Blackpool Weekender 2017 - Meet The Artists
Work by Kasumi Dean, image belongs to the artist.
UKYA and Abingdon Studios Blackpool are taking 12 artists to Blackpool for a weekend of creative exploration. This mini residency offers a period of flux and change to artists with little expectation beyond being curious and having time to think and to learn and share with others. Meet the artists here.
AJA IRELAND
Using unsettling noise, distressed screams, hand made electronics and found objects pushed through pedals, Aja Ireland's industrial beats and distorted drone are her very personal, physical interpretation of the contemporary condition. She challenges the audience by breaking down barriers and pushing limits sonically and visually. Recently commissioned to write the film score for artist Joey Holder’s “Ophiux” exhibited at Wysing Arts Centre, Aja enjoys exploring the boundaries between industrial and noise, she has recently toured Europe and the UK and due 3 E.P releases in April 2017 with LOVE LOVE, Fog Mountain and Dark Floor.
REECE STRAW
My work operates through documentary film and photography that has also reached into installation and sculpture alongside the moving image. The genuine exploration of communities, heritage and iconic figures of culture in my work usually extends beyond the final outcome/exhibited work from my continued engagement with the subject I have been investigating. My practice exists somewhere between journalism, documentary, cinema and fine art that provides constant critical analysis of my progression of artistic process and community value.
COLETTE GRIFFIN
Colette Griffin is a studio holder at One Thorsby Street, Nottingham and graduate of Loughborough University School of the Arts (2012). An artist and curator she has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and institutions including 2 Queens, Leicester; One Thoresby Street, Nottingham (solo); S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Sungshin Women’s University, Seoul and Jinji Lake Art Museum, Suzhou.
Colette is assistant curator at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, where recent projects and publications include the Nottingham Castle Open 2016, ADA by Karina Smigla-Bobiski, Now for Tomorrow II, Search the Collection and The Grand Tour Walks.
EMILY SIMPSON
My practice deals with ‘vagueness’, with a tension between states, between chance and control, success and failure, pasts and presents, decision and indecision, certainty and uncertainty. Often a set of rules or framework are set in place for the work to form itself around. This framework can take any form, be it an object, space, thought, duration, journey or technology. However, as the work takes shape even these ‘rules’ are approached indeterminately, blurring the rift between autonomy and intention. The rules are allowed to be rewritten within the process of writing, or not if the case may be. This stylised hesitancy becomes the works medium, using a language of purposeful purposelessness to mimic the desirable uncertainty of post(post)modern ‘living’.
REBECCA LIVESEY-WRIGHT
Rebecca Livesey-Wright lives in Glasgow. She likes writing and performing poems, using walking as a key research and creative practice. She also enjoys teaching kids art (which is what she does for a living) and coming up with ideas for zines that she never makes. Rebecca doesn’t like taking herself too seriously and has a slight tinge of imposter syndrome. Rebecca graduated in 2015, but because she did her final project on the issues with access to both higher education and the arts, and meritocracy, she won’t tell you what she graduated with or where from.
KASUMI DEAN
Kasumi lives and works in Manchester, UK. Her studio is situated in Manchesters China town at Ny Space: http://www.nyspace.org. She currently works at Manchester School of Art through a Graduate Internship scheme. She has been a Volunteer at Castlefield Gallery for over a year and is part of their graduate mentor scheme. She graduated from BA Fine Art in July 2016. She completed a Foundation at CCW (Camberwell), University of Arts London in 2013.
ALEXANDER CROFT
My work involves looking at the hardship we face through the mundane nature of working life, trying to survive through the grey repetitive nature of living in the UK. I am interested in microcosms in the north of England, places where we go for an escape that don’t quite fit the norms of the surroundings. For example; fast food shops, theme parks and arcades. For me, they are a place that is created as a new space from the moment you walk through the door. They are entirely complex with crafted sound, light and visual aesthetics for the main purpose of making you forget the outside world and being encapsulated in its space.
ANNA WACHSMUTH
After studying Photography and Media at the Fachhochschule Bielefeld, Germany, and the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem, Israel, Anna Wachsmuth worked with photographers and artist such as Daniel Josefsohn and Alexandre de Brabant in Berlin. In 2015 she started a Bachelor of Honors degree in Fine Arts at the Glasgow School of Arts where she will finish in the summer of 2017. She is the founder of Salon 16, a cross-disciplinary platform for the discussion on contemporary arts in relation to its social and political accountability, and a member of Transmission Gallery, Glasgow.
ELLIE POWER
I am primarily a video artist but also create work using installation and performative interactions alongside my videos, employing ideas and materials of animation, gaming and digital realities. I generate a lot of my work through writing and since graduating this has become an even larger part of my practice and am currently thinking of ways to develop these texts (poems, stories, observations) into works of their own. I am also currently part of Into The Wild programme at Chisenhale Art Place. As a group of fourteen recent graduates each with our own individual practises and working across various disciplines (performance, film, painting, sculpture and writing) we have been meeting regularly for discussions and crits and will be working together on exhibitions, events and a publication
Hannah Tolmie
I am interested in objects and their perceived values, their attractions and satisfactions. These ideas are explored through seduction and distraction, playfully using brands, foods and decoration. I often use embellishment as a way of investing into an object whether that be to cheapen or enrich it dependent on the materials in use. What makes something tacky or cheap and what can change our perception of this?
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ROBERT MILLS
In January 2017, Babaloose comes back once more. (www.babaloose.com). Babaloose is an open platform promoting the politics of performance and the power of an audience as a creative community. Babaloose facilities a performance and poetry night a few times a year, to give artists a space to try out writing and performing if it's not something they are normally into. We also work with different groups of artist each time to build a set, and create zines usually around the focus of alternative education. The end of January/February will bring together two friends (Ewan McCaffrey and I – Nifty Foe) for a new exhibition as friends.
GEORGIA GRACE GIBSON
Georgia Gibson is an visual artist from north east England, currently working between the north east and Manchester, while studying for her BA in Fine Art at Manchester School of Art. Within her practice, she deals mostly with identity: mostly looking at cultural heritage, family and growing up within the social media generation. Overall Georgia's work attempts to find out more about herself and her "identity", and asks viewers to do the same.