- Venue
- The North Wall Arts Centre
- Location
- South East England
Process, repetition, and transformation are the key themes explored in a variety of media by young artist, Tova Holmes, in her current exhibition at Oxford’s North Wall Arts Centre, Repeat After Me.
A 2006 graduate from Oxford University’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Holmes teaches Art at St. Edward’s School, Oxford and has had several exhibitions in Oxford, London and further afield since 2004.
Back in 2006, Holmes was already engaged in similar, process-driven work; her piece in the Ruskin undergraduate exhibition, The Heat is Rising, at Modern Art Oxford, explored the studio space that each of her fellow students occupied leading up to their degree show.
The pieces exhibited at Repeat After Me, involve wool, clay and porcelain slip as well as collage, paper, print, books, and digital imagery. Whilst the by-line for this self-artist-curated exhibition is, ‘The memory of objects transformed by repetitive processes’, it is only really themes of repetition and transformation which all these works share. The act of repetition of a particular process is investigated in the ‘Holes‘ series, (multiple pin pricks in paper creating depth and varying surface terrain), the ‘Knitted clay, crochet clay and doilies‘ series’, (the clay shell remains of pieces of knitting, crochet designs and paper doilies dipped in porcelain slip), and the small, box-framed, paper-based pieces, ‘Small Holes‘ and ‘Labelled‘. The effect of transformation on an object is explored in the ‘Cut Books‘ series, (books transformed into sculptural works), in the small paper works, such as, the ‘Spirals‘ series, (whereby ‘similar but separate elements’ are connected by ‘placing the components in formation’), and in the plaster structures such as ‘Found‘, ‘Every‘, ‘Wise‘, and ‘Into‘.
The works are not just about the result of repetitive actions, however; they also consider what happens to the artist undergoing these repetitive actions. Holmes informs us that each ‘Holes‘ piece takes between 10-15 hours to produce, and that “the process becomes a meditative one. The repetitive performance of piercing by hand transforms body into machine.”
In my view, the exhibition suffers a little from a lack of critical curation; there are simply too many works or possibly, too many different kinds of work, on display. Clearly, a decision to mix up the different series’ was made, however, it may have been more in keeping with the themes of the work if the different series’ had been hung together, notably the printed and sewn works and the paper and plaster structures. The ‘Holes‘ series, for instance, need their own designated space due to their beautiful, ethereal, and barely visible quality. I would have liked to have seen the exciting photographs of the ‘Cut Books‘ works much enlarged and hung in a space of their own, rather than overshadowed by the large ‘Paper sewing‘ piece at the end of the wall. The quality of the photographs is excellent and their composition hints deceptively at works much larger than those they depict. The photos are yet a further transformation of the original, book format, and it might have been interesting to pursue this idea further.
I struggle to find the themes of the show expressed in all the works on display: ‘Florentine Puddles‘, ‘Women in Art’, and ‘Decisions‘, being examples. Other works fit thematically, but are not covered in the leaflet accompanying the show, such as ‘Porcelain collars‘ and ‘Stitched Sieves‘, so that they seem to exist strangely outside of the exhibition.
Several pieces have made a strong impression on me: ‘Green 1‘ and ‘Green 2‘, ‘Red‘, and ‘Blue‘ from the ‘Cut Books‘ series have undergone very successful transformations from hard, similar, books to variously fluffy, chaotic, and intense sculptural pieces. The ‘Porcelain collars‘ pieces have morphed into roses; this makes it even harder to decipher their base materials from a distance. The viewer is drawn into studying them close by and the illusory effect is complete when it becomes apparent that one of the pieces contains very old shirt collars labelled ‘heavy’! It seems that these collars were used to make the ‘porcelain collars’ of the other two pieces in the series.
Holmes says of the works in Repeat After Me, “I’m an art teacher and it’s about doing small things in the 20-minute or 40-minute blocks of time that I have and building it up to make a bigger piece. It has evolved out of my lifestyle.” In this case, I think less might have been more, but the way in which the themes of process, repetition, and transformation have been tackled here, makes this an exhibition well worth visiting for those interested in the subject.
