The residency is now halfway through, though it’s gone so fast! Just a mention of a few goings on since I’ve moved here.
Firstly, tomorrow at 5 o’clock sees the end of mine and fellow resident Naomi harwin’s current exhibition in the gallery’s window space. I’ll talk about the window show and new ideas that have come from it in a later post- as well as how I found Frieze Art Fair and Sunday Art Fair, which I was able to go to because of the residency’s funding for admission and travel from Turning Point West Midlands.
I’ve seen some really great shows whilst I’ve been here. Earlier, in September, it was the opening of the B Arts ‘Artcity’, the beginning of their new work programme for the next five years, in their new space on Hartshill Road. It was an exhibition of lots of different artists in what is a very large and beautiful space; it was nice to walk around the towering, de-constructed animals of Jadie Eleanor’s and then tunnel up the stairs to a performance by Chloe Cooper. It had a very vibrant atmosphere when the speeches were being made, one of real change and momentum.
As part of the gallery’s curatorial programme, Campbell Works in ‘Coming Up For Air’ materialised Airspace Gallery’s innards with the installation of a whole heating system, worked and sculpted into a three-dimensional drawing. I also very much enjoyed The Spode Works exhibition which has just come to an end, ‘Journeys, Pathways and Track Plans’, which saw works sprinkled around the old Spode site, with Joyce Iwaszko’s work humming quietly though eloquently off the buildings’ walls and Chloe Ashley’s large photograph lying so naturally like a Persian rug on the floor, but then curling and whispering things through holographic echoes.
On a final note, below are some of the tags I’ve been sorting through that people have filled in for the interactive timeline that’s part of the current Artist and the City exhibition at the Potteries Museum, where you write an artistic event you think deserves to be on the timeline. Suggestions still welcome for another few weeks.
So its coming up to the end of my residency at Airspace. Very kindly the gallery let me stay on for two months longer, which has been invaluable in terms of really seeing the impact of living in the city of Stoke-on-Trent within my work.
I’ve realised my work is specific in a very indirect way to where it is made when I look back at each place where I’ve had a studio; it seems living in a strange city has struck a chord and made a great impact of some kind, so I am staying in the city indefinitely after the residency to explore this further. Notions of familiarity and unfamiliarity are very important in my process of de-constructing the visual, which is partly why I have called the final show ‘Close’ for its multiple meanings in regards to these ideas.
My painting practice has now shaped and morphed itself into a number of wobbly almost-paintings, written pieces and hanging structures. The show is in two weeks, and I’m really looking forward to it though there’s still a lot to be done. In the gallery it’s going to be very much dependent on the curation, as even after I’ve made the work I’m still actually making the work because the space is part of it; in the studio it will feel right in one place but in the gallery it may feel right somewhere quite different. The formalism of the gallery naturally means that I’m going to be working with props and ‘organic’materials as a setting to lower the contrast between the straight lines of the space and the kind of intimate lopsidedness of the work. Like they were little babies being mothered by the studio and now they’re growing up and creating their own environments and homes. This uncertainty as to what will happen in the space until everything’s in there is very exciting but very nerve-wracking at the same time.
The show opens on the 13th March 6 till 8 pm and then is open 11-5 everyday till the 21st March.
http://www.airspacegallery.org/index.php/projects/close_a_solo_exhibition_by_alice_walter
https://www.facebook.com/events/463603887120174
My painting practice doesn’t have very much of a structure, as pieces don’t have any set course or direction; each addition to a work sets it off in a new path. I’ve recently started making paintings on clay, which has helped my feel in each work for the right composition and dimensions (which seems to make the path clearer and easier; more pruned), as I draw into the clay before it dries and then after that I finally paint it.
Today there was a studio meeting where we had a little Christmas party but also talked about a work each – really nice to be in a very relaxed crit-like atmosphere again after leaving uni, learning about people’s work- and it helped me define a few things: I’ve hovered around the word ‘domesticity’ for a long time, but what is really relevant to me is the intimacy part of it, the intimacy of the everyday as its internalised. ‘Domesticity’ didn’t quite ring true in the works that I tried to associate it with; they were too sludgy. Sludginess is something I really want to welcome in but its hard to accommodate. The red clay before I paint it really wants something a bit sludgy I think.
I was in a strange daze for the whole of my visit to Frieze back in October, but one thing I was actually very struck with was the Hauser and Wirth curation by Mark Wallinger, ‘A Study in Red and Green’. It worked with the sludginess. It seemed to be curated not just within itself, but, I think, curated in the light of it being in Frieze. It reminded me of a stuffy museum’s dull red and murky green walls, along with its general overhang of paintings and its awkwardness in layout as a busy public environment. It was actually based on Freud’s study, and its formalness worked well with many of the works having a free sense of drawing at their core, a light, absolute sense of nimbleness.
