longing, and failures in dreaming. His paintings and texts examine the discrepancies between sexuality and innocence, and examine the interstices between consumption and desire; marginality and complicity; kitsch and sublime. He counts life, difference, and innocence amongst his main inspirations. Shaw aims to create poetic encounters of a vision informed both by the minority queer experience and myths of the artist as ‘outsider’. The work expresses uniquely personal struggles in desire and constitutes a failed quest for ‘pink utopia’: He says “I work to create my own personal visual mythology: my gods live on a pink cloud.”
All artists graduated BA (hons) Mixed Media Fine Art from the University of Westminster in 2015.
www.jamieshawart.co.uk
alexandralinfoot.wix.com
hemcart.weebly.com
PROMOTIONAL POSTERS:
At present, we cannot put a deposit down on our preferred space until we have raised the funds from this page. Renting space is notoriously expensive in London and our estimate for the venue is a conservative one based on a space we have found. The timescales for the exhibition will be somewhat reliant on the availability of the space in the coming months. As such, we cannot specify dates or locations for the exhibition at this stage – but we’ll keep you updated with every development and forward-step we make as the project becomes a reality.