East End Review

Tag: exhibition

Draw talent: Shoreditch art school holds exhibition of work by artists aged 10 to 18

Part of a piece by Shoreditch-based 14-year-old, Ananda. Photograph: Royal Drawing School

Drawing, said David Hockney, helps you put your thoughts in order and can make you think in different ways.

If that is true then drawing should be an attractive proposition for young people trying to make sense of their impending adulthood and the world around them.

Next month the Royal Drawing School will be displaying 250 drawings by members of its Young Associates Programme.

These budding artists are all aged 10–18 and for many it will be their first chance to show work in a professionally-curated public exhibition in Shoreditch.

Axel Scheffler, illustrator of The Gruffalo, one of the most popular children’s book of recent times, was impressed with the work on display at last year’s exhibition, but warned the artists that becoming a professional takes dedication.

“It took me a long time to become an illustrator. I had work constantly after leaving college but it took 13 years as an illustrator before The Gruffalo came along,” he said.

However, Scheffler describes drawing as a “brilliant human activity” and says children should start drawing “as soon as they can hold a pencil”.

“The younger you start the better you will become,” he says. “Drawing is just a great activity to establish a relationship with the world. You observe what’s outside but you can also express what’s inside you and try lots of different techniques.

“For a young person hoping to become an illustrator I would recommend they draw as much as possible and another thing is to be curious about how other people draw.”

Judging by some of the works set for inclusion in the show, the standard looks to be high, with portraits and observational drawings in a range of styles.

The Royal Drawing School was set up in 2000 as the Prince’s Drawing School to address concerns that drawing was falling off the map as an essential skill for art students.

Supported by the Prince of Wales, it received its ‘royal’ title in 2014. At the time Grayson Perry said: “In the 21st century – with all our amazing digital technology – drawing remains a skill that is as important and relevant as ever.

“We don’t have a USB port in our head and drawing is the most direct way we have of expressing our visual imagination to the outside world.”

Royal Drawing School Young Artists Exhibition
Until 29 September
Royal Drawing School
19–22 Charlotte Road
EC2A 3SG
royaldrawingschool.org

August 25, 2016
Isolation Chamber Vacation, Transition Gallery, preview – Alone time

The Champagne Suite, from Juno Calypso’s series The Honeymoon. Photograph: Juno Calypso

Solitude is something humans both crave and fear – seemingly in equal measure.

Nineteenth century transcendental philosopher Henry David Thoreau spent two years alone in a lakeside cabin in Massachusetts.

Recounting his experiences in his seminal work Walden, he wrote: “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Yet fear of isolation and ‘ending up alone’ created a cultural icon for our times in Bridget Jones. And once heard, who could forget the mournful croon of country singer Hank Williams as he sings: “I’m so lonesome I could cry”?

So which is it to be? This month an exhibition at Transition Gallery explores solitude in all its manifold forms: its horror-filled connotations of madness and perversity on one hand, and its elevated status as a tool for creative genius on the other.

Curator Sarah Cleaver has been researching the subject ever since watching the film Paris, Texas, immersing herself in the subject through the work of Thoreau and reclusive American writer Henry Darger, and starting a Tumblr to document her findings.

“When I first started researching I thought maybe it was going to be a book,” says the 28-year-old.

“But when I started realising the amount of visual aspects to it I realised an exhibition would work quite well.

“Paradoxically it’s a project about being alone but it works better with other people.”

Isolation Chamber Vacation features the work of five artists as well as various ephemera from Cleaver’s research such as artists’ books, letters, back issues of magazines and a ‘library’ of recommended reading.

Juno Calypso’s photographs are self-portraits in which she adopts the fictional character, Joyce. For her series The Honeymoon, the artist posed as a travel writer and spent a week alone at a couples’ only honeymoon resort in Pennsylvania, with a suitcase full of wigs and wedding lingerie.

Kirsty Buchanan will be displaying a series of drawings made in ‘private spaces’: so whilst taking a bath or in bed.

“I’ve known her for a long time, and we would talk a lot about women’s rituals and men’s fear of what women do behind closed doors, so diaries, cosmetics and that kind of thing,” Cleaver says of Buchanan.

Other artists in the exhibition include Nicola Frimpong, whose watercolours Cleaver describes as “kind of Marquis de Sade-esque orgies”, whilst filmmaker Hannah Ford will be screening a piece inspired by period dramas and the idea of the young unmarried woman who has to stay at home with her parents. Katernina Jebb will be showing a print from a series on sex dolls which touches on technology and how we use the internet.

Alongside the art, there will be film screenings of Repulsion (1965), Paris, Texas (1984), Morvern Callar (2002) and In The Realms of the Unreal (2004). There will also be talks, with speakers including Mary Wild, an expert on film and psychoanalysis who will be talking about aloneness in horror films.

Cleaver believes now is a pertinent time to be looking at solitude in greater detail, given the influential of digital technology on our lives.

“I think there is a kind of fear about how connected we all are yet how we’ve managed to isolate ourselves, the fact you can get in contact with anyone you like from your bedroom basically. I hear a lot of people talk about how technology has made them lonelier.”

She admits that she herself revels in solitude, saying: “I love to be alone.” But she warns of this attitude proving a “trick”, particularly among artists.

“I love to be alone but also think there’s a lie to solitude,” she says. “And that is, if I get rid of enough people then I’ll produce something wonderful.

“That’s as much of a trick as anything else, it’s just another method of procrastination for a lot of artists.

“You know, I could do this if I didn’t have a family, I could do this if I didn’t have a partner. So I’m into that idea too, that it’s kind of fetishized and kind of a myth that lot of creatives like to talk about.”

Isolation Chamber Vacation
2 September– 2 October
Transition Gallery
Unit 25a Regent Studios
8 Andrews Road
E8 4QN
transitiongallery.co.uk

August 25, 2016
Shadow Optics at Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes, Clapton: Things falling apart

An excerpt from Solveig Settemsdal’s Segment I.I.

The art world today is so vast that it’s impossible for any one individual to have a complete understanding of everything that’s going on at one moment,” says the gallerist Iavor Lubomirov.

Lubomirov is director of Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes in Lower Clapton, which describes itself as a “charitable venue for curators” rather than a traditional gallery.

“Commercial galleries tend to have a stable of artists they show regularly big institutions are usually looking retrospectively at artists careers, so that puts us in a unique position,” he says.

Shadow Optics is the gallery’s latest venture into curation. It brings together four relatively unknown artists and is curated by CJ Mahony, a sculptor who runs an archaeological project space in Cambridge.

“She’s interested in things that have a sense of delicacy about them so as if they’re about to fall apart, barely holding together, and she’s also interested in light (which is fairly common among artists anyway). It’s these two themes she’s trying to bring together in this show.”

Among the artists featuring in the exhibition is Solveig Settemsdal, whose work exists in a hinterland between drawing, sculpture and photography. She uses materials that are easily affected by their surroundings – giving sculpture an almost liquid quality.

“I think if you at Solveig’s photos they’re fascinating because you have no idea how they’re created or what they are but there’s a sense of things floating in outer space or underwater,” says Lubomirov.

“It could be like an atomic explosion it could be an organic animal or an alien – whatever it is it looks like it’s about to float away and you’ve caught it at this precious moment of existence.”

The group show also includes work by Georgie Grace, whose videos look into technological change and our tolerance for flickering light.

A still from Georgie Grace’s Shedding.

And Reece Jones makes drawings that start off whimsical but which undergo repeated application and removal until they evolve into a finished image that is difficult to define.

“Of course the thing is these are artists who are not represented by our gallery or who are necessarily going to be seen together again, Lubomirov says.

“It is a moment that will come and then disappear.”

Shadow Optics
3–25 September
Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes
26 Lower Clapton Road
E5 0PD
lubomirov-angus-hughes.com

August 24, 2016
Stephen Staunton’s ‘dramas of colour’ make Headway in Bethnal Green this month

Birds by Stephen Staunton, who became an artist after sustaining a traumatic brain injury.

In 1991 Stephen Staunton – an artist originally from Galway in Ireland and now living in north London – sustained a traumatic brain injury in a road traffic accident. As a result, Staunton is deaf and uses very little language or formal signing, instead “communicating through gesture, isolated words, vocalisations, and the physical resources of his surroundings,” according to Headway East London, a Haggerston-based charity that supports people affected by brain injury.

Staunton began attending Headway in 2007, where he started painting. Nine years on, and an exhibition of his work – described by Headway as “patchwork dramas of colour” – is on display this month at the Gallery Café in Bethnal Green, sponsored by the Whitechapel Gallery and curated by Steph Hirst.

“I think Stephen’s paintings are partly expressions of an unusual way of seeing,” reflects Bryn Davies, co-ordinator at Headway. “He paints as if he’s at home with the social lives of colours. Stephen’s works usually begin from a source image, but they quickly take on a life of their own. He works with a mixture of careful planning and off-the-cuff gusto.”

Chinese Ladies by Stephen Staunton.

Staunton developed his practice in Headway’s art department, known as Submit to Love Studios. Davies explains that the studios are a central part of Headway’s work. “Art gives an opportunity for our members to express themselves and their relation to the world in an atmosphere of collaboration and mutual support,” he says. “Such projects also open up conversations which will hopefully lead to a deeper understanding of the difficulties and talents of brain injury survivors.”

Staunton himself gave a talk on his paintings on 5 May at the Gallery Café, followed by a musical performance by other Headway members.

Steven Staunton Paintings
Until 31 May, Gallery Café,
21 Old Ford Road, E2 9PL
whoareyounow.org

May 11, 2016