Craft Festival Wales
Several a-n members are among the 80 exceptional makers from across the UK who take part in this celebration of craft, including jewellery, glass, pottery, furniture and textiles.
Beauty meets function in the work of a-n member Rosa Harradine, a brush and broom maker living in Carmarthen. Working with natural, sustainable materials, pieces such as her Arenga Brush bring together traditional techniques with colourful details, to appear both contemporary and timeless.
Narberth-based Sian Lester creates botanically dyed textiles and ceramics, while Alanda Wilson makes hand thrown tableware, glazed in colours whose names are inspired by the west Wales landscape: choose from a jug in ‘Welsh Thunder’, a raw rimmed bowl in ‘Sea Foam’, or a lidded jar in ‘Mountain Lichen’.
6-8 September 2024, Cardigan Castle craftfestival.co.uk
Is This What We Have Left?
This three-person exhibition is curated by a-n Arts Organiser member Benedetta D’Ettorre, who participated in our Northern Ireland Curator Bursaries trip earlier this year and features two artists she met there – Belfast-based Kate O’Neill and Marta Dyczkowska – along with Leeds-based James Thompson.
‘Is This What We Have Left?’ includes film, sculpture and installation that bear the traces of buildings, particularly those used by artists. Dyczkowska’s films record the demolition of her former studio, while Thompson’s work reflects on Leeds’ historic Tetley building, which after 10 years of use as a gallery and cultural space is being redeveloped as a commercial brewery. Thompson spent months capturing the essence of a space in flux through clay pressings, video and sound recordings, rubbings and casts.
Meanwhile O’Neill presents a plaster cast replica of a wooden fireplace and more than 60 porcelain crotchet squares. These objects refer to her grandfather’s wood and textile making skills, which she is now re-discovering and learning.
19 September – 19 December 2024, Hyde Park Art Club, Leeds instagram.com/hydeparkartclub
Jamaica Street Open Studios
Among the 35 artists opening their doors at Bristol’s Jamaica Street Studios are a-n members Jessa Fairbrother, Jess Knights and Dave Bain.
Fairbrother’s hand embroidered photographic work Role Play (Woman with Cushion), which explores infertility and loss, is featured in the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, which continues its UK-wide tour at Millenium Gallery, Sheffield from 24 October 2024.
Bain’s colourful, commercial illustration work includes large-scale mural commissions for hospitals, schools and museums, while Knights creates textural illustrations, often working with brands and organisations in the health, social and environmental sectors.
This Open Studios opening night party is likely to be extra celebratory, after a successful crowdfunder earlier this year, which raised money to help buy the building from its current owners and secure its future as artist studios.
20-22 September 2024, Jamaica Street Studios, Bristol jamaicastreetstudios.co.uk
Chila Kumari Singh Burman: Neon Dreams
Large-scale neon work by a-n member Chila Kumari Singh Burman will illuminate the Holburne Museum’s neoclassical galleries this autumn, mixing images drawn from popular media, history, Hindu-Punjabi festival culture and mythology.
Burman’s largest individual neon work to date will be installed on the building’s façade. The Glowing Canopies (2023) features delicate depictions of trees and bees – chosen for their close and increasingly precarious relationship in the face of climate crisis – in a spectacular explosion of colour.
Meanwhile, visitors to the museum’s Ballroom will find a life-size neon tiger sculpture. Explaining the symbolism of tigers in her work, Burman says: “It is rooted in my childhood memories, as a Bengal tiger figurine was attached to my father’s ice cream van. It has gone on to symbolise my father’s cultural diversity and bravery, as well as the animal’s fierce, resilient and gentle qualities – their ability to survive, despite human intervention, inspires my creative process”.
16 September 2024 – 12 January 2025, Holburne Museum, Bath holburne.org
New Contemporaries
This year’s a-n Degree Shows Guide cover star Varshga Premarasa is among the 35 artists selected for New Contemporaries 2024, along with Sophie Lloyd, who featured in our 2023 Guide.
Premarasa’s narrative paintings explore her Sri Lankan heritage, a culture she mainly knows through her parents’ stories, which make their way into her work in dream-like collages of disparate images. Mixing family histories with film references that reflect the artist’s interest in psychological thrillers and plot twists, paintings like Little Golden Memories weave whimsical visuals with darker subtexts.
Lloyd’s gluttonous sculptures, which are made from sugar and lead to resemble stained glass, depict an array of fairground-like figures – “caricatures based on people I see in media and entertainment,” as she described them in her Degree Shows Guide 2023 interview. “I love the sickly sweetness of sugar,” she explained. “It’s delicious but en masse it’s disgusting. Stained glass lead is a poisonous material. Paired with sugar it becomes mischievous.”
Until 7 December 2024, KARST, The Levinsky Gallery and MIRROR, Plymouth newcontemporaries.org.uk
Permindar Kaur: Nothing is Fixed
Last chance to see a-n member Permindar Kaur’s solo exhibition of sculpture and installation, which explores questions of identity, home and belonging.
‘Nothing is Fixed’ focuses on how aspects of identity intersect, with factors such as society, family and education forming ‘unique combinations of discrimination and privilege.’
In Kaur’s work, material and form often challenge one another. Soft materials and fabrics are inflected with menacing undertones, such as in the series Camouflage (2012-13), in which patterned and patchwork fabric pieces contain hidden figures or creatures, hanging limply but armed with claws, horns and beaks.
Until 7 September 2024, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton jhg.art
Exodus Crooks: We Need 2 Tlk
Midlands-based a-n Artists Council member Exodus Crooks presents a new moving image installation in a former bank vault.
‘We need 2 tlk’ explores how humans talk to one another and how Artificial Intelligence mimics human behaviour. The installation draws on ideas around media and technology as outlined by celebrated Jamaican-British academic and cultural theorist Professor Stuart Hall (1932–2014).
Crooks’ installation focuses on the bodily gestures of everyday mobile phone use and how information is processed between the eye, brain and hands, to consider the ways in which technology mediates the tone and sentiment of our communications.
Until 2 November 2024 at The Exchange, University of Birmingham ikon-gallery.org
Top image: Permindar Kaur, Climbing Patchwork (detail), 2023. Photo: Luke Shears
