28 August - 3 September, 2019
Katrin Hanusch, Georgina Sleap, Lucy Tomlins, Àngels Miralda
Photographs courtesy of Pangaea Sculpture Centre, Stephanie de Leng, and the artists
Museu Etnològic
Carrer del Pintor Joan Ripollés
La Vall d'Alba, Castelló
Spain
From 28 August to 3
September the exhibition space of the Ethnographic Museum will be used by three
invited artists and one curator in residence to build up an exhibition. Themes
that connect the three artistic practices include the social nature of
sculpture, slow by design, and life cycles. During the build-up, we invite
everyone to join us and see the process of creating artworks on site and
setting up an exhibition. After the official opening on the 31st, the
exhibition will remain open until the 3rd of September.
In the context of the
Ethnographic Museum of Vall d’Alba which houses traditional tools used in
agriculture and the home, the artists exhibit new considerations of our
contemporary relationship with material. The museum which is rarely open to the
public, gives a unique opportunity to see the collection of objects housed in
the exhibition halls. They create a historical backdrop of how people have used
materials and artistic techniques in dialogue with production and the landscape
for centuries. From the local tradition of ceramics, to the design of wooden
chests and an exemplar of a loom that was used in the area, the exhibition
develops in the presence of objects that attest to a sculptural and artistic
tradition of the region. The exhibition developed here in Vall d’Alba will evolve
and iterate to a new location in the form of an exhibition next February in a
local market in Huddersfield, UK.
An artist’s residency
can have multiple purposes, among them, to give artists a new setting to
research and test existing and developing projects, to inform about a new
context in regard to its history, culture and different localities, and to meet
new audiences. In Vall d’Alba, the artists offer to bring a new perspective
into the town, to investigate local phenomenon and create artworks that respond
to the regional context. This project has been organised by Pangaea Sculptors’
Centre - an initiative started in London to support, nurture and develop
artists working with sculpture through mentoring, fabrication, education,
commissioning opportunities and public events. In partnership with town halls
of Vall d’Alba and Atzeneta del Maestrat, the residency will take place during
the Vall d’Alba August festival.
Katrin Hanusch addresses the materiality of sculpture in site-responsive
productions that intend to capture potential and unused energies within
materials. Working with various mediums that reveal divides between the visible
and invisible/present and absent, the materials derive from specific sites and
allude to poetics, humour, and spirituality.
Hanusch
has collected now-defunct LED laptop screens from computer repair shops around
London and stripped them to their bare essentials. Disconnected from their
function of computer processing visualisation, they become a raw material that
fuses light and optics. These panels will be modified and connected to a
solar-powered portable battery and be carried and worn together as crafted
garments in public contexts. This meshing of everyday devices and clothing
comments on utility and function as much as the long parallel trajectory of
sculpture and technology. Much of what we see and experience today is through
screens on our portable devices. This “immaterial” image is therefore turned
around into artist’s materials in order to enhance its proximity to the human
body. In their second-life as an outfit, the screens enact the prosthetic
function of devices but this time with their own agency. As it moves around,
the screens catch and reflect sunlight through their material properties. The
work itself becomes site-responsive, catching rays of light and dispersing them
through the landscape.
Other
sculptural productions will be produced with local natural and discarded
materials found in the environment of Vall d'Alba. A collection of found sticks
lies somewhere in the space, part of it has transformed into the clothes hanger
that displays Hanusch’s work in progress, chosen for its ideal natural shape
fitting to the size of the human body. These gnarled organic formations appear
strange, but connect to objects such as natural forked branches which were
traditionally used in agriculture like tools visible on the first floor of the
museum. These found parts as well as the ephemeral or performative nature of
the garment combine notions of value with the essence of time - that art can be
a fleeting moment of the meeting of materials and elements that combine and
disintegrate in endless cycles.
Georgina Sleap has developed a body of work at Fayoum Art
Center, in an Egyptian village called Tunis. Egypt's consistently hot dry
climate is allowing her to make a series of paper mâché sculptures over many months.
The many hours spent building up each sculpture with gluey scraps are
punctuated by embraces, attentively working towards the point when her hugging
arms are filled to capacity. The elaborate contours of the forms that emerge
would have been impossible to predict.
The
dimensions of the pieces respond to the length and reach of the artist’s arms
and fingers. The limbs and shapes of human organs and the negative space that
they create constantly influence and shape the production of things even when we
think of the large ceramic vases for water-collection within the museum. Sleap
is investigating a matrix to extract new reactive shapes that emerge not with
any specific use or purpose, but purely from this formal relation between the
body and materiality.
The
sculptures have gradually been influenced by the local cultural and climatic
conditions in Egypt. Ancient ceramic methods still practised in the nearby
Egyptian village of Nazla have helped develop methods, while the sun bleaches
the sculptures a desert yellow. In this sense, slow-by-design is a recognition
of time as a crucial ingredient in the production of sculpture. In Vall d’Alba,
Sleap is showing not only the papier
mâché works, but also a new project
which has emerged from it.
Like
ceramics, textiles are a craft that follow human civilisation across continents
and centuries. Studying the textiles of nomadic communities led Sleap to the
idea of making a portable, or “backstrap” loom. She adapted the design used by
Guatemalan women - a simple wood construction with cotton threads held in
tension by her backward-leaning body. However, the method she’s using evolved
from what she learnt from weavers in Egypt. In the ethnographic museum of Vall
d’Alba, a loom typical of the town in the recent past is found on the second
floor. The development and technology of weaving changed Valencian society –
increasing industrialisation changed the economic structure and led to
demographic shifts from the country to urban centres.
Adapting
methods gleaned from repeat Youtube binges and afternoons of hours spent
sitting between weavers, textile’s universal application in human societies
attests to its societal function and creative potential. Over these months of close entanglement with
the weaving and the sculptures, Sleap is lifting, pulling, and knotting little
bits of matter to create objects that are decided by her bodily geometry.
Lucy Tomlins works
with everyday materials and the re-making of common objects. Historical and
monumental sculpture relies on the reproduction of objects, Tomlins consciously
uses the process of mimesis to question why certain objects need to be copied.
When placed in new locations and contexts, these familiar forms change their
symbolism and meaning.
Tomlins’ newest project involves experimentation
with the direct casting of an olive tree and reinvents our connection to this
locally ubiquitous being. Vall d’Alba is surrounded by fields of olive trees
which are an essential part of the agricultural economy. While they are a familiar
visual reference in the town, to the British artist they are more a symbol of
something mythological or exotic. In an initial stage, Tomlins prepared the
bark of a tree to create a sculptural cast. Using silicone, the form was pushed
into the material and removed from the tree. This imprint captures the
roughness and texture of the bark in a gelatinous and moving substance that
begins to look more animal than vegetable.
The tree becomes a
hide-like object and produces an uncanny form in this material transformation.
This silicone is paired with a stone and metallic structure whose process takes
methods from construction, concrete casting, and the production of decorative
floors. Arranged on scaffolding above the blue concrete, the structure creates
a dialogue between baroque forms, a closed composition of movement and
interaction, and dialogue between the organic and synthetic. The two materials
(silicone cast and concrete steps) try to imitate natural materials (olive tree
and sedimentary rock) but their process of production is man-made elaboration.
This asserts that these materials have an inherent value that legitimates their
reproduction and relates sculptural thinking to the industrial.
Like Sleap’s project
dealing with weaving, the tactile knowledge of an object is significant for the
development of our minds and lifestyle of interaction with materials. If
normally this knowledge comes from working the land or in this case,
replicating a tree’s bole, maybe sculpture is a useful thought process in order
to keep contact and conviviality with our environment. The work is an output of
juxtapositions that signals a material shift between the hard, rough, living
matter, and the pink, soft, sinuous texture of the rubber with characteristic
dents of bark permeating through.
The fibreglass cocoon of
the tree is found in the outer courtyard. This beige object is called an “outer
jacket” and normally acts as a brace or exoskeleton for the silicone
reproduction. In this case, it is displayed as a fallen form that recalls
another agricultural theme. The open composition returns us to the pastoral tradition
exemplified in the “horn of plenty” mythologised in art history as cornucopia –
a conical form filled with the goods of harvest. Transmogrified into a semi-abstract
form, it appears as a symbol of bountifulness and abundance whilst the original
trees’ olives mature for picking.