Bearspace is pleased to present new work by a collection of its leading artists curated by Director Julia Alvarez.
Tectonic plays on the ever-changing, shifting landscapes, forming the basis of the artists work. Each artist has honed their practice, using between them an array of sculptural photography, print and digital collage to create a series of fragmented landscapes, based on real and interpreted landscapes.
Landscape as a genre has always held a relevant presence for artists as a main source of inspiration. Stretching from it’s debut in renaissance paintings to it’s influence in urban photography, it’s relatable to a variety of people, constantly evolving and accessible. Within Tectonic each of our artist navigates their way through some of the different environments in which we find landscapes. With inspiration stretching from the everyday, landscapes from familiar film scenes (therefore making it relatable), right through to almost dream like environments Tectonic demonstrates a variety of ways in which the genre can be interpreted. From Sri Lanka to Malta our artists work are representations of their own actual journeys, represented through their processes and through them as they work in different locations around the world.
Tectonic included the work of Bearspace artists, Suzanne Moxhay, Reginald Aloysius, Jane Ward, Janie Kidston, Olivia Jade Savage and Victoria Arney.
Suzanne Moxhay
Suzanne Moxhay’s work hovers between the miniature and the epic. Juxtaposing found images from newspapers and magazines with her own photography, Moxhay overlays fragments of landscape on layers of glass and then re-photographers the newly created composition, finally producing idealised, dystopian environments created much like the traditional movie Matte painting technique.
Moxhay studied at the Royal Academy Schools and graduated in 2007, following this the artist spent a year long residency at the Florence Trust Studios, and has been exhibited in major collections such as the Jerwood Space, Saatchi New Sensations and the Venice Biennale.
Reginald Aloysius
Reginald Aloysius’s mixed media work explores themes of globalization and modernisation. Detailed drawings of his native South Indian Hindu temples are examples of Dravidian architecture looming out from the undergrowth, overlaid with aircraft flight plans carved into the polished wood surface; a scarring that mirrors the irreparable change that an evolving society can have on ancient tradition. Recently Aloysius has been adding colourful and highly textural blooms of oil paint on top of his pieces, reminiscent of the colours of the Sri Lankan landscape and foliage.
Aloysius studied at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford University and has been featured in a number of exhibitions and was notably nominated for the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2011.
Jane Ward
The meticulously constructed works that Jane Ward creates employ the artists' own digital photographs repeatedly broken down and collaged, creating images of imaginary, fragmentary, and transient land and cityscapes. Fragments of ink are dissolved by hand, leaving traces of earlier forms and injecting the passage of time via the serene colours of Ward's landscape photographs and the minuscule details that feature foliage, high rise buildings, and flecks of the city. Jane Ward studied an MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2007 and going on to win the Terrence Conran Foundation Award and the Tim Mara Prize.
Olivia Jade Savage
Inspired by the landscapes and sets of Science Fiction films and literature, Olivia deconstructs and reconstructs worlds with underlying suggestions of more familiar environments.
Most collage artists are dissatisfied with certain aspects of culture, hence the desire to dissect and rearrange it to their preference, to deconstruct and rebuild. Every aspect of these surreal landscapes exists within our own planet, mountains, skyscrapers, moons and cities are merely composed and juxtaposed in such a way as to make them seem alien and impossible. However they still retain a hint of familiarity, perhaps to jolt the mind, to remind us that the themes and warnings within these films (Sci-Fi is often dystopian and satirical as a genre) are not so alien after all, and the worlds we’re viewing, not so far away.
Janie Kidston
Janie creates micro landscapes in her studios, using her own painted works, then transforming them into organic sculptures, finally photographing them against a crisp white background to create a glacial scene. These are blown up to a macro scale giving them monumental appearance. They float with strange lights appearing under them, reminiscent of the northern lights. Each photograph is studio shot only.
Janie studied at Camberwell College of Art, Printmaking MA in 2014. She has been awarded the Dean’s residency award and has also been selected for the UAL postgraduate exhibition in 2014.
Lucinda Metcalfe
Lucinda Metcalfe is a London based artist, creating vivid paintings that are inspired by the buildings and environments of travel brochures. Metcalfe's paintings provoke wonder and longing of tropical idylls straight from the pages of Winter Sun.
Metcalfe has chosen to inform her work via an Ilya Kabakov quote - "The creation of projects, the formulation of all kinds of Utopias, is immanently inherent in us, in our consciousness, and furthermore it rests as a stimulus and as a basis for any of our actions as long as we remain human beings. In other words we can exist only in the mode of the creation and realisation of Utopias, no matter what they might turn out to be 'in actual fact'." (Ilya Kabakov)
Victoria Arney
Through many different visual disturbances, Victoria Arney's drawings and prints question representation, memory and potentially our relationship to natural forces – where one begins and ends. The theme of natural events changing the order of landscapes leads Arney to focus on and depict the chaos of nature. Arney's work is both dramatic and fragile suggesting the thin line between structure and desolation, often featuring overlaid coloured disks of Japanese paper or semi-transparent washes of pastel colour.