‘Test:bed’ 2015
Open Call Exhibition
Curated by Ann Carragher
(In conjunction with ArtCOP21)
http://www.abingdonstudios.co.uk/artcop2-testbed/
http://www.artcop21.com/events/testbed/
Invites you to an informal evening of art and critical discussion, premised on the theme of Art and Ecology, in a global and local context.
Our open studio evening and collaborative exhibition aims to engage discussion regarding Art and Ecology, relative to a 'new landscape aesthetic' (Eddie Procter 2015), conveying modern anxieties and contemporary concerns in a local and global context. The event becomes an impetus for recasting values, and encouraging future inquiry and discussion, where political, social, environmental and philosophical concerns are central to future practice and engagement with climate change.
ArtCOP21
Climate is everyone’s business. Join the cultural movement towards a carbon neutral, clean future. We need the negotiations taking place during the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) to succeed and build a sustainable global culture. Climate change is often seen through a policy or scientific lens, and solutions are discussed only in political offices, boardrooms and negotiating halls. ArtCop21 launched ahead of the UN climate talks in Paris, aims to challenge those tropes. Climate is culture. What is required is the active engagement of citizens worldwide in the urgency, value and opportunities of a transition away from fossil fuels and the embracing of a greener, sustainable future economy.
http://www.artcop21.com/about/
SELECTED ARTISTS:
1. Marianne van Loo
My images are taken in Gurgaon, a New Town just south of Delhi. This new town, epitomises the growth that is currently taking place all over India. Gurgaon barely existed 25 years ago and it now one of India's fastest growing cities. But this growth comes at a grave environmental price.
My images are a record of a new town development and they ask questions about sustainable development for the future and the price the environment at large is paying for unsustainable growth in this country.
An ever-widening gap between rich and poor and an ever increasing demand on mother earth by the rich and able.
www.mariannevanloophotography.com
www.gurgaonportraitofacity.com
2. Hazel Edmunds
This body of work documents a journey with vintage Reflex Brownie camera from the 1940’s. The camera was specifically used to attempt to capture and recreate a sense of the past, a nostalgic reenactment, where one wants to return, remember and preserve. I seek to produce images that not only look like they were taken a decade ago, but that they will amplify and reiterate the importance of nature and its existence to the viewer. This work deals with issues of protection, preservation and heritage.
http://hazeledmunds.co.uk/page0/page0.html
3. Nick Kowalski
‘Low Tide’, mixed media on board, 2015
The contested space of our coastline has become a depository for collective memory. A battleground littered with relics, and cast-offs, the debris we will ultimately be measured by.
http://www.kowalskiart.com/index.php
4. Tina Warren
The plight of the Orangutan is something that has been close to my heart for some years; they are one of humankind’s closest relatives, sharing approximately 97% of the same DNA. These beautiful, intelligent and gentle apes are being wiped out by the greed of man, who’s actions have caused massive deforestation through Indonesia, forcing the low numbers of remaining Orangutans out of their habitat, threatening not only the species but the worlds ecosystems, through the destruction of the rainforest.
‘Sponsored by Nestlé’ not only symbolises the horrific destruction of these peaceful, beautiful apes brought about by the greed of environmentally and socially irresponsible global companies, but it also highlights some of the ethical questions around artist’s responses to global issues on a local and global level; with particular attention to the questions of the ineffectuality of sociopolitical art and the corporate sponsorship of the Arts.
http://tinawarren.co.uk/profile/
5. Ann Carragher,
‘Through a glass darkly’ 2015
‘Where for art thou Starr grass?’ 2015
I am personally concerned with our changing landscape and our ‘changing’ relationship ‘to’ and ‘with’ the landscape. My own visual research explores boundaries, demarcations, and contested & liminal spaces, relative to landscape and the architectural/ urban environment, and how we mediate these spaces physically and psychologically - whilst simultaneously exploring the social, environmental & scientific issues concerning our relationship to such environments. The work alludes to uncertainties and anxieties of our time, through temporal and ephemeral metamorphic.
The relationship between society and environment presents all sorts of political, social and philosophical enquiries, which encapsulates ambivalence, complicating general ‘landscape discourse’ with apocalyptic and dystopian resonance (especially in regards to neo liberalism and capitalism).
http://www.anncarragher.com
6. Sam Pickett
Using pipe work and plastic tubing I wanted to produce a crude sculpture that would represent the age of Anthropocene – the tipping point the earth has reached where mans impact on the earth (through mining and pollution) is irrevocable. I found the cold-water vessel with removable bladder. The associations to the human body were irresistible. As the ‘rain catcher’ began to take shape it became obvious to construct it to my dimensions – the waste water leaves the plastic container through a range of tubing that falls onto two ‘flaps’ designed to tip over once full. I’ve had mixed results with the mechanism – it needs fine tuning to make the flaps ultra-sensitive and ‘return’. The customised umbrella and pole were initially designed to operate outside – to catch the rain through an open window and feed it into the rain catcher but practicalities and weather dependency altered the outcome. I decided to film it functioning in the rain outside, in the garden initially with the intention of taking it to a more natural environment at some point.
7. Hannah Elizabeth Allan
‘Harbour’ is a new body of research exploring post-human landscapes and the conceptualisation of time beyond the human trace.
I have explored these ideas through environment, in particular the failure of humans to ‘own’, occupy or illustrate Sublime landscapes such as the Polar Regions. This work attempts to think beyond the human impact on landscape, assuming the age of the Anthropecene has come to an end, and the few traces of humanity that are left (i.e. buildings, ships in ice) are ultimately futile traces of a lost history.
‘Harbour’ 2015- Audio recording from a residency in Oslo. (The sounds of the harbour space and weather, with whispered and hesitating descriptions of the inclement space.)
http://hannahelizabethallan.info
8. Elizabeth Leeke
We think of shop waste in terms of the items discarded after purchase, but what about other aspects of retail experience? With every shopping season and promotion comes imagery in the form of posters, packaging and display units, and when that promotion ends, it goes in the bin.
Made from recycled supermarket point of sale, this book makes the disposable usable, and gives longevity to the work of some long suffering graphic designer somewhere in the ether, the work also becomes a metaphor for agents and clients of consumerism, conglomerates and mass globalization. The hard durable waste branding and packaging has been recycled and reshaped as a useable notebook, ironically reframed, shelved and archived.
https://agoraphobiaexhibition.wordpress.com/elizabeth-leeke/
9. Aaron Tonks
‘Series07’ is part of a body of work that attempts to illustrate a metaphor relative to societal, economic and political pressure through control and conformity. The power of big businesses, governments and banks, etc., manipulates and ‘traps’ the individual into 'conformity'... such conformity creates apathy, rendering the individual powerless and in a sense ‘ineffectual’ - homogenized, corporate and generic.
https://agoraphobiaexhibition.wordpress.com/aaron-tonks/
10. Georgia Noble
My work explores a personal engagement and anxiety between humanity and the natural world. My practice explores themes of mortality and existence within a force that has uncontainable strength and beauty - and yet we as humans believe we can control and manipulate every inch of it to suit our means.
The work both alludes to the natural environment as well as a sense of a non-physical space. It is my aim that the work provokes questions of the metaphysical, challenging preconceptions of our existence within nature and addressing our inferiority and mortality in relation to it.
Through the portrayal of an experience of nature, as opposed to a clear physical representation of it, I do believe that the work addresses the viewer's own relationship and engagement in the environment and therefore encourages a connection and contemplation of what can be done to help protect and preserve our beautiful landscape.
www.georgianoble.com
11. Lisa Wigham
" In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it."
From "A Map to the Next World" by Joy Harjo
The works on display are a correspondence between autobiographical experience and wider environmental concerns. Two prints entitled Swimming the Lake and Endless Sea are embedded with horizon lines drawn from memory and fault lines created by corrosive mordents used in the process of etching.
In this method of print-making I have applied the rapid tension of heat and cold to metal plates, and during microseconds of exposure to these forces, images are formed. This process of etching mimics that of geographical erosion and the fracture of seismic ruptions.
This is both a map sent as warning, and a panorama weathered by experience.
http://www.twoampress.com/
http://www.artcop21.com/events/testbed/
Invites you to an informal evening of art and critical discussion, premised on the theme of Art and Ecology, in a global and local context.
Our open studio evening and collaborative exhibition aims to engage discussion regarding Art and Ecology, relative to a 'new landscape aesthetic' (Eddie Procter 2015), conveying modern anxieties and contemporary concerns in a local and global context. The event becomes an impetus for recasting values, and encouraging future inquiry and discussion, where political, social, environmental and philosophical concerns are central to future practice and engagement with climate change.
ArtCOP21
Climate is everyone’s business. Join the cultural movement towards a carbon neutral, clean future. We need the negotiations taking place during the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP21) to succeed and build a sustainable global culture. Climate change is often seen through a policy or scientific lens, and solutions are discussed only in political offices, boardrooms and negotiating halls. ArtCop21 launched ahead of the UN climate talks in Paris, aims to challenge those tropes. Climate is culture. What is required is the active engagement of citizens worldwide in the urgency, value and opportunities of a transition away from fossil fuels and the embracing of a greener, sustainable future economy.
http://www.artcop21.com/about/
SELECTED ARTISTS:
1. Marianne van Loo
My images are taken in Gurgaon, a New Town just south of Delhi. This new town, epitomises the growth that is currently taking place all over India. Gurgaon barely existed 25 years ago and it now one of India's fastest growing cities. But this growth comes at a grave environmental price.
My images are a record of a new town development and they ask questions about sustainable development for the future and the price the environment at large is paying for unsustainable growth in this country.
An ever-widening gap between rich and poor and an ever increasing demand on mother earth by the rich and able.
www.mariannevanloophotography.com
www.gurgaonportraitofacity.com
2. Hazel Edmunds
This body of work documents a journey with vintage Reflex Brownie camera from the 1940’s. The camera was specifically used to attempt to capture and recreate a sense of the past, a nostalgic reenactment, where one wants to return, remember and preserve. I seek to produce images that not only look like they were taken a decade ago, but that they will amplify and reiterate the importance of nature and its existence to the viewer. This work deals with issues of protection, preservation and heritage.
http://hazeledmunds.co.uk/page0/page0.html
3. Nick Kowalski
‘Low Tide’, mixed media on board, 2015
The contested space of our coastline has become a depository for collective memory. A battleground littered with relics, and cast-offs, the debris we will ultimately be measured by.
http://www.kowalskiart.com/index.php
4. Tina Warren
The plight of the Orangutan is something that has been close to my heart for some years; they are one of humankind’s closest relatives, sharing approximately 97% of the same DNA. These beautiful, intelligent and gentle apes are being wiped out by the greed of man, who’s actions have caused massive deforestation through Indonesia, forcing the low numbers of remaining Orangutans out of their habitat, threatening not only the species but the worlds ecosystems, through the destruction of the rainforest.
‘Sponsored by Nestlé’ not only symbolises the horrific destruction of these peaceful, beautiful apes brought about by the greed of environmentally and socially irresponsible global companies, but it also highlights some of the ethical questions around artist’s responses to global issues on a local and global level; with particular attention to the questions of the ineffectuality of sociopolitical art and the corporate sponsorship of the Arts.
http://tinawarren.co.uk/profile/
5. Ann Carragher,
‘Through a glass darkly’ 2015
‘Where for art thou Starr grass?’ 2015
I am personally concerned with our changing landscape and our ‘changing’ relationship ‘to’ and ‘with’ the landscape. My own visual research explores boundaries, demarcations, and contested & liminal spaces, relative to landscape and the architectural/ urban environment, and how we mediate these spaces physically and psychologically - whilst simultaneously exploring the social, environmental & scientific issues concerning our relationship to such environments. The work alludes to uncertainties and anxieties of our time, through temporal and ephemeral metamorphic.
The relationship between society and environment presents all sorts of political, social and philosophical enquiries, which encapsulates ambivalence, complicating general ‘landscape discourse’ with apocalyptic and dystopian resonance (especially in regards to neo liberalism and capitalism).
http://www.anncarragher.com
6. Sam Pickett
Using pipe work and plastic tubing I wanted to produce a crude sculpture that would represent the age of Anthropocene – the tipping point the earth has reached where mans impact on the earth (through mining and pollution) is irrevocable. I found the cold-water vessel with removable bladder. The associations to the human body were irresistible. As the ‘rain catcher’ began to take shape it became obvious to construct it to my dimensions – the waste water leaves the plastic container through a range of tubing that falls onto two ‘flaps’ designed to tip over once full. I’ve had mixed results with the mechanism – it needs fine tuning to make the flaps ultra-sensitive and ‘return’. The customised umbrella and pole were initially designed to operate outside – to catch the rain through an open window and feed it into the rain catcher but practicalities and weather dependency altered the outcome. I decided to film it functioning in the rain outside, in the garden initially with the intention of taking it to a more natural environment at some point.
7. Hannah Elizabeth Allan
‘Harbour’ is a new body of research exploring post-human landscapes and the conceptualisation of time beyond the human trace.
I have explored these ideas through environment, in particular the failure of humans to ‘own’, occupy or illustrate Sublime landscapes such as the Polar Regions. This work attempts to think beyond the human impact on landscape, assuming the age of the Anthropecene has come to an end, and the few traces of humanity that are left (i.e. buildings, ships in ice) are ultimately futile traces of a lost history.
‘Harbour’ 2015- Audio recording from a residency in Oslo. (The sounds of the harbour space and weather, with whispered and hesitating descriptions of the inclement space.)
http://hannahelizabethallan.info
8. Elizabeth Leeke
We think of shop waste in terms of the items discarded after purchase, but what about other aspects of retail experience? With every shopping season and promotion comes imagery in the form of posters, packaging and display units, and when that promotion ends, it goes in the bin.
Made from recycled supermarket point of sale, this book makes the disposable usable, and gives longevity to the work of some long suffering graphic designer somewhere in the ether, the work also becomes a metaphor for agents and clients of consumerism, conglomerates and mass globalization. The hard durable waste branding and packaging has been recycled and reshaped as a useable notebook, ironically reframed, shelved and archived.
https://agoraphobiaexhibition.wordpress.com/elizabeth-leeke/
9. Aaron Tonks
‘Series07’ is part of a body of work that attempts to illustrate a metaphor relative to societal, economic and political pressure through control and conformity. The power of big businesses, governments and banks, etc., manipulates and ‘traps’ the individual into 'conformity'... such conformity creates apathy, rendering the individual powerless and in a sense ‘ineffectual’ - homogenized, corporate and generic.
https://agoraphobiaexhibition.wordpress.com/aaron-tonks/
10. Georgia Noble
My work explores a personal engagement and anxiety between humanity and the natural world. My practice explores themes of mortality and existence within a force that has uncontainable strength and beauty - and yet we as humans believe we can control and manipulate every inch of it to suit our means.
The work both alludes to the natural environment as well as a sense of a non-physical space. It is my aim that the work provokes questions of the metaphysical, challenging preconceptions of our existence within nature and addressing our inferiority and mortality in relation to it.
Through the portrayal of an experience of nature, as opposed to a clear physical representation of it, I do believe that the work addresses the viewer's own relationship and engagement in the environment and therefore encourages a connection and contemplation of what can be done to help protect and preserve our beautiful landscape.
www.georgianoble.com
11. Lisa Wigham
" In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it."
From "A Map to the Next World" by Joy Harjo
The works on display are a correspondence between autobiographical experience and wider environmental concerns. Two prints entitled Swimming the Lake and Endless Sea are embedded with horizon lines drawn from memory and fault lines created by corrosive mordents used in the process of etching.
In this method of print-making I have applied the rapid tension of heat and cold to metal plates, and during microseconds of exposure to these forces, images are formed. This process of etching mimics that of geographical erosion and the fracture of seismic ruptions.
This is both a map sent as warning, and a panorama weathered by experience.
http://www.twoampress.com/
