- Venue
- https://shadowlightartists.org.uk/luminous-virtual-gallery/
- Starts
- Sunday, November 15, 2020
- Ends
- Friday, November 12, 2021
- Address
- https://shadowlightartists.org.uk/luminous-virtual-gallery/
- Location
- South East England
Shadowlight Artists: LUMINOUS
Open Now: LUMINOUS Online Virtual Gallery
From 20/11/20 LUMINOUS Virtual Tour with 3D scans of LUMINOUS galleries on the websites of Modern Art Oxford & Arts at the Old Fire Station, Oxford
From 02/12/20 to 23/12/20 LUMINOUS – the physical exhibition opens its doors at Modern Art Oxford & Arts at the Old Fire Station, Oxford galleries (subject to local & national lockdown rules)
Managed by Film Oxford, LUMINOUS is the latest project by the Shadowlight Artists, a group of seven artists with learning disabilities based in Oxfordshire, supported by Film Oxford and established in 2009.
Commencing in late summer 2019, the LUMINOUS project has come to be defined by the lockdown, which presented significant additional challenges to people with learning disabilities. As it started during the production phase of the project Film Oxford, the Shadowlight Artists and freelance professionals found new innovative ways to work collaboratively at a distance. They liaised with each artist’s family members and their support & care organisations to draw up individual plans, so the group’s production work could continue during the pandemic.
Animations have been created using drawings exchanged by mail; sculptural work has been created collaboratively via Skype; dance for camera has been transposed from the studio to the outdoors and art materials and paintings exchanged by courier.
A large part of the project has become about keeping in touch with the group. The artists are particularly at risk from social isolation as their normal lifestyle and social support is drastically reduced due to covid-19. For many, unable to leave their homes their art becomes a focus to draw comfort and pride from.
Most of work presented in this exhibition does not engage the COVID-19 crisis as a subject in itself, but instead underlies it as a sub-text due to the radically different working methods. The enforced experiment in distanced artistic collaboration has in reality opened up new possibilities for the future activities of the group, offering a pathway towards artists collaborations which are unlimited by geographical separation and also towards greater potential inclusion for disabled artists if given sufficient resources.
The work in this exhibition is diverse in media and subjects. Painting, photography, animation, dance for camera and sculptural installation all feature in the show, covering subjects from a personal relationship with the landscape to bullying. Some of the work looks back on the changing industrial landscape and to historical portraiture. Other work draws on a huge range of emotions from joy to sorrow, and from humour to exasperation. All of the work has in common that it represents an honest response to the day-to-day world from this unique group of artists.
The Shadowlight Artists are:
Wendy Belcher, Tom Breach, Mark Hemsworth, Russell Highsmith, Richard Hunt, Lucy Skuce, Danny Smith.
