AUDIOSCOPE
Saturday 19th May (7.30 - 10.30pm)
The Old Boot Factory, 102-104 St Mary's Road, Oxford, OX4 1QD
AUDIOSCOPE Annual Oxford music festival. AUDIOSCOPE has teamed up with Launch Collaborative to present a ‘quiet’ show in The Old Boot Factory as part of The Natural Course of Things. All proceeds from the show will go directly to national homelessness and bad housing charity Shelter, for whom Audioscope have raised more than £23,000 since 2001. Oxfordshire Artweeks sponsor, Zip Cars, will provide lifts home to the people who have travelled the furthest to attend the show. Line up: The Scholars, Rome Pays Off, Richard Walters, Phil McMinn. Tickets will be on sale from Thursday 5th April for just £5 fromwww.wegottickets.com/audioscope.
Exhibition Preview
Friday 11th May (6.30 - 8.30pm)
The Old Boot Factory, 102-104 St Mary's Road, Oxford, OX4 1QD
Come and join artists Sarah Mayhew and Joseph Fairweather Hole (Jon Barker will be there in spirit - he's not dead, just abroad!) at the preview of their exhibition, The Natural Course of Things. Entry is free and drinks will be available at the bar.
Oxfordshire Artweeks in East Oxford - Launch Party
Tuesday 8th May (6 - 9pm)
The Old Boot Factory, 102-104 St Mary's Road, Oxford, OX4 1QD
View artists' work, browse portfolios & have a drink or two at the launch party of Oxfordshire Artweeks in East Oxford. This is a free event and networking night that will present the opportunity to meet artists exhibiting in East Oxford as part of Oxfordshire Artweeks (there's over 20 in total)... and have a few drinks!
Natural Course of Things
Jon Barker
Joseph Fairweather
Sarah Mayhew
12 - 20 May. 12 - 6pm
The Old Boot Factory, 102-104 St Mary's Road, Oxford, OX4 1QD
The Natural Course of Things is a set of three stand-alone installations created by three independent artists, and takes its’ name from Sarah Mayhew’s immersive installation that, not unlike Jon Barker’s or Joseph Fairweather Hole’s work, explores the psychology of space through subconscious languages and landmarks
Sarah Mayhew studied Fine Art, and later Spatial Design; she has worked as a curator, and continues to work in cultural event production and promotion, and also as an art critic. Through her creative practice Mayhew explores ideas concerning the personalised nature of decision making, of pathways in art and life, and the way that one’s environment can dictate direction. Frequently drawing on adages or aphorisms when entitling her works she reinforces the sense of familiarity, or lack of, between viewer and experience. Captivated by the idea that our own personal histories have built up idiosyncratic languages that are generally only known to us on a subconscious level, Mayhew invites the viewer to navigate unknown waters. Landmarks are placed in front of the viewer that enable them to charter their journey as they so wish, dependent upon their ability to read the language of the landmarks, and their confidence in taking on such a journey.
Jon Barker is a Lighting Designer who works mostly with rock and roll bands touring at an international level. For the animation festival ANIMATE Kingston 2012 Barker was commissioned to create an installation that explores the relationship between people and the space around them through the use of interactive sound, lighting and video projections. For The Natural Course of Things Barker will transform an area at the rear of The Old Boot Factory into an interactive visual and sonic experience in which viewers can immerse themselves.
Splitting his time between London and Oxford Joseph Fairweather Hole is a Scenographer, Illustrator and Artist. Installed in an unassuming side-room that forms part of The Old Boot Factory, Chimney is an imposing monolithic concrete structure that marks and commands physical space, whilst the movement of light within it depicts the passage of time. Chimney draws its reference from similarly shaped structures that have stood throughout history, and continue to stand, to mark ritual or symbols across civilizations, like a standing stone, lighthouse, or chimney.
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.
Great little collection on show at the Museum of the History of Science, Perspective: an English View. A rare opportunity to see a selection of 18th and 19th Century English instruments for drawing in perspective. The exhibition includes a portable drawing machine by James Watt (see image).
The James Watt device was mounted on three legs, and consisted of a box which opened out to form a flat surface, with an adjustable arm holding an eye-piece.
Jointed parallel rulers mounted beneath the board held both a brass point and a pencil, used to trace and sketch the object to be reproduced. The whole device could all be folded up.
The exhibition also includes a copy of Thomas Malton's A compleat treatise on perspective... who's frontis piece displays a fascinatingly surreal engraving of eighteenth century gents wandering around large dodecagon objects.
I finally got the chance to go and see the fantastic collection of works on paper by Graham Sutherland at Modern Art Oxford. Among these rarely seen watercolour and ink studies are some stunning small topographical images.
Curated by 2011 Turner Prize nominee, George Shaw, An Unfinished World is a reflective exploration of the lesser-known work of one of the most compelling artists of his generation.
The exhibition concentrates on Sutherland’s early Welsh landscapes from the 1930s, works created during his time as official WWII war artist, and after his return to Pembrokeshire in the 1970s.
Far from traditional studies of landscape and environment, these works not only depict but also exude a world that is as dark as it is magical, as elusive as it is recognisable. Strangely bereft of human life, the works navigate the real and imagined; where country lanes loop into each other, horizon lines fold into foregrounds, and nothing is as it seems.
George Shaw presents these works through the lens of a contemporary painter, describing them as ‘a lament to the passing and changing landscape, a monument to the earth itself’. He adds, ‘the exhibition shows us Sutherland as an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him – a world forever unfinished’.
An Unfinished World brings together for the first time over eighty rarely seen works on paper from public and private collections across the UK.
