Centrifuge: Twenty successful artists
David Baker
Alice Bradshaw
Chris Henry Clarke
Matthew Cowan
Katie Davies
Kate Day
Catherine Elvin
Rosie Farrell
Evanthia Grigoropoulou
Laura Harrington
Zoe Johnson
Gary Leddington
Rebecca Lennon
Tim Machin
Pete McPartlan
Daniel Simpkins
Nick Thurston
Ruth Todhunter
Tom Watson
Penny Whitehead
David Baker
Leeds
Left: Untitled (500 Sheet Pad of A4 Paper with Every Two Sheets Paper-Clipped Together in One Corner); 2006
Right: Untitled (A Number of Light Bulbs in a Circle); 2006
A defined conceptual framework with underlying themes of temporality and minimal elements forms the basis of the majority of my work. My working process is guided by given special and material conditions; therefore it is necessary for each piece to be made anew on each occasion they are exhibited. I construct assemblages using a wide range of ephemeral materials which are functional and familiar in everyday life including paper, light bulbs and paint. Each piece functions as a sculpture in its own right and in its relationship to the space and the viewer’s position.
Alice Bradshaw
Halifax
Left: Untitled; 2005; ink on two-ply tissue, separated, with blutack
Right: Untitled; 2006; broken branches mended with sellotape
I intend to create a sense of curiosity through the manipulation of mundane objects and materials. Mass-produced, anonymous objects are often rendered dysfunctional caricatures of themselves. My intent is to blur distinctions between the absurd and the mundane by creating or accentuating subtleties, whilst addressing concepts of purpose and futility.
Chris Henry Clarke
Sheffield
Left: Tribute to Saul Hudson; 2007; 9 minute video loop and mixed media
Right: 4-ever; 2006; modified plug extension
In my practice to date I have been interested in how meaning and self-identity are constructed from the world. The works themselves suggest a sense of aspiration, of a desire for something better and explore a gap between this and daily reality. With a conceptual approach employing appropriation and assemblage I aim to use the world to generate new meanings.
Matthew Cowan
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
Left: The Four Hobby Horses of the Apocalypse; 2005; performance still
Right: A Morris Dancer Should Never Appear to Touch the Ground; 2007; billboard poster
My practice is in the realm of traditional British customs and culture. My work combines elements of photography, video, installation and performance to reflect the joyous ceremony of the folk world. Recent pieces have tapped into the English folk identity, and play with an uneasy English obsession with its folk traditions.
I am a director of Novellus Castellum, an artist led group which is producing a programme of residencies in the Exsertus project space in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Katie Davies
Sheffield
Left: Narrow; Normal; Wide; 2005; two screen synchronised video projection (video still)
Right: Stalactiform; 2007; rapid prototype, ABS
If “advertising advertises advertising”, (M. McLuhan) then this self-referencing principle is both the device that my practice appropriates and the culture within which it is integrated. My works assume the position of a rhetorical study of communication.
Working with digital media, the works investigate manifestations of language. The timing of comedy, the spectacle of ceremony and three-dimensional translation of sound have all been areas of investigation into the role duration plays within a narrative. Working strategically, my aim is to offer translation and reproduction and subsequently, a sense of artifice that is produced.
Kate Day
Manchester
Left: Navigating the Manchester Art Scene Installation Detail (Text Panel and Interactive); 2007; paint, ink, three perspex boxes (one with lid), text panel, paper, pencil
Right: Navigating the Manchester Art Scene Installation Detail; 2007; paint, ink, three perspex boxes (one with lid), text panel, paper, pencil
My recent work has been with Doorstep Collective, an organisation with the objective of bringing local cultural resources to audiences through experimental critical and visual practice. Our current project, Navigating the Manchester Art Scene, asks visitors to interact with the exhibition space by adding their own creative network to what is already displayed on the walls. We ask visitors to consider their role within an invisible cultural network and locate themselves within it. Themes posed and arising from this project have included: the artist in institutional and social space; the home and city as creative space; and the temporal qualities of interactive exhibiting.
Catherine Elvin
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
Left: Monte Carlo; 2006; colour photograph
Right: Corner Brook; 2006; colour photograph
My photographic works falls into the larger category of landscape, and is often concerned with public or leisure environments. People are conspicuously absent from these spaces, which are usually associated with human interaction and activity. I am seeking to develop work which deals with landscape in an anthropological context producing work which is increasingly involved with social and emotive concerns.
Rosie Farrell
Liverpool
Left: Ambitious Heights; 2004; video (2 minutes), colour photograph
Right: Attendant; 2005; photograph of performance
I work both independently and collaboratively, by directing and helping to drive live events and projects. I strive to develop a self-aware and critical practice that pulls site and art within the same explanatory framework.
My works are minimal as well as subversive and I operate in various media to create situation-based pieces. I choose to use both the conventional gallery space and/or the ‘street’ for most of my projects, carrying out performative operations within the framework of an exhibition.
Given the current climate in both contemporary art and society, I am interested in exploring cultural production, exchange, and individual and collective experience.
Evanthia Grigoropoulou
Salford
Left: Mars (2), 2006, digital image
Right: Untitled, 2007, oil on pebbles
My work involves a process of drawn out labour that reconfigures an object in different ways to explore different ideas such as identity, fiction, simulation, dissimulation, colonization, and culture. For this process a variety of media are employed: the production of a postcard to explore the idea of propaganda, the manipulation of images of Mars to explore the ideas of migration and colonization, and the dissimulation of pebbles, by painting them, to look like other pebbles and semi-precious stones to explore the ideas of identity, trade, and the overlapping of culture and nature. The works produced are site-specific, generally exist outside of a gallery context and involve exchanges between places.
Laura Harrington
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
Left: Parnassus #4; 2007; Sgraffito into render (lime and sand) using laser cut stencil
Right: Pink Flower; 2004; still from 16mm black & white film with hand painted dye, transferred to DVD
My practice examines the complex human relationship with nature and differing perspectives within this field. Currently taking inspiration from archives and in particular the conservation of delicate forms by technical means, my work is a combination of flowing freehand forms reproduced with robotic precision.
I have also worked with many organisations, artists and curators as a project manager.
Zoe Johnson
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
I am interested in interpretation in the exhibition space and the possibilities for dialogue between works and their audiences, facilitated by discussion and debate.
Gary Leddington
Manchester
Left: To Bestow Animation upon Lifeless Matter (Ray gun C.1950) – (installation view); 2007; Pine tree, Copper, Steel Cable, Jump Leads, Car Batteries
Right: The Death Posture; 2007; still from digital video.
Working primarily in sculpture, drawing and performative video, my work is a narrative based investigation into the desire to explore and thus transform or transcend mental, physical and cultural limitations. Taking existing knowledge as its departure point, my practice dissimilates information into a system of symbolic dots, events and objects that begins to reference and refigure factual culture as experienced by subjective obsession. In this sense my practice finds at its essence a meditation on the nature of the creative act.
Rebecca Lennon
Liverpool/Berlin
Left: Time is Flying; 2006; animated still images and text
Right: The Missing House Series (This is Not America); 2007; Documentary Film (HDV), photographic series and transcribed interviews
My artistic practice primarily incorporates writing, moving image and photography, often within a site specific, relational or installative context. The complexity within everyday dialogue and seemingly mundane scenarios as well as the gaps in memory and understanding are used to create filmic riddles, documentary archives and fiction, blurring the line between the voyeuristic and the personal, the real and the invented.
In a curatorial capacity, my practice examines the notion of site-specificity by opening up new spaces, contexts and audiences for the exhibition of contemporary art. This process references the composite meaning that these site-specific characteristics create in the work, often drawing upon cross-disciplinary and collaborative relationships within their composition.
Tim Machin
Salford
Left: Snowfall; 2007; snow from a shops entire stock of snow globes
Right: Birds; 2007; cut out bird identification guide, white tack
I use intricate drawings and tiny lo-fi sculptures to quietly unpick my surroundings and explore the methods we use to describe, name and categorise the world. A guide to British birds becomes a Hitchcockian flock, a roll of sellotape is transformed into a thunder cloud whilst the snow from a hundred snow globes piles up on the floor.
Pete McPartlan
Hull
Left: Subjective network of formally similar non-representational ideographs and A preconceived binary tree of indeterminate node to parent similarity; 2007; installation shot of two drawings
Right: E.L.O.M.D.; 2007; documentation of video performance
I am an artist and experimental musician working with generative music software, soldering iron, VHS tapes, a pen and scraps of paper. I have installed paper based work, performed live lo-fi video stuff, play and record music under various aliases (URL Scruggs, MIDI Gutherie, PetMcPalt and MC Phil Mintron) and have improvised with various Hull based collectives. I also write a nano-circulation fanzine "The Pitchforke”.
Daniel Simpkins
Sheffield
Left: / past / possible / provisional /; 2006; walking discussion
Right: / past / possible / provisional /; 2006; detail from leaflet
My work oscillates between and encompasses multiple roles, including curating, reviewing and organization; manifested through small-scale interventions, durational and participatory events, writing and discussion. This multidisciplinary approach evades the reductive assumption of conventionally distinct roles in the making, displaying and consumption of art and is intrinsic in my exploration of social and cultural networks and conventions.
Nick Thurston
Leeds
Left: Head over heels and away collaboration with Pavel Büchler; 2006; installation of vinyl lettering on glass and paper publication.
Right: montage of pages from Reading the Remove of Literature, published by Information as Material; 2006; litho printed book
I make poetic artworks and approach my practice as a process of allowing moments to mean in new ways. I understand my practice as happening through, and materialising from, a constant process of re-reading.
I am editor of the York based artists' book publishing imprint Information as Material.
Ruth Todhunter
Knutsford
Left: Spillage; 2005; projection onto chair
Right: Unreel; projection under desk
I select functional objects from the familiar realm of the domestic and the industrial to make abstract compositions about light, colour, texture and shape. In these works, made as photographs, video film, or installation, the objects lose their identity and function, becoming almost unrecognisable as an emphasis on form and colour takes priority. My approach to making the work is akin to that of painting; every element is carefully controlled, considered, reassessed and changed until the final composition is achieved. Minute changes in lighting or angle make vast differences to the tone, hue or density of colour. My response to each specific site produces work unique to its environment.
Tom Watson
Manchester
Left: Documentation of Print Shop; 2007; Window display containing jackets, t-shirts, skirts, fish net hold-ups, knee high boots
Right: Documentation of Print Shop; 2007; Display of process undertaken to produce paper and letter press from clothing: fitted furnishings, clothing and boots, blender and other appliances, hand made paper and letter set
I am interested in the inherent contradiction objects contain, in that the object can provide cues and a means to reflect, remember and affirm our ability to effect and shape our environment, as well as become the embodiment of the death of our own initiative or our means of forming a relation to this environment and the man made things which inhabit it.
It is within this framework that I have taken an interest in exploring the limitations imposed by the hierarchies that exist between thought and action. I look to the potential of readdressing this imbalance through allowing for action or the doing to become a means of establishing a different type of autonomy through an open ended investigation with notions of productivity.
Penny Whitehead
Sheffield
Left: Focus Group: Advanced Studio Practice Level 6; 2006; series of discussions
Right: Blind Hostess by Kate Longman, dinner party, as part of May I Introduce... ; 2007
I am interested in the analysis, critique of and intervention into the systems and institutions within which I operate, as artist and citizen, in particular the language, conventions, ideologies and hierarchies inherent in these systems. Within my practice I aim to confront and explore elements of these established structures, informing a range of outcomes including dialogue, collaboration, intervention, writing, events and discussion.
