Toil and Trouble
4 - 20 November 2022
Thurs to Sun, 12-5pm
Private View :
Thursday 3 November 6 - 8pm
Friday 18 November, 14.00–15.30. Research Forum, APT Gallery.
THEMES: Intervention, Collaboration, Sustainability, Translation, Performativity. Click here to register for the forum. For more information about the forum click here.
Saturday 19 November, 14.00–15.30. Public Discussion Chaired by Andrew Bracey, APT Gallery.
This show proposes a methodology based in conscious collective evolution, rather than self-determination, using conversation and rearrangement as an ethos for an exhibition that changes across its duration and becomes a catalyst for exploring how control of meaning is shared and surrendered in a group dynamic.
Toil and Trouble
Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking. - Lynn Margulis, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (1986)
If humans are to survive, they must participate in their own evolution. This means discovering, more than defining, ourselves through our engagement with others.
This show proposes a methodology based in conscious collective evolution, rather than self-determination, using conversation and rearrangement as an ethos for an exhibition that changes across its duration and becomes a catalyst for exploring how control of meaning is shared and surrendered in a group dynamic.
The initial installation of works will be agreed between three artists – Ali Darke, Lucy Renton and Sue Withers – whose practices intersect around axes of craft, the domestic and female labour, negotiate the boundaries of decorum; that which society deems appropriate in culture, language, behaviour and taste. Through the aesthetics of domestic decoration, the industry of grooming, and the unruly body they consider what is disparaged as feminine excess.
Invited to intervene in the show midway, Eric Great–Rex will have an open brief to ’disrupt’, to alter and re-stage it. This activity becomes the focus for a public discussion between the artists and the ‘Disruptor’ and the re-staged exhibition remains open to the public. There are effectively two shows, before and after the ‘Disruption’, with a public sharing of the critical process of its alteration.
Surrendering control is inherently risky and parallels the productive uncertainty of studio practice. We also see installation as a productive site, foregrounding our belief that the exhibition is the beginning, not the end of the work/s.
Following the rupture caused by Covid, this is a key moment to reassess the experience of physical exhibitions, and the role of the artist as curator or as curated.
Artist Introductions
Ali Darke studied at Wimbledon College of Art, the Slade School of Fine Art and was awarded a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art in 2021. Most recently: Between Walls, Safehouses, London (2020); Memento Mori (2021), Common Ground, (2022) Air Gallery, Manchester, Vestiges, hARTslane Gallery, London; Wells Art Contemporary, Wells Cathedral; Micro-Vestiges, One-To-Ten, Hastings; Memento Mori, Palazzo Ducale, Atina, Italy; Wirksworth Art Festival, 2022. She has attended residencies at Nottingham Trent University, Psarades, Greece; Ramsgate, UK; and Atina, Italy.
She works in drawing and sculpture responding to memory, myth, and the evocative language of psychoanalysis. Haunting echoes of loss and psychic fragmentation are viscerally expressed in materiality and form.
Transforming discarded material by cutting, stitching, and stuffing, hybrid objects emerge. Playing with their dynamic presence in space, tests unsettling tipping points of beauty, absurdity and abjection. Suggesting a hinterland between the mind and the body where the unconscious leaves a trace, she discovers the unexpected and uncannily familiar.
@ali_darke - www.alidarke.com
Lucy Renton’s practice is rooted in painting and printmaking, also in an expanded way with sound and experimental music, showing in the UK, Europe and Japan. Recent exhibitions include Cluster Letchworth (2021), Enough is Definitely Enough! (2019-20) and the Bummock project with the Nottingham Lace Archive (2016 -19).
Her work explores our relationship with interiors playing with the value of the decorative in contemporary art, evoking domestic motifs in site-specific installations and paintings. The work draws on historic textile and wallpaper design and craft processes, celebrating their seduction through colour, and the psychological overload of excessive ornament and the endless repetition of pattern.
Ideas of ‘home’ contribute to this work: what engenders a sense of a safe territory of belonging, or a dream of a different reality?
Lucy Renton studied at St Martins and the Royal College of Art and was awarded a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art in 2019.
@_lucy_renton - www.lucyrenton.com
THE (ARTIST) DISRUPTOR
Eric Great-Rex
Eric has recently retired from academia after 30 years teaching on undergraduate, post graduate and doctoral programmes. He was a Fulbright Scholar in the early 80's when he was based in New York researching a range of non-silver photographic processes. On returning to London he taught at a number of Art Schools including the RCA, RA and the Slade. He has exhibited in the UK, the USA and China with works in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition – Shanghai Honggiao Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, China – Silas Marder Gallery, Bridgehampton, New York – Edinburgh Printmakers, Scotland and the Multiple Store, London.
His practice over the last twenty years has used ceramics and printmaking as the principal mediums. His recent work has drawn on ideas around commemorative and transitional objects, exploring how we venerate our daily lives and the stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense and give meaning to our experiences.
London-based artist, curator and educator, Sue Withers studied Fine Art at Leeds Polytechnic and Wimbledon School of Art and has just completed a Professional Doctorate in Fine Art at the University of East London. She holds several teaching qualifications, and spent twenty years working in Further & Higher Education. Always keen to collaborate she co-founded Proof, an artist-run curatorial project dedicated to artists’ multiples, and the use of domestic and ‘non-gallery’ spaces in 1998. More recent co-curated exhibitions include Between Walls at Safehouses, London (2020) Research Space (2019) and “Loving Care” (2021) at the Way Out East Gallery, London.
Spanning printmaking, photography, video and sculpture, her work explores the construction of female identity through consumerism; the pursuit of perfection, acceptance or visibility through the acquisition of possessions. It examines the influence of class and the dangerous or transgressive qualities of that which is often considered frivolous: colour and fashion.
@sue_withers - www.suewithers.org