- Venue
- Towner
- Date
- Wednesday, September 17, 2014
06:00 PM - Address
- Devonshire Park, College Road, Eastbourne BN21 4JJ
- Location
- South East England
- Organiser
- Blue Monkey Network
This popular event provides an opportunity for our five presenters to brush up on their presentation skills, and a chance for artists to get to know each other better and explore the breadth and diversity of artistic practice in the region. The five artists will each talk for five minutes and show 15 images of or relating to their work in these short and snappy Pecha Kucha style presentations.
The talks will be followed by time for discussion, chat and a glass of wine.
FREE to Blue Monkey Network members; £5 non-members
Refreshments will be available (contributions welcome) or please feel free to bring a bottle.
Our five presenters this month include recent graduates Nikki Davidson-Bowman, Lyn Dale, Katy Oxborrow and Jules Mitchell, as well as Hastings-based Nicole Zaaroura.
Nikki Davidson-Bowman is a multi media artist whose practice is primarily concerned with the printed word and evolves through playful experimentation, collecting, cutting, making, analysing, laughing, destroying, remaking, and removing. It is obsessive, meticulous & laborious. The work considers an ambiguous relationship with storytelling and the autobiographical. Informed by life, associations, the fanatical confessional elements of the media and the challenges that private and public personas present, Nikki says she tries to confront what is fact and what is fiction, attempting to provide some order out of chaos, be that externally or within. ‘The text is a fetish object and this fetish desires me.’(Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text).
Lyn Dale is a conceptual artist who likes to make things … to cut and stitch; to twist and fold; to knead and mould. She has experimented with art and craft of many kinds over the years but the academic journey she began 5 years ago encouraged her to explore the concepts which now form the basis of her artistic practice. ‘Making’ has become a tool for thinking, rather than just an end product. Her work is centred around her personal experience of ‘living a life’, yet the topics she references (Comfort, Sanctuary, Luck, Friendship and Life Stories) are universal too.
Katy Oxborrow’s use of early earth pigment expresses a desire to retain connections with ancient philosophies and to acknowledge the ritual significance of organic materials. Katy says, “Combining a solid (earth) with liquid (oil) to create pure colour, is magical to me. I treat my organic materials as something living and respecting its importance as something that has grown from life” The cultural relevance of forgotten connections between land and people reflects the gradual dismembering of the worldview that once embodied Mother Earth and Katy uses paint as a way of communicating what we are losing by only looking forwards.
Nicole Zaaroura is an artist based in St Leonards on Sea, working across photography, sound, moving image and installation, in both public and private locations. Her practice explores the nature of memory and encounter, of intimacy and distance, and concepts of trespass/parameter. She studied at St Martins (BA Fine Art) and Northumbria university (MA Fine Art) and has exhibited previously in the UK, Switzerland, Canada and Finland. Her current project, ‘A Barefoot Residency’, a six month residency at St Johns Church, St Leonards, is a continuing investigation and response to place, parameter, quiet and disquiet. Using performance as process within the space, she draws on ideas around gesture as memory/memory as gesture, and the order of remembering.
www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking/projects/single/4421619
Julia Mitchell is a contemporary fine artist, whose work explores the fragile nature of life.
Her more recent works are memorials. Using ceramics and ice she creates visual and experiential installations. The ceramic pieces expand and turn to dust. The ice melts, creating its own lasting image. Both ceramics and ice together reflect the fragility of the human condition, and the inevitable process of decay. Julia continues to push the often unpredictable materials she uses to the edge, to create work that is honest, authentic and exploratory, working with them in very different ways in order to propel her ideas forward.
