Displays that take inspiration from the juxtaposition of art works and objects in the Kettle’s Yard House, will occupy the Alison Richard Building. When Jim Ede created Kettle’s Yard in 1957, he arranged artworks, found objects and furniture in ways that simultaneously responded to, and influenced, the viewer’s movement around the spaces – challenging conventional experiences of viewing art in galleries. These conventions will be further tested by installing artworks and objects from the Kettle’s Yard Collection within the dynamic, multifunctional spaces of the Alison Richard Building.
Curated by Josephine Waugh, 2nd Year Undergraduate Student, History of Art, University of Cambridge
Exploring the Display: Free Talk
A free talk by Josephine Waugh accompanies the exhibition and will take place on the 1st of February at 5pm in the Alison Richard Building.
21 November 2016 – 13 January 2017
Private View Tuesday 22 November 2016, 5.30 – 7.30pm
David Kefford’s sculptures are part of an ongoing project entitled ‘pocket sculptures’. The project involves a process of gathering small items of waste material (ordinary bits and bobs, which other people have discarded) on routine walks. These are then taken back to his studio where they are assembled/modeled/arranged through an intuitive and improvised process – finger exercises.
Kefford’s work often engages, through simple actions and playful gestures, with human-related objects and materials in a particular space and time. Much of it is site-generated, contingent and fragile, which reflects his interest in the awkward and precarious status of his artistic persona and related objects used to stage an event. The sculptural work is mutable, temporal, uses un-monumental materials, and is made in connection with, and to, his own body. He liberates and subverts common objects, materials and found images from the everyday environment and transforms these into new sculptural scenarios that suggest elusive, emotional and psychological narratives.
He is interested in the intersection between the private making process and a public outcome and how these can potentially coalesce through a ‘live(d)’ experience. His practice continually seeks new physical spaces, media space or the space between bodies and events for production and presentation and how they are affected by new spatial conditions. It is the role of improvised play in the act of making sculpture within a social context that best embodies Kefford’s practice – a fluid process of continual becoming, a ‘cause and effect’ of performative actions.
David Kefford (b. 1972) is an artist based in Cambridge UK. He graduated from the MA Fine Art course at the University of Brighton in 1999, is alumni of Wysing Arts Centre and co-founder of artist-led initiative Aid & Abet. Kefford’s work has been extensively exhibited and commissioned in the UK and internationally. He has been the recipient of several prizes and awards and his work is held in a number of private collections.
Felipe Ehrenberg, Latin American Artists and the Beau Geste Press
10 October – 14 November 2016
In Association with Cambridge University Library and Trinity College
Curator: Erica Segre
The Mexican mixed media, conceptual and performance artist Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion co-founded the Beau Geste Press collective in Devon (1970-1976) with English artist and art historian David Mayor. It became one of the most influential avant-garde independent presses of the post-war period and is regarded by art historians and contemporary artists as one of the most significant transnational collaborative projects of the 1970s.
This exhibition showcases a collection of these provocative and original limited editions often made using unconventional materials and ‘arte povera’ techniques of production and distribution in an unusual variety of small-scale formats. It explores the legacy of indiscipline of the BGP’s uniquely communal and discrepant artefacts.
Lala Meredith-Vula is showing a series of photographs that mark her personal journey of rediscovering her roots and her own identity during the past 25years, including the aftermath of war in Bosnia and Kosovo. Lala will also feature works from the blood feud reconciliation movement in Kosova from 1990 – 1991 and the incredible time in the Kosovar history when people decided to bring an end to blood feuds and to stop the killing which lasted for over a hundred years and sometimes until all men of the two involved families were killed. The blood feuds were often influenced by the fifteenth-century canon of Lek Dukagjini, a set of traditional Albanian laws.
Lala Meredith-Vula was born in Sarajevo in 1966, to an Albanian father and English mother, and came to Britain in the 1970s. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London University (1985/88) and was awarded a Yugoslav scholarship at Pristina University, Kosova (1988/90). Her first show was in Damien Hirst’s landmark exhibition “Freeze”, London (1988) that is famous for launching the YBA Young British Artists. She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007) representing Albania, as well as nationally and internationally with many solo shows including at the Photographers’ Gallery London, in Germany, Italy, Albania, and in numerous group shows in the UK, USA, and China.
Both exhibitions run from 11 July – 25 SEPTEMBER 2016
The Private Views for both exhibitions take place on Wednesday 13 July from 5.30 – 7.30PM
PeterHawksby‘s exhibition ‘Personal Space’ is showing works which mark a return to a style he first adopted in late 1960’s, using acrylic paint on watercolour paper, applied with a blade. The works explore the spatial tensions between the illusion of the design and the paper as object. The colour schemes are an intuitive response to the design and evolve as the work progresses until they are in harmony with the structure.
Object Objectbrings together objects, made and found, to reflect the everyday lives of its seven participating women artists. Working in isolation from each other, the women came together to curate the objects, in the expectation that shared concerns and experience would lead to common themes, and it is these that have informed the grouping of objects. The artists have been brought together by Jane Hellings.
On Saturday 10 September Object Object will host a multi-disciplinary symposium; Objectification and Gendered Violence, bringing together frontline workers from Women’s Aid and Cambridge Rape Crisis, with visual artists, performers, poets, filmmakers and musicians to explore the role played by objectification, in the perpetuation of gendered violence. Further details will be available on our website shortly.
Jill Eastland‘swork is research based, usually growing from a social, political or environmental issue. She enjoys collecting things and these collections are often incorporated into her work. Jill is founder of Rebel Arts, presents on Rebel Arts Women’s Radio and organises Eastern Bloco Arts Area at Strawberry Fair.
Jane Hellings often works collaboratively, sometimes with Up t’Arts women artist’s collective and also with Rebel Arts, on acts of creative resistance.From her studio at home, she uses low-tech processes and everyday materials to make work about daily life. She has a first class honours degree in textiles from Bretton Hall, Leeds University and an MA in Print from Cambridge School of Art.
Susie Johnson graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art. From her studio at Cambridge Artworks she creates clever, quirky work in which she explores the taxonomy of shape, the mathematical treatment of movement and the tension between nomothetic and idiographic views of the world.
Alison O’Neill has a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art and an MA in Feminist Theory from Leeds University, where she studied with Griselda Pollock. Her concerns are class, gender and motherhood and her work incorporates drawing, installation and video.
Eirini Kartsaki is teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Eirini writes and devises performances which she shows nationally and internationally and is currently working on a book entitled Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces. She also makes things, primarily, but not exclusively, as performance props.
Jane Waterhouse graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art, she then added to this, a distinction in MA Print. Jane combines traditional techniques with her own innovative processes to make exquisite prints. Her subject matter; daily soundings, wayfaring, belonging, tokens, imbue her work with a poetic quality.
RachelWooller is interested in the power of materiality. She likes to juxtapose materials to create visual metaphors, which explore the structures we are bound by. She is drawn to issues of power, yearning and the intangible.
11 APRIL – 1 JULY 2016
PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 14 APRIL 2016, 6.00 – 8.00PM
Sandra Scott is a Barbadian-born professional artist and teacher who has lived and worked in Cambridge for the past 24 years. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Barbadian National Cultural Foundation NIFCA award. In 1984 she won the prestigious Organisation of America States fellowship to study Art Education at the Edna Manley School of Art, then known as the Jamaica School of Art. Her early work used mixed media and sculpture and was strongly influenced by African art. Her recent works are further inspired by contemporary artists such as Klimt and Hundertwasser.
Scott’s current work combines her own hand dyed fabrics, batiks and prints, which form the basis for her machined stitched pieces. Keen to experiment with new ideas and materials, she has included her own printed papers and embossed foils with some of her fabric pieces. Drawn to the aged face and body, Scott is fascinated by what constitutes ideal beauty in different societies. This theme has been a prominent feature in her work, resulting in highly personal and symbolic expressions, and designed to reveal and bring these issues to the viewers’ attention.
11 APRIL – 1 JULY 2016
PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 14 APRIL 2016, 6.00 – 8.00PM
Beata Zygarlowska’s photographic works explore senses of space created by, and around the human body. Utilising her background in architecture, Beata approaches the scale of the built environment in a free and abstract way. In combining it with the photographic technique of double exposure, she creates images which construct new relationships between an object and its surroundings. Poetic ideas are framed in space and time; the sensuous skin of a woman set against the cold skin of a modernist building, a male figure as the bedrock of a skyscraper or a spinning female dancer in a void. Unfamiliar representations of bodies in space transform our reality into abstract impressions, questioning our experience of what we know, or what we think we know.
Born in Warsaw, Beata studied in Copenhagen at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and at The University of Cambridge. She lives and works in Cambridge and London. For her photographic work, combining architecture and light, she has received several grants and scholarships, among others from the Danish Agency for Culture, the Anglo-Danish Society, the Sophus Fonden by Louis Poulsen Lighting (for her studies on V. Hammershøi), and the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation.
Leaflet Installation
Room 204, Centre of Latin American Studies
Alison Richard Building
24 November – 31 March 2016
This exhibition can be visited by appointment only, please contact Julie Coimbra (jac46@hermes.cam.ac.uk) if you wish to see it.
This installation brings together two poetic, political, and print projects resulting from the recent re-inauguration of La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote in Mexico City. Today transformed into an exhibition space for the archive of anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and a print workshop, La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote was once the editorial office of an iconic satirical magazine from late nineteenth-century Mexico, known for its stand against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1884-1911). Lending continuity to the critical praxis of this much-persecuted publication (whose contributors were often imprisoned and even murdered), today’s La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote has joined the local and international movement of solidarity with the 43 disappeared students from the teacher-training school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” in Iguala, Guerrero. The photographs on display here have been taken by five photojournalists (Italians Giulia Iacolutti and Valentino Bellini, Mexicans Mauricio Palos and Heriberto Paredes, and Canadian Brett Gundlock) who have closely followed the aftermath of the “Iguala events”. To mark a year after the disappearance of the students, these pictures were reproduced, and then exhibited horizontally for people to take copies, at La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote using a modern version of the mimeograph, called the Risograph, that allows cheap mass-scale image reproduction. Alongside these photographs, the poetic and textual works exhibited here have resulted from the decontextualized quotation of some of the writings of the original founders of the magazine El Hijo de Ahuizote. In light of the human rights situation in contemporary Mexico, these texts are likely to have deeply unsettling resonances for today’s publics.
8 FEBRUARY – 1 APRIL 2016
ALL FLOORS OF THE ARB
PRIVATE VIEW 5 FEBRUARY 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 PM
‘Fulcrum’ presents the work of three painters from Cambridge. Their work ranges from the abstract to the figurative, from the gesture to the construct. Together they balance on the tipping point between representation and abstraction. Here we find more or less painterly ways of working, experiments in pictorial possibility that test the image against the abstract potential of the material and history of paint. In bringing the work together in one show we hope to provide an opportunity for viewers to explore this territory with us.
15 January – 1 April 2016, ARB atrium
Private View 5 February 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 pm
Force Majeure, French for a superior or irresistible power, is a term used in the writing of legal contracts, to free both parties from obligation in the face of extraordinary natural events or disasters, from war to hurricanes or earthquakes.
The ceramic work Mella Shaw is showing in this exhibition is concerned with moments of transition, tipping points, thresholds and edges. All the work is painstakingly hand-built from small component parts of colourfully stained porcelain. Shaw exploits porcelain’s material quality of pyroplasticity, where the clay body sags, warps or bends in the kiln when fired at high temperature. She is particularly interested in the moment when clay vitrifies into ceramics, where an object loses its order and momentarily gives way to chaos and chance, in the dark behind the closed doors of a kiln. The resulting forms are reminiscent of otherworldly ruins, caught on the verge of collapse.
Mella is Exhibitions Manager at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, a role she combines with her own practice as an artist/maker, and with teaching and writing about ceramics. In 2013 she graduated with Distinction from the MA Ceramics and Glass, Royal College of Art, London, and was profiled in Crafts magazine, Ceramic Review and Axisweb. Residencies include three months at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, and a year as artist-in-residence and tutor at University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Kaolin Gallery, Stockholm, showing at both London and Milan Design Weeks and by Sarah Myerscough Gallery at STRARTA Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London. Mella exhibited at the British Ceramics Biennial 2015 as one of 11 artists selected to represent the best of contemporary British ceramics in their centrepiece AWARD show. She has recently been featured in Wallpaper* magazine and on BBC news as well as being selected by Culture24 as one of “10 artists you should be collecting now”.
Displays that take inspiration from the juxtaposition of art works and objects in the Kettle’s Yard House, will occupy the Alison Richard Building. When Jim Ede created Kettle’s Yard in 1957, he arranged artworks, found objects and furniture in ways that simultaneously responded to, and influenced, the viewer’s movement around the spaces – challenging conventional experiences of viewing art in galleries. These conventions will be further tested by installing artworks and objects from the Kettle’s Yard Collection within the dynamic, multifunctional spaces of the Alison Richard Building.
