A Body A Part
4 - 14 May 2023
Thurs to Sun, 12-5pm
Private View :
Thursday 4 May 2023, 6-8pm
Poetry Event: Thursday 11 May 2023, 6-8pm
Featuring new work inspired by the exhibition, read by Tamar Yoseloff, Emma Simon, Kat Dixon, Sara Levy, and Vanessa Lampert.
In this exhibition the works are curated with a focus on the body and the part object.
Five contemporary artists, Hermione Allsopp, Dexter Dymoke, Kasia Garapich, Erika Trotzig and Poppy Whatmore respond to the traditions of sculpture, but take an alternative approach. The works reflect on the humour of the anthropomorphic, combined with the unsettling isolation of the part. The works are not literal representations of the human form but made from part objects and materials. These sculptures, images and video performances refer to bodily aspects which further respond to the environment they inhabit.
Sculpture can be seen to derive from parts; from the ancient finds of antiquity, the broken parts of bodies in museums, to constructed or built forms and assemblage. The artists use materials and processes, developing investigations in an experimental way which explore issues of failure and collapse, the absurd, and subverted notions of the traditions of the body in art. The physical is involved with the psychological. Artists’ use of materials invite questions about ourselves and the human condition, which have become more prevalent in this recent period when many of us have experienced being apart and this age of uncertainty.
Artists Exhibiting
Hermione Allsopp made the work intended for this exhibition during lockdown. A time that was focused on the body, its physical vulnerability and mental isolation. Whilst exploring her materials (objects sourced from charity, junk shops and offcuts) she developed the work Fragile Breath. Here materials are worked together to make large cocoon like hanging forms that shift between referring to skeletal structures or lungs.
The Limbercreep works illustrate a new path in her practice - working with clay. Segments of modelled pipes fit together in different configurations to create sculptures that becomes limb like. Her work reflects on how these everyday objects or familiar things can be transformed, altered and animated to create something that becomes uncanny and starts to refer to altered physical and mental states.
Hermione Allsopp is an Artist that primarily works in sculpture, installation and collage. Solo exhibitions include: Organic Matters, residency presentation for Magic Carpet Landed exhibition, Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania 2021-22. Gross Domestic Product at Unit One Gallery, London. Highly Sprung, Folkestone Triennial Fringe., 2017 Recent group exhibitions include: Trace Elements at The Factory Project, London, the soft and elastic bone, VSOP Projects, Greenport, New York, USA 2021, In Quest for Beauty-Assemblage in the Ahmenson Collection, Ahmanson Gallery, California, USA. Reassemble, Collier Bristow Gallery, London 2019, The Everyday and Extraordinary, Arts Council Collection at Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 2018-19 Kaunas Mene M. Žilinsko dailės galerija, Kaunas, touring to Palanga, Lithuania,
Kasia Depta-Garapich: Kasia’s current project dwells on the human/animal relationship. The work is personal and consists of a series of drawings on family archival images, video performance and sculptural objects. In her work the main female protagonist undertakes a transition from human to animal form. The work shown at the exhibition consists of bronze casts of artist’s hands and feet with attached bear claws. Other objects on the outside look like animal body parts while on the inside they have an imprint of human body (artist’s fingertips).
Kasia Depta-Garapich is a visual artist born in Poland, living and working in London. She works across various media including drawing, sculpture and writing. She often combines sculptural and performative practice with spatial interventions and video. She graduated in Fine Art Sculpture MA the Slade School of Art (2012) and BA Wimbledon College of Art (2010). Selected exhibitions: Excursion, Watermans Art Centre, London (2023); Claw, Goethe Institute, Krakow, Poland (2022); …You Ate Three Hundred Devils, Tatra Muzeum Zakopane, Poland (2022); Melancholia, Freud Museum, London (2020); Matter of the Anthropocene, Centrala Gallery, Birmingham (2020); Simple Gestures, BWA Katowice, Poland (2020); Re-Domesticated, Grymsdyke Farm, Buckinghamshire (2019); Handiwork, Wladyslaw Hasior Gallery, Zakopane, Poland (2019); Near Thing, APT Gallery, London (2018).Selected residencies: Tatra Museum, Zakopane, Poland (2019); Grymsdyke Farm, Buckingshire, UK (2019); Grizedale Arts, Coniston, UK (2014). In 2022 she received Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize for student entry for series Family Album.
Dexter Dymoke is preoccupied with the dichotomy of image and form in sculpture. The complexity of “image” is bound up in the moment of presentation, the status and drama of the reveal. The question remains how to divest the sculptural object of its propositional stance in favour of the dynamics of “revealing”. Working with unconventional and prosaic materials Dymoke considers the body as vectored terrain, its surface reduced to ambiguous sections. These sections combine with diverting embellishments, and colours, somewhat akin to the coded identification found in heraldry. In this way the imagery and form of the body are co-opted into a new hierarchy of classification.
Dexter Dymoke lives and works in London. He has been an artist-member at APT Studios since 2014. Selected exhibitions: APT Now, APT Gallery, London, (2022). Project Portal, (solo), APT Gallery, London, (2021). Mama, Papa is wounded, Deptford X, London (2019); New Relics, Thameside Studios Gallery, London (2018); Near Thing, (artist & curator), APT Gallery, London (2018); Articulate,(with Stephanie Conway), Convoy Projects, Deptford,London (2017); A Threshold, APT, London (2016); Twentieth, APT, London (2015); Drawing into Sculpture, Griffin Gallery, London (2014); Fabric, Collyer Bristow, London (2014); A Rain of Stars (solo), Nettie Horn, London (2013); Creekside Open (selected by Phyllida Barlow), APT Gallery, London (2011); Proteo, Nettie Horn, London (2011); Rapidform Sculpture, Sackler Centre, V&A museum, London (2010); 'Bench', Friends of Battersea Park Annual Sculpture Award, Battersea Park, London (2010); RCA Group show, Weissensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin (2009); Creekside Open, (selected by Jenni Lomax), APT Gallery, Deptford, London (2009).
Erika Trotzig: Erika will be showing work that relates to the failings of the body, but also to its resilience. Although abstract, the anthropomorphic is never far away: echoes of bodies, comically ill-fitting, sagging and drooping, almost falling apart, yet somehow still managing to keep upright. The pieces could be interpreted as anti-monuments, uneasily hovering between a state of beg and a state of collapse. The works tries to somehow respond to the intensely personal experience of being (in) a body; too much, whilst simultaneously not being enough. Often in her work the body is also a building, an architectural construction-intensely fragile, held together with materials such as string, tape and splinters of wood.
Erika Trotzig is a London based, Swedish artist, working in sculpture. She has participated in group and solo shows including at Fold Gallery, Paradise Row and Gallery at Number 32 in London; upcoming shows include the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2024. She is a current recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Award, and she was shortlisted for the Clifford Chance Sculpture Award and Mother Art Price in 2022. In 2021 she was selected for the PADA Studios residency in Lisbon. For several years Erika had her own clothing label, making one-off, handcrafted pieces which were shown internationally. Erika is a graduate of the BA Fashion and MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, where she is also associate lecturer.
Poppy Whatmore: Meetings, 2021, is a memento of overwhelming fear in a hostile environment. She imagined a pair of hands taking over her interior space and swallowing her up. It felt as though her presence had disappeared from her body. The disharmony and disjuncture is exposed by the jagged, obliques lines and the jarring colours. Lacan interpreted the image of the fragmented body ‘[manifesting] itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual.”
In the small work, We At Least Have to Live in the Same House Together, 2021 again fragments a part of the body, in this case, twitching feet, lying at the end of the bed. The works both explore fear addressing struggles of lived experiences evoking moments of explosive force or kinds of resistance.
Poppy Whatmore is a visual artist based in London. Achievements include Arts Council Award (2012-2010) and won the Aesthetica Art Prize, 2013. Selected group shows include Warped Domesticity, Stash Gallery and On the Edge, Royal British Sculptors, 2023: Yobitsugi: Beyond Repair, White Conduit Projects, curated by Paul Carey-Kent, 2022. She was commissioned to install a work for ArtHouse Jersey, Skipton Big Ideas in Jersey, 2021 and selected by Alessio Antoniolli, Director of Gasworks for Inviational – 1, Unit 1 Gallery I Workshop (2021-2020); Diviners, Phoenix Arts Centre, Brighton, 2021 and included in FairArtFair selected by Marcelle Joseph (2022). Selected residencies include PADA and Passengers 2020. She was included in Wells Contemporary 2020; Middlesbrough Art Weekender (2019); Creekside Open, 2017 and New Contemporaries 2012 (works chosen for Saatchi Gallery’s Public Collection). Most recent solo show includes Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Want to Go To The Office Party, Stone Space Gallery, 2018.