On the radar is a page dedicated to those artists that have been filling up the pages of our notebooks over the last few years. Over the coming weeks and months we will begin to divulge this information...
David Fletcher
Fletcher studied Fine Art (Painting) at Winchester School of Art and went on to complete his MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. He lives and works in London.
 | |||
| Statue, 2011, oil on canvas 25x35cm |
"I attempt to approach my work in a simple and pedestrian manner. The iconography of the everyday is a key feature in my work; the importance of the everyday in my paintings is the importance for me of not looking to hard, of finding this material at my fingertips as it is presented to me. A simple metaphor is found amongst the tableaux of the everyday and this forms the core of the prospective painting. The metaphors that I use are very much a part of language. They can be literalised, even clichéd. They can perhaps be seen as readymade metaphors. The Metaphors (or contrasts, or comparisons) often attempt to refer to large or universal themes. While these could be said to have evolved out of a long standing impulse to locate aspects of the Romantic in common place, they also give the painting, in a literal way, a sense of direction, of meaning. These potential metaphors – as they are chanced upon in the everyday – are often constructed from elements that can be seen to refer directly to the medium of painting; dark butting against light, complementary colours sparking off each other, the colourless, the colourful. Through a process of painting which is simple, which adheres to some kind of logical scheme, and which is reductive; structuring the painting around the enhancement of a very specific aspect of the image, the painting takes on the feel of certain painters from the history of Modernist figuration. This is not something that from the beginning I set out to do, but as time has gone on, it has seemed fitting for me not to resist this, and while I don’t intend to parody any of these artists, I will allow myself in some ways to allow there works to seep into my own. "
"I am interested in the way an artist such as Duchamp comes back again and again to an eccentric and personal expressive language. Focusing on a discourse that is perceived to be universal in order to satisfy his unobtainable ideals of achieving some kind of objectivity, and constructing his works using mechanical means and an inevitably idiosyncratic logic. Or the artist who makes work that evokes the occult, or magic or some other system of thought that theatrically attempts to escape the subjective. These artists for me can potentially produce the most amazing hybrids of ideas, failures; follies to objectivity. In the absence of ever being able to achieve the objective, and yet compelled to do this evermore by the fragmented nature of the contemporary, some artists seem to give a meaningful nod to the fictionally objective, and this has a sad poetry to it that I find I want to engage with. "
Neil Clements
Clements (b. Northern Ireland, 1982) studied at Glasgow School of Art, where he completed a Research in Creative Practices MA. He lives and works in Glasgow.
'58, 2010
'Conceptual and formal references to post-war American art and culture, art history and critical theory inform the work of Neil Clements, but ultimately it is the viewer’s relation to the work that completes it – the subjective encounter in a particular context.'
Tine Bech.
Tine Bech is a visual artist and researcher who work with interactive installations and public art. She was born in Denmark and now lives and works in London, UK.
Interactive Sound Installation
Bech's practice is concerned with creating engagement using interactions and play. The artwork is intentionally accessible through the use of location and materials and often ‘hums and reacts with a playful anthropomorphic life that is liable to take you by surprise. Projects have centred on the use of interactive electronics and location tracking technology, urban spaces and environmental elements such as gravity, water, sound and light to develop spaces where participations, play, and experiences of immersion take place.
Fiona Curran.
Surplus to requirements, 2010
Mixed media
Mixed media
The subject matter and motifs in Fiona Curran's work reflect an interest in the continuing representation of landscape as 'ideal', its roots in the Romantic traditions of the 18th and 19th Centuries and close historical relationship to formal abstraction. Using found images from a growing archive of historical prints, photographs and postcards that the artist is collecting, Curran's works reference real spaces and sites with a tangible sense of place alongside more formal, abstract works that engage with unseen but 'sensed' geographies.
Intervals To Which I Would Migrate, 2010
Mixed Media
Mixed Media
The works reveal a recurring Utopian impulse, formal idealism and sense of escapism that re-registers in a palette borrowed from the computer screen and advertising. There’s an embrace of optimism and hope in the seductive candy colours alongside a subtle sense of unease in the overblown fluorescents and darker undertones. Splinters of the natural world appear in the use of wooden veneers and formal compositions explore how angles contend with and counterbalance one another in shifting spatial planes. Images are overlaid and cut away to reveal void spaces that remain empty or are filled by fields of intense colour or glimpses of scenery. The titles of the works often give a further clue to their origin in this push-pull between fragmentation and ambiguity, loss and longing where all is not quite as it should be in the bright and beautiful image-world we inhabit.
