Between a Hole and a Home

04 Jun 2010 - 18 Jun 2010

Private View Friday 4th June 6pm - 9pm

William Cobbing
David Ferrando Giraut
Nathaniel Dinham
Grant Foster
Alex Crocker
Nathan Birchenough
Savvas Papasavva

This show brings together an exciting selection of work including several site-specific installations and works that have not been displayed in London before. The exhibition was initially conceived as a series of solo shows forced to overlap through the architecture of the exhibition space. The artists taking part in this exhibition share concerns with the technicalities of physical making as well as conceptual intent, exploring the ideas and implications of process, material and structure.

Formal sculptural sensibilities provide the foundation for William Cobbing's work which is manifested in a range of media including video, installation and performance. Cobbing's work is context specific responding both to the environment in which they are made and the environment in which they are displayed. As part of this show Cobbing will be presenting work made during a residency in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Nestled beneath the border of Scotland its' beach lays victim to the violent intensity of the North Sea's epic tides, it's landscape punctuated with the ruins of abandoned defensive architecture, wearing the scars of centuries of conflict where the Scottish border was continually redrawn. "Moon walker 1 & 2", were shot on Berwick beach documenting the artist as he moves through the evocative landscape. This mundane action is made surreal and unnerving as one realises that the artist is erasing his footsteps as he moves. There is a sense of entropic dispersal which Cobbing acknowledges developed from a musing on Robert Smithson's work while on the residency. Re-contextualised within the urban setting of this crumbling warehouse there is a haunting resonance with the evocative landscape and feel of embedded history.

Landscapes and context dominate the work of David Ferrando Giraut. His work Meteorite Fall has its starting point in a fragment of the film Stalker (Andrei Tarkovski, 1979), in which a mysterious event - what seems to be a meteorite fall- is told. The narration of this event in the movie, or better, the gaps in this narration, work as a generator of an action. Like an appendix to the film it reveals the mechanism through which the fiction is created: an excavator builds the hole that will be taken as a meteorite crater, as the territory is dug, the excavator takes away its real condition, turning it into fictional scenery. This attempt to reconcile contemporary mass media infused perception with a personal, even romantic space is a theme that runs throughout David's work. Through a manipulation of the products of the entertainment industry, Giraut proposes alternative uses, narratives and fictions, creating a space for individual creativity and the generation of new subjectivities.

In residence at the gallery for over a month, Nathaniel Dinham immersed himself in the atmosphere of the gallery's loaded architecture. Using expanding foam, one of the most basic of contemporary sculptural building materials, Dinham created an artificial mass, dividing part of the gallery uncomfortably in two, blocking and removing doorways. Using excavation as an artistic action he has carved out a passage way almost as attempt to undo his previous action while simultaneously creating a new space.

Shifting away from the vast and overarching architecture of the gallery space, Grant Foster and Alex Crocker have built a set in which to stage their work, considering it a show within a show they have titled, "A head is a home, a trophy's made from bone". Crocker's small-scale paintings feature couples or twins inhabiting rooms and shelters. Through the flattening of the picture plane and an economical application of paint they evoke a sense of simple bliss and daydreams. Foster's sculptures use figurines commonly associated with the sweet ideal of the home. These found objects are subverted into trophies of failure, wearing crusts of paint furiously scraped back from unsuccessful paintings.

The works are situated within a simple house-like structure, a symbol of the home. Both artists share the desire to make work that is difficult to place in an attempt to achieve a sense of timelessness or the half remembered, their approaches contrast with flights of the imagination offset against the visceral and bodily. A cycle occurs, lifting off and grounding, dreaming and waking.

Rhythmically rotating in the cavernous bus garage is Nathan Birchenough's Big Wheel, it's interdependent components working together in synchronisation, rotating and oscillating. Big Wheel; like Birchenough's many works, employs an aesthetic based on practical and technical decisions, in a way a pragmatic aesthetic in which he utilises the simplest design and least material required in order to achieve a goal. At first glance, and in keeping with the pragmatism that perpetuates Birchenough's practice his goal is to achieve a function, mimicking the machines and technology that inspires him, however Birchenough employs these motifs as a means to investigate the emotional motivation behind science and engineering, and the psychological dimension of machines.

Birchenough works is often conceived and built through dialogue and with support from his artistic collaborators Savvas Papasavva and Craig Kao. In addition to the big wheel, supporting material and documentation of their research will be presented as an acknowledgement of and introduction to their collaborative and yet distinct working processes.

A film by Savvas Papasavva both documents their trip to a steam fair as well as showcasing Papasavva's own practice and pre-occupation with the mechanics of film making. Additionally Papasavva assisted Birchenough in the design and fabrication of the Big Wheel, illustrated with the maquette that he lays claim to. Papasavva referred to his role in the fabrication of the wheel as a technician. This is not to validate the artist - technician role but to acknowledge their belief that for them there is no real difference between the artist, technician, designer, journalist or engineer. Explaining that "we see all theses roles as equal and interchangeable. The pragmatic aesthetic is similar to a craft aesthetic, and I believe that engineering craft skill is incredibly important, but at this moment in this country it is often undervalued". So much so that Papasavva is keen to reveal that the maquette of the wheel was built after the original so even our assumption of the function of the maquette as being a preliminary tool ceases to the case.

Following these ideals it comes as no surprise that Nathan Birchenough, Savvas Papasavva and Craig Kao all admire the politics and legacy of Fred Dibnah, a steam engine expert who kept the industrial traditions of the past alive. His illegal mine building and preoccupation with physical and tangible labour echoes with the laborious tunneling Nathan Dinham has enacted within the microcosm of the gallery.

This exhibition is curated by Julia Crabtree and William Evans who saw this as a opportunity to bring together a group of artists who work shared similar concerns with their own.

Exhibtion continues until 20th June 2010, open Wednesday - Sunday 12 - 6pm

Invitation image: Untitled (Presumably a meteorite fell down here about twenty years ago...), 2007, David Ferrando Giraut

Images from Between a Hole and a Home

Mouse over the images to see all available thumbnails