Monday, 9 April 2012

arting about in Norwich


Over bank holiday weekend we managed to sneak a couple of days away in Norwich, while there we checked out a couple of galleries we have been following for a few years now but have never managed to visit in person. First up was Stew Gallery:


Founded over 3 years ago by a group of NSAD Fine Art and Visual Studies graduates, students and lecturers, Stew is a not-for-profit, volunteer-run organisation. The name is derived from the shared ideal of food playing a central role in the space and analogous to the diverse pratices within the building. The earliest board meetings were based around cooking and discussion/decision making.


Stew is meant to be inclusive in the best possible sense. Rents are as low as possible for studios and costs for hiring out the gallery and flexible workspace equally as affordable while being able to maintain the building. As a not-for-profit organisation they reinvest all surplus cash into materials, projects and improvements for the gallery, workspace and studios and of course food funds.
Stew is currently home to a group of thriving, open-plan studio spaces, a bustling hireable gallery space and the first ever publicly accessible screen printing rooms in the city.


On display during our visit was W.E.L.C.O.M.E the first exhibition by a collective who provide  new and innovative space for young upcoming artists to showcase and sell print editions of their work. The exhibition featured new work from Adam Batchelor who created a set of drawings and an accompanying painting, new paintings by Christopher Joyner and Stephen Mellor and a selection of illustrations by Natsuki Otani. There was also a sculptural frame work  dedicated to prints which  included work by Illustrator Joel Benjamin and designer Suzanne Antonelli. 


Next up was Outpost a fantastic artist run space that has been running since 2004. The current exhibition by Paris based artist Morag Keil was an immersive sound installation made up of looping audio recordings, from environmental or textural recordings such as that of a roller-coaster to edited snippets from the computer game Tekken.  As a whole the work was bewildering, as you were assaulted by a wall of confusing sounds, however the individual audio from each speaker was cleverly directed using bowls to channel the sounds into localised areas below each speaker. Strung above the viewer at head height and following the architectural lines of the building, the hanging speaker pods invited you in one at a time to discover their audio content, leading you on a journey with no particular start or end.

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