RICHARD DUCKER

Richard Ducker covers every-day objects in concrete. Narratives are set up through the introduction of found materials within the work, and the way the work is presented. As personal associations are projected onto these standardised, mass- produced objects, they became alive, as sites of symbolic exchange. Out of this representation of obsolescence and nostalgia, he uses the language of the monumental to create artworks where memory and the present collide. The works coalesces around certain themes of loss and a domestic disquiet. There is often a sense of displacement, narratives are either imagined or remembered, and the body remains an absent presence.

MATT FRANKS

“The intensification of common dumb cartoon imagery is at the heart of Matt Frank’s sculptures. Taking conventional reduced two dimensional renderings of images such as skulls, nuclear bomb explosions, swirls and vortexes, Franks solidifies these graphic simplifications into three dimensional forms in ludicrously bright acidic or pastel colours. Composited into intricate near baroque, comical and outlandish objects, Franks’ sculptures don’t seems to be depictions of either straightforwardly inanimate things nor of creatures in their own right. Rather they seem to be bodies that lie somewhere between the two, hybrids with their own mysterious exuberance.”  Copyright Suhail Malik 2004

courtesy Houldsworth Gallery

CLARE GASSON

Clare Gasson `looks to cinematic space and experience, though concentrating on sound, and the imagination of the audience – looking to the atmospheric and sensate. The work is often presented via sound systems. This may take the form of a CD for CD walkmans, or the sound may come out of a monumental sculpture/speakers. She is interested in questioning the authority of the medium. The work is disseminated through different media – often too these are repeated, for example the narration on the limited edition CD is also to be shown as a script in a journal.



STEWART GOUGH

Stewart Gough makes sculptures that are essentially formal, made in a constructivist vein. They playfully combine readily available D.I.Y. store materials with a definite control of scale, form and colour. These works command a sculptural presence and resonate with architectural ideology.



SAM HERBERT

Sam Herbert's recent paintings have examined the dichotomy between a romanticised view of an imperial past and the jarring reality of the exploitation that this lifestyle was founded upon. The paintings have an immediate familiarity derived from memories from historical novels, illustrations, sepia photographs or costume drama. His intention is to take these romanticised notions of the British Empire and turn them into paintings that seem hazy or nostalgic. By placing the viewer in a position that elicits an empathetic reaction poses a set of questions that reject a straightforward answer and require a re-examination of initial assumptions.

CLAIRE ROBINS

Claire Robins explores the vulnerability of the physical and the ephemeral nature of human experience. In Beyond Repair? two young trees, despite their protective staking, have been brought down by wanton human destruction, and like so many deleterious acts, where the relationship between the perpetrator of violence and victim appears arbitrary or tangential, the destruction defies understanding and precipitates a symbolic site. Monument is empty sky-rocket husk, made permanent by casting into bronze. It is a perverse little object, transmuted cardboard and stick, hopelessly failing to immortalise the fleeting sparks of its former existence.

LIANE LANG

Liane Lang employs a variety of inanimate objects and fabricated figures to construct images and videos that exist between narrative fiction and still-life composition. Set in spaces that appear contrived, and could be described as in themselves sculptural, the photographs represent a highly controlled, single view point on an installation. They extract from the elaborately inanimate, a moment of animacy, a subtle shift between the observation of a figure as form and as active agent. The figures in the work inhabit their environment like spectral presences, simulating touch and sensation, engaged deeply in mock reflection, standing in for the absent and the absent minded. They provide a vacancy for unselfconscious voyerism, for watching nobody through the key hole.

RICHARD LIVINGSTON

Richard Livingston makes paintings of pleasure and tragedy using as source material images from archives and the media, which are selected for their emotional resonance. All references to a particular time or place are erased to isolate and accentuate the posture, gesture or fragment. By blurring an anguished or sensual moment and erasing its specificity, another dimension such as colour or tenderness may be revealed, presenting an oscillation between suffering and pleasure, coexistence and separation, remembering and forgetting. Many of the current works are exploring human emotions, perceived through images of animals - in the laboratory, the home or wildlife films. We use animal metaphors to picture desire, affection, cruelty and the movement between visceral animal and rational human.

LAURA WHITE

Laura White is interested in the way we read and view nature. How nature through the frameworks we set up can seduce us and provide us with unthreatening pleasure and entertainment, like visiting an aquarium, a zoo, or walking through urban parkland. This process of visual engagement, often in the work projected as a moving image is shattered by the viewers acknowledgement of the positioning, exaggeration and awkward arrangements of the image, or the presence of objects in the space, which slowly reveal a less entertaining view of nature, one that exposes its extreme manipulation and often threatening instability, whether that be through human contamination, misrepresentation, dislocation, or nature’s ability without any human intervention to destroy.