Cornish Weekender 2018 - Meet the Selected Artists
The Cornish Weekender is the second of a suite of micro residencies run in partnership with artist spaces across the UK, the first being held in Blackpool in 2017 with Abingdon Studios. In 2018 we are working in collaboration with Porthmeor Studios and curator, Claudio Zecchi. The Cornish Weekender will be a three day investigation of St. Ives; its rich artistic history & community through dialogues, activities, and projections.
This micro residency brings together creative people of all persuasions, visual arts to performance, music to architecture, urbanism and anthropology. Find out more about the selected artists here.
ALEX HACKETT
My work exists within fields of poetic text, sculpture and the edible to form installations with an integral dialogue between individual works. My work examines and questions the dichotomy of the natural and the
unnatural in the contemporary world and ethical concerns with the way we live in our current environment. My practice is largely based on our human relationship to watery landscapes, whilst considering their state
in the Anthropocene; permanently altered by human activity. The work includes both natural and manmade materials, and strong use of the sensory, through both evocative and literal means. Sculptural forms are remembered and adapted from the environment to create objects with both a link to place and personal experience. Materials remain distinctly human and the work holds a close and intimate quality. Writing exists as a tool within my art practice, working in conjunction with object or image to form
connections in texture and sensation.
alexhackett.wix.com/portfolio
HALEY CRAW
I am a Canadian artist based in the UK, working with drawing, sculpture, and performance art. I use a multidisciplinary approach to present the transforming body, the feminine monstrous, and the mythology of the fallen woman to explore complexities of sexuality and ideology. My work engages with mythology, both from folklore and religious mythology, where I aim to destabilize archetypes of women such as the virgin and the whore. I also aim to highlight the role of performance in ideology, focusing on body gestures and clothing.
Over the next year I aim to create work in a studio space in Norwich, as well as create video based performances where I explore the body in relation to the British landscape, engaging with site-specific histories. I am drawn to the British landscape, particularly the architectural ruins and heritage sites that span throughout the country. I plan on making work that explores the body to the history of these ruins, especially in relation to the contemporary consequences religious ideology throughout history has had on women’s intellectual and bodily freedom. I am in the process of making a video performance in response to the ruin of the Church of Saint Andrew in Covehithe, where I will use my body and my voice to engage with the site.
www.haleycraw.com
ISOBEL ADDERLEY
My creative ambition is to create a hybrid practice that exists in the space between and draws equally on contemporary art film-making, contemporary dance performance and music production. I am fascinated by our preconception of the body and physical space as separate and opposing forces. I am interested in blurring or troubling these preconceptions in my work and see each practices described above as being able to directly impinge on the audience in different physical ways. I aim to use film, sculpture, live performance and music production to create expressions of this investigation. Through doing this I hope to be able to inhabit a broader space than only the gallery, and to draw audiences from contemporary art, dance and the broader and more democratic audience of electronic music into new situations.
The flicker between two states is important to me in many areas of my practice. I like words
which mean different things, erratic – a movement or behaviour and also a glacially moved rock in a landscape. Words which when said could be mistaken for different meanings, tail – belonging to an animal or instead a story. In my performance, I have used elements of yoga and contemporary dance, I use a chiffon material as a kind of exterior skin, in which I hold varying poses creating solid sculptural shapes. Cusp, the transition between two different states, or the pointed end of a tooth. Similar to these words my performance enables me to be BOTH. Both still and moving, soft and hard, person and object.
www.isobeladderley.com
MONICA TOLIA
Monica Tolia is an interdisciplinary artist working in choreography, dance and score, computation, installation, sculpture and sound. She works collaboratively with dancers, electronic musicians and
programmers, creating immersive performances that reflect on the proliferation of computational processes in physical spaces, and how it impacts human embodiment. She is currently a final year student on the MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent performances in London have included an open studios in the Deptford X Fringe Festival (2017), NO
FUTURE at Out of the Brew Gallery curated by the Centre for Cultural Studies (CCS) as part of the ‘Against the Slow Cancellation of the Future’ Conference at Goldsmiths (2017), and We’re All Involved in this Mess at Enclave Lab (2017).
www.monicatolia.com
SAM SCHMITT
Oil and gas keep letting us know that we need them more than they need us, and our thinking changes much too slowly; information overload helps, but in unnerving ways.
I make installation, sculpture and painting with a focus on image and the intellect changing abilities of a two dimensional surface. Screen, canvas, and technologies of reproduction.
Currently in my first year of the Master’s of Fine Art program at Goldsmiths, U of L.
Collaboration with Xavier Robles de Medina, at Barbé Urbain Gallery, Ghent. Mar. 3 - Apr. 8.
About giving up control, authorship and appropriation.
Curating a group show with fellow students for the week of May 7 - 14, Asylum Chapel,
London.
TOM STOCKLEY
Tom Stockley is a lo-fi performer, writer, designer, organiser and occasional statue based in the South West of England. Informed by a century of counter-culture, his practice is parasitic and flirts with the humour, beauty and sadness of every day life by any means necessary (including spoken word as t.s. idiot, DIY venue Space 37 and annual festival Langaland). In 2016 he led workshops at Newlyn Art Gallery, appeared as a rock in an international theatre production and burnt his degree. Right now he lives in Bristol with some humans and reptiles, working as a youth worker and on various projects with We Are Uncollective.
Since moving to Bristol in the New Year, Tom is building a studio/DIY event space (To Be Announced) and collaborating with some of the up-and-coming artist projects in the city (including Creative Youth Network’s You Produce, Lavrak’s Extravaganza and a currently untitled street poetry project with Spike Island Masters students. This Summer his solo show ‘Orchestral Testicles’ will tour Fringe Festivals across the South West. He’s also curating the Alternative stages, theatre and visual arts programme for Langaland Festival 2018. Recently he was published by Sober Magazine and will be working with them closely in the future, as well as writing for The New Art Examiner.
www.tomstockley.weebly.com
ALICE GALE-FEENY
My practice encompasses video, performance, writing, site-specific projects and group facilitation. The work questions modes of knowledge, prioritising the embodied, subjective experience of the individual, using this as a starting point for understanding how groups communicate and share space. I am interested in how the body and voice articulate and define objects and architectures and am preoccupied by notions of community. I am researching and filming intentional communities, collective working groups, shared houses; where the activities of a group and the architectures in which they live or meet, are inter-dependent.
My two recent works shown in France engaged with literature on rhythm in architecture and the slippages in meaning through translation and repetition: ‘Experiencing Architecture’ by Steen Eiler Rasmussen was put to test as a theoretical hypothesis and ‘La Jalousie’ by Alain Robbe-Grillet, was explored through reenactment. www.alicegale-feeny.com
HERFA THOMPSON
My work is inspired by my own journey of coming to terms of existing as a British black female, dealing with racism, and rather than being angry, drawing daydream like scenarios of love and support that I hope makes anyone feel happy and warm. Despite my university background in architecture, sculpture and performance art, drawing at the moment is my tool for exploring social ideas, identity and place. I hope to create an installation of my drawings on my ceramic tiles to create a dance floor as one of my interests from performance art is the decline of social dance in communities, as it’s another erasure of the community’s “third space”. I’m hoping to work with older communities who would have had ballrooms in the 1940s and 1950s and hopefully being able to create a ball for them and other generations.
The ideas that influence my illustration work are fluid movement, exploring black female identity, vulnerability and the bright colours of Martinique and the sculptures I saw around me as a child in Zambia and Zimbabwe and my A Level Biology years. In general, phenomenology, architecture, textiles, the sea, food such as Martin Parr’s Real Food documentations. Cinema is also a huge influence on my work. I love patterns, prints and colours and constantly reference Marimekko.
https://herfathompson.wixsite.com/home
MARK DYER
I am a composer of experimental concert and installation music.
I have always been fascinated by ruins as bleak but alluring reminders of our vulnerable place in time and space. Ruin depiction and aesthetics are commonly explored within archaeology, literary theory and the visual arts.
My artistic practice involves composing ‘musical ruins’: borrowed material subjected to destructive compositional techniques that might establish a listener experience analogous to visiting an architectural ruin. By exploring the significance of musical material that we might consider old or broken, when consumer culture seems to be obsessed with the new, I hope to engage with the emotional responses inherent to ruin experience such as nostalgia, alienation and hopes of restoration to name a few.
Musically, this manifests in work that is quiet and fragile with an emphasis on sonic colour, repetition and introspection. Such qualities are juxtaposed with the presence of musical quotation and familiarity, as the original material juts forth from the texture. Two composers who have greatly influenced my work include the American experimental composer Morton Feldman, and the German composer Helmut Lachenmann whose work confronts tradition. This aesthetic hybrid of influences helps me maintain a unique compositional voice whilst avoiding pre-determined aesthetic conventions.
https://www.markdyercomposer.com/
SAM BAKER
By deliberately twisting, bending and pinching linear forms I am creating a new physical act of communication. The works stand as sites of a past performance where I have laboriously cut into materials creating conversation about production, finesse and technical virtuosity. The introduction of steam is an activator that playfully turns a process into a material within itself, by rupturing the binary relationships of wood and steel.
here is an out of control nature to steam and the way that it will not behave as a physical, matter based material. As vapour, steam is pervasive and intangible. I am interested in mocking and provoking the physical through the use of steam as a force to create and destroy.
SUFEA MOHAMAD NOOR
I am an artist, curator and researcher based in Liverpool and Leeds. I primarily work with public arts institutions to cultivate engagement with marginalised communities through contemporary art. My work focus on the civic duties of public arts institutions, British contemporary art, the politics of biennials, postcolonial visual culture, and feminist practice. The methodologies for delivering my work use collaboration as a tool for the exchange of skills, knowledge and/or objects, as well as, the concept of sharing a meal to facilitate activities for discussions and learning.
I have previously worked with Tate Liverpool, Bluecoat Centre for Contemporary Art, Liverpool Biennial as well as Assemble, Ruth Beale and Rose Wylie.
In 2018, I am collaborating with an artists-led gallery and studio in Liverpool to decolonise the arts curriculum and demystify the reality of working in the arts by teaching about postcolonial contemporary art in secondary schools in the city. Similarly, I am teaching Arts Award in Oldham/Manchester to share creative skills and knowledge by referencing the works of contemporary artists who are people of color. I am also working on a personal research to apply the principles of cooking to curating and creating contemporary art which I hope to publish with the University of Leeds.