Sunday 25 October
12pm to 5pm

Ana Vicente | Joost Gerristen | Madi Acharya-Baskerville | Marcia Teusink | Mark Sowden | Matthew Swift | Mike Sims | Sam Hodge | Tom Banks

Ground Work – Incubator of Ideas, is a precursor to a three week exhibition, Ground Work, that will be taking place at APT Gallery October 2021. This ongoing project was first formed in 2014 under the banner Things That Are and is made up of an evolving group of artists and a writer who all find inspiration from observations of the environments in which they live, travel through or actively seek out.

Despite lockdown being unsettling, scary and dangerous, it gave the group an opportunity to enrich the dialogue they have with each other, through zoom meetings, What’s App and a shared Instagram account. They were all noticing things more acutely and intensely in their newly constrained worlds and found themselves wanting to share these observations with each other. A shared experience that had particular significance for the group was Mark Sowden’s hand chosen individually boxed gifts from the Thames shore sent to each member of the group in specially prepared cardboard containers.  This act enhanced the already present feelings of generosity and created the impetus for a week devoted to experimenting and collaborating alongside each other.

Incubator of Ideas is an opportunity for some of those involved to make discoveries within the immediate vicinity of APT. It will see them deploying varying methods of roving, noticing, finding, concocting and making. Sam Hodge is collecting items that include metal and wood to crush into pigments for pouring, spilling and painting. Madi Acharya-Baskerville is searching for discarded items by the water’s edge as a source for new sculptural pieces. Mark Sowden will be mud-larking on Lewisham’s Thames shore, live streaming his finds into the gallery and Mike Sims will build upon words written from a pre-Covid walk around Deptford Creek, writing on boxes collected in response to the box his gifts arrived in from Mark.

Incubator of Ideas will also create a workshop/laboratory where artists take risks and see works emerge in the context of each other’s output.  Marcia Teusink is constructing structures on site that collapse and reconfigure, playing with scale in relation to the large gallery space. Ana Vicente will project time-based details and observations of home life over and onto works and walls. Tom Banks has taken direct inspiration from the objects boxed and posted to him producing a deft and sensuous series of lyrically deconstructed oil paintings. Joost Gerritsen will be streaming into the gallery from his studio in Valencia, directing the installation of assemblages made of found objects from the rugged terrain of his surroundings and Matthew Swift will be making work in response to displaced objects, furniture and off cuts found on the floor and surfaces of his studio.

A crucial aspect of the Ground Work project is to find out more about the various ways a broad range of people observe, process and create understandings of the places and spaces they live in and walk through on a daily basis. We are asking Lewisham locals to contribute photographs, written work and drawings of their own observations, which will become part of the content of handmade booklets and art-books produced during the week in the gallery. Through this book-making a compilation of experiences will be bound together into a shared compendium of local interpretations and understandings. Ground Work is inviting all those interested in contributing to upload photographs, drawings and text to padlet.

For those who are interested in visiting and seeing what Ground Work-Incubator for Ideas are up to, the gallery will be open Sunday October 25 12-5. You are very much welcomed but due to Covid19 please let us know what time you will be visiting by emailing us so we can make sure there will not be too many people in the gallery at any one time.