The Lloyd Gill Gallery

Press Release for September 2009

‘Identity - Anonymity’ curated by Antria Pelekanou

Preview 26th September

Exhibition start 29th September end 23rd October

Open Tuesday – Saturday 10am – 4.30pm

The Lloyd Gill Gallery, Lee House 13 Beaconsfield road, Weston-super-Mare Somerset BS23 1YE
www.thelloydgillgallery.com
enquiries@thelloydgillgallery.com
44 01934 623449

“Identity – Anonymity” is the new upcoming group exhibition at the Lloyd Gill Gallery. This exhibition is a showcase of selected artists in contemporary painting. The exhibition will commence in September 2009. The gallery enrolled a new intern and part of the training process is to demonstrate curating abilities through the guidance of the director. Antria Pelekanou has curated this exhibition to a high standard. Antria recently graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the University of the West of England Bristol.
Antria has written a short essay which can be viewed on the gallery website under future shows and clicking the essay pdf link. The essay remarks on other established artists who have developed their work to illuminate the theme of identity.
This exhibition at the Lloyd Gill gallery will showcase artists who demonstrate how the theme of identity can become fluid in translation by alternative means.
Participating artists

Hayley Ditchburn

Hayley is a recent Fine Art graduate from Falmouth University.
Hayley has always been attracted to the medium of paint. Hayley liked the physical aspect of building the image: choosing the right colours, mixing the paint and applying it to the canvas. In this sense the process is important to her with focus on underpainting, layering and creating texture. Watching something simple and nondescript develop into the final image is immensely pleasurable.
Hayley likes the human aspect of painting people. No two people are the same and this is mirrored in her paintings and their imperfect surfaces; it seems like a two-way commentary about human nature. Hayley paints nudes as She feels it adds another dimension to the figure and allows her to explore the idea of sexuality openly.
To Hayley, the subject of sexuality is both timeless and modern. Female sexuality is a wide subject and her paintings attempt to approach it by exploring the ways each gender views female sexuality. We live in a culture where we’re bombarded by sexual images in the media daily; sometimes to sell us something, sometimes to titillate. Hayley is exploring the idea of voyeurism with reference to the big brother phenomenon. However, the voyeuristic aspect of the work also confirms their sensuality.
The images She create are very personal, her ideas are undoubtedly shaped by her life and experiences, this is why Hayley has chosen to use herself as a model. As a young woman in modern society her views on sexuality and femininity contrast greatly with those of older generations, and with a male perspective: as a by-product, her paintings sometimes appear to provoke debate.

Hayley Ditchburn, Triple Focus, Naturally Flawed, Oil on Canvas, 90 x 60 cm, 2009

Adam Drouet

Adam is a recent graduate in Fine Art from Falmouth University.
As a painter Adam is preoccupied with the figure located in the landscape and other real or imagined spaces. His work is concerned with how we perceive our environment, and are in turn perceived by others within it.

Adams most recent series of paintings, inspired by the life and works of Paul Gauguin, explores his physical, mental and artistic search for a primitive paradise and an understanding of an instinctive human condition. The title of his most famous painting – Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? – asks fundamental questions about human nature and identity which every generation seeks to answer. Gauguin’s quest ultimately led to despair and death. Are our chances of finding ourselves in paradise in the modern world any better?

These paintings deal with many ideas, such as whether paradise is a physical place we must travel to, or a personal identity and state which we create for ourselves wherever we are. Migration, religion, environmental issues, technology, virtual worlds, alter-egos and avatars, money, sex and culture all come into play.

Developing Gauguin’s visual language of symbolism, I borrow some of his symbols directly, alter others and invent new visual metaphors and allusions. An eclectic range of source images are used to create the paintings. While conveying a coherent theme, the paintings remain ambiguous, discomfiting and mysterious, and can be read in many ways by the viewer. I love these qualities in Gauguin’s work. An element of humour and playfulness is also injected into the subjects.

Paint is applied in a variety of ways and figurative details may be more or less tightly resolved; colour and composition are important elements, and the images maintain a constant tension between flatness and depth, dream and reality.

Adam Drouet, Coming of Age, Oil on canvas, 100 x 120cm, 2009.

Jane Price
Following a foundation course at East Warwickshire College Jane studied Furniture and Product design at Kingston University.
For fifteen years, Jane worked as a designer with Geoff Hollington Associates specialising in colour, materials and finishes on a range of furniture and product briefs ranging from Herman Miller to Parker Pens and Kodak. In 2004, Jane became a full time artist, working from Great Western Studios in London before establishing my own in studio Chiswick in 2007.The start point for all my work is the colour and texture observed in architectural forms from around the world.As Jane works on developing the original thought the painting will frequently evolve into something far removed from where it began, often reflecting little of the original start point.
Jane’s desire is to make marks and create textures through the use of different media. There is a certain degree of ‘Black Magic’ in this experimentation that aids the abstract element within the paintings and this process is what excites her. The layering, working and reworking of the canvas surface is important in the same way that many of the source forms, such as walls or doors, are painted, chipped, damaged, scuffed and scratched many times over between periodic repairs and repainting. Jane is fascinated by the ever-present thought that something is always hidden beneath the layers!

Jane Price, It’s all about the process, Acrylic & mixed media, 120cm x 80cm, 2009

Rachel Whittaker

Rachel recently graduated from Falmouth University with a BA Hons in Fine Art. Rachel paintings are developed from her interest in everyday, amateur photography. Rachel has been using found negatives and photographs from her own family collection. Rachel illuminated the negatives herself using a small light box and then re-photographed them.
Rachel has been investigating how her attention or focus shifts from when Rachel take photographs, to when Rachel looks at them again some time later, with a view to painting from them. Cameras automatically capture general, rather than specific subject matter. Additional visual information is often recorded beyond the particular element the photographer focuses on. The negative photographs are interesting in another way because Rachel does not know the intentions of the photographer and Rachel has no way of finding them out. Rachel has been exploring these responses through the medium of paint.
Rachel is interested in looking at how the image emerges and is built up on the surface as She translates the photographic sources into paintings. Rachel has been experimental with a variety of painting techniques, such as glazing, underpainting and the removal of layers. Rachel has also explored the intensity of colour and the figure/ground relationship.

Rachel Whittaker, Vest, Acrylic on board, 29.5cm x 21cm, 2009

Joan Kelly

Joan Kelly has been living in Singapore for over three years, teaching a practice based curriculum in Foundation studies as well as advanced painting and drawing classes at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art Design and Media. While in the USA she worked on several 1% for Art painting commissions, and founded an art studio for adults with disabilities. This studio is still successful today.
Her introduction to Asia began in 1986 when she traveled to Indonesia carrying the pictures, letters and money from Indonesia foreign workers in New York to their families on Java. Presently, this thread has continued through her portraits of Singaporeans on the fringes of society. She has painted prostitutes, foreign workers, and maids. The paintings are pictures of real people as well as “sociological memoirs” with references to her observations and her own life infused in the story. Sexuality, sensual pleasures, miscommunication, and power struggles all come to the forefront when engaged in Joan’s work.
NYC Art Critic, Barbara Grossman writes,” This series of paintings is holding up to the viewer and to the Western artist herself, the plight of most of the people in the world. The research, which entails spending time with her models in their environment and being able to communicate her interest, is unique; to be completely in the world of those who she paints, Joan pays them a fair wage. As an artist she is empathetic with a person’s decisions and fate.”

portraits Joan has been doing work in a brothels in Kolkata India and the red light districts in Singapore and Shenzhen, China.Here is a brief description of my work with cultural theorist Dr. Bhaskar Mukhopadaya of Goldsmiths College “Today, the wheel has come in full circle, artists are asking, once again, with Nicholas Bourriaud, whether through art, “it [is] still possible to generate relationships with the world,” circumventing the trap of ‘representation’. Our research will be situated in the direction of what Bourriaud calls ‘relational aesthetics’ - an aesthetic that seeks to relatewith society and the world. Our research is an investigation into the communicative dynamics of painting: the purpose is not simply to paint a face but to generate an encounter. The enterprise is more ethnographic than mimetic. Thus, in this conceptualization, portraiture becomes a form of ‘conceptual art’.” We seek to engage with marginal communities – sex-workers, immigrant workers. The point is to reclaim this group from social oblivion: to give each of them a ‘face’. The result will be a reinforcement of sociality. The research will be carried out by Artist Joan Kelly and cultural theorist, Dr. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay through collaborative methodologies (combining the creation of the artifact with the sociological and cultural analysis of the interaction of the artist and the immediate milieu of the subject). The study will be conducted among marginalized groups in Singapore, South East Asia, Asia including India and China. The outcome of the project will be a series of exhibitions comprising visual works, written texts and oral presentations. Further, a series of scholarly essays along with the visual works will be published in refereed international journals and a limited-edition monograph will be circulated among professionals for peer review. The project will mark out Singapore as a significant site for innovative art-activism and NTU will gain recognition by hosting this cutting edge research.

Joan Kelly, Shi,ism 7, Oil on canvas, 35cm x 26cm, Dec. 2007.

Tim Banks

Tim Is a recent graduate from the University of Wales Newport with a BA (hons) Documentary Photography, 2009.
Tim’s practice is fluid within the photographic medium and is lead by many influences. The majority of Tim’s influences, are underpinned by interests in social and landscape identity. Wither it is landscape or portrait based Tim tries to push the documentary base of my images to encompass new conceptual and aesthetic aspirations suitable to my subjects.
The series Human Bodies is a set of photographic portraits that combine reverse nudes and layers of human cells.
The portraits explore notions and perception of human identity, by breaking the conventions of photographic portraiture and offering up alternatives visions of the human self. It is not the conventional notion of individual identity that is generally associated with portraiture, but a vision that suggests a collective human identity as organisms made up of flesh and blood. They combine desexualised and (what could be termed) ‘non-portraits’ in an abstracted vision of the body. The images reference and manipulate the photographic relationship to science, by merging and distortion of these combined elements.
Identity and new ways of considering our self-image and knowledge of our own identity sit at the base of this project.

Tim Banks, Lymph node and thymus, digital archival prints in black box frames, 60cm by 20cm, editions of 10, 2009

Babette Martini

           Babette completed her studies for a PhD during 2003 - 2007 PhD, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Her work was recently shown at Der Menschliche Körper - Metamorphosen, Fraunhofer Institut UMSICHT, Oberhausen , Germany (solo exhibition), 2009.
           Babette recently shown as a group show where she studied at Howard Gardens, UWIC, in the show It Wouldn't Be Worth It Without The Struggle, Howard Gardens Gallery, UWIC, Cardiff, curated by Neil Jeffries.

           Babette's work is concerned with the expression of emotional and bodily states and the shifts in the bodily boundaries of inside and outside through material changes and the resultant metamorphoses in the artwork. Thus the behaviour of the material and the associations it evokes are central to Babette's practice. Expression in Babette's work is generated by material changes and not by the narrative of gestures or what is traditionally understood as contrapposto. In this way, the artistic process itself, its impetus and the unforeseen (event) become essential to her artwork and their act as a means of are felt as a form of communication between Artist and the medium. Babette considers the expressive force of the artwork in its various stages of making to be equally as valid as the 'finished' piece. Thus the artistic work becomes for Babette, both the result and the carrier of a series of transformations. In her work, Babette investigates the means by which the immanent authenticity of the artistic process and the expressive force of the medium are made visible and are integrated into the artwork as a whole.

            Babette's current work examines facial expressions. On the one hand, they are to be understood as a reflection of inner feelings, the face being read as a text. On the other hand, expression itself becomes the mask we present to the external world. By combining materials which are traditionally employed to make images of the human figure, Babette's practice examines the expressive potential of each medium and how it inter-relates with other media.

Babette Martini Twelve Heads, Wax, fabric, liquid clay, steel sheets, heads: life size casts, 90 x 152 cm, 2009.

Sophie Derrick
            Sophie completed her degree in B.A (Hons) Fine Art (2:1) during 2005 - 2008 at the University of Leeds. During the Summer of 2005, Sophie took a gap year and worked at a voluntary work placement which involved conserving the turtle population in Mexico and teaching English. In 9th March 2009, Sophie Derrick was shortlisted for ‘The best of the UK’ Exhibition, SaLon gallery London.Headhunted for this exhibition of the best graduates in the UK, sourced by the gallery who searched through the degree shows for artists. Shortlisted to the final 20 selected from 2000.

            Sophie is a recent graduate of the Fine Art course at Leeds University. Through this education Sophie has developed her Fine Art practice, which now incorporates the two mediums of painting and photography. Sophie has a great interest in the materiality and substance of paint, and execute this interest through photography, creating a juxtaposition of the two mediums. Sophie photograph the act of painting on to my skin and sometimes paint on top of the photographs, creating a layering of image of paint and painted image.
           Her body becomes the canvas for the paint, questioning the traditional concept of painting and portraiture, and the barriers between painting and photography. The body becomes both object and subject in the work

Sophie Derrick Auerbach to the Future No. 1, photograph of oils on skin, mounted on mdf, width 51 cm, height 75cm, 2008

Antria Pelekanou
Assistant Curator

Artist submissions

The Gallery curators are seeking for Artists whose work focuses on contemporary issues such as place, identity, landscape, gender, or language. If your work fits the criteria please email a submission of up to 12 jpegs, cv, statement and work list to the gallery email address below.