curated by Bella Easton and John Stark
January 4 to February 19, 2016
19 Neptune Quay
Ipswich, Suffolk, England, +44 01473 338654

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. Last year she interviewed regular artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent about his show “The Presence of Absence.” Carey-Kent now takes the other side, talking to Easton about the latest in her series of “Collateral Drawing” exhibitions.

PAUL CAREY-KENT: You are, first and foremost, an artist. How did you come to be organizing exhibitions?

BELLA EASTON: I grew up in a creative family: my father is a painter, and mother an oil painting restorer. For as long as I can remember I knew I would also train as an artist. After studying at the Royal Academy Schools, I exhibited my work for some years before I started organizing my own exhibitions nomadically. I then set up and ran a project space in South East London for four years, to 2015. I continue to promote and collaborate with others and have many future projects and exhibitions lined up in the UK and abroad. Being both artist and curator has enabled me to work with a diverse range of artists, writers, journalists, gallerists and curators.

What is “collateral drawing”?

Collateral Drawing is an on-going project run under my curatorial platform, BEASTONprojects. For each project I invite a co-curator, such as you, Paul, for the Berlin version. Collateral drawing explores the by-products left behind from the artist’s working process. Each invited artist reveals elements from their practice that would otherwise remain unseen by the public, alongside a finished artwork. That can take many forms, but I’m especially fascinated by the way each artist’s methods inflict marks on their surroundings. Whether dripped, scratched, taped, cut, erased, smeared, or hammered — all are repetitive and typically unguarded instances of drawing. The wall, floor or table acts as a raw surface to capture these ongoing ritualistic activities. Those work surfaces are rarely displayed, but hold a fascination of their own: not just as a documentation of the creative process, but as an insight into the relationship between what is subconscious and conscious in the artist’s work.

This is the fourth in a series of shows on that theme. Why a sequence, and how many do you expect there to be?

When Collateral Drawing was launched at Plymouth College of Art, two years ago, there was no particular emphasis on where its 10 artists came from. Subsequently, the artists have had some connection to each venue’s location, including at two international project spaces. Beton7, which was staged in Athens in 2014, showed Anglo-Greek artists. And rosalux, in Berlin in 2015, brought together artists linked to London and Berlin. The fourth show, in Ipswich, features 16 artists with an East Anglian connection.

The whole project is documented through the Collateral Drawing website. I’m keen to expand the sequence as far as I can take it. Three more are planned for London, Margate and Toronto in 2016 and ‘17. I am aware, though, that funding will be necessary! I hope it will eventually be possible to produce a book of the project.

Where is Ipswich, and what makes a good place to put on this show?

It’s near the East coast in Suffolk, East Anglia. Collateral Drawing will be presented in a public gallery within the new university site at Ipswich Docks. Having begun my artistic training in Suffolk, I have always been aware of the vibrant artistic community East Anglia attracts, and am at a stage in my own practice where exhibiting the project on home territory provides a platform for my own artistic reflection.

The series feature a high proportion of painters. Why is that?

I’m not sure that’s been planned, but perhaps my painting background has led me to work with curators who, like me, are inclined to select painters; and painting does provide a visceral and tangible way into the collateral process. That’s changing though: this show includes some artists who don’t work in conventional terms of painting or sculpture. So that the notion of collateral drawing is being challenged and expanded. I’m expecting the London CD to include several photographers, and I’m co-curating the 2017 Margate CD with photographer-curator Julia Riddiough.

Are studio visits an important part of the process?

The ideal would be to visit each artist’s studio. That isn’t always possible, but I am always conscious of the importance of picking up on the subtle habits each artist’s workspace holds — and which they themselves may not recognize because they’re so absorbed in the making.

Could you give an example or two of collateral drawing that struck you from the previous shows?

Goodness, that’s a hard task. It’s all interesting. I was intrigued by Frances Richardson’s use of an eight-by-four-foot sheet of MDF as a work surface, which, over time, built up drill holes and saw marks. It was beautifully intricate and like an artwork in itself. Or there’s the way Mark Titchner’s paperback books related to the inkjet prints set alongside them, which edited and magnified their back covers to a point where the statements printed on them were reinterpreted.

Has there been a line of development over the first three versions?

There has been a gradual process of editing down how many collateral elements represent the process of each exhibiting artist. John felt there needed to be a further reduction with the current CD and as a result we feel this has achieved greater clarity between the collateral clues and the finished artwork.

You’ve included your own work each time. What do you think you’ve gained from that double involvement?

It’s helped me to be far more objective about my own practice, and made me consider the methods I use more thoroughly and openly when I return to my studio. It is a very direct and honest way to develop as an artist, similar to peer learning.

You also have a co-curator, also an artist in the show and a local resident. Can you tell us something about John and his work, and how you have collaborated?

We were introduced through John’s gallerist, Zavier Ellis and found we had Suffolk in common. John recently moved to Aldeburgh with his wife, Da-eun, after living in South Korea. We both studied at the Royal Academy Schools, albeit at different times, and I like John’s philosophy and humorous outlook on life. He’s been a real asset.

The last time I saw Glenn Brown’s work, it occupied the whole of the Gagosian booth at Frieze. How did you persuade such a high profile and commercially successful artist to take part in such a modestly funded and provincially located show?

Yes, and John was especially thrilled when Glenn agreed to take part as he admires him very much as an artist who — like him — has made a successful career from re-working old masters. Glenn grew up in Norfolk and now lives and works between London and Suffolk. He really liked the unusual concept and was very understanding about the (lack of) budget. He has loaned a drawing from that Gagosian project, together with palettes and his light box, which holds photo reproductions. Glenn likes to support worthwhile local projects, and in 2012 he exhibited in the Aldeburgh Festival’s visual arts program.

Ryan Gander is also well known internationally. I imagine, with his love of playing with what a work of art can be, that he took particularly readily to the concept of the show?

Yes like Glenn, Ryan also lives between London and Suffolk. He instantly agreed to participate and is showing Things that mean things and things that look like they mean things (2008), a fictional documentary film that explores the production of an artwork that doesn’t exist. That brings an interesting angle: John describes Ryan, Daphne Warburg Astor and Kayle Brandon’s works as “utilizing the collateral, which then feeds back into or becomes the art work, a chicken and egg situation which could be described as an ouroboros.”

You are also featuring Matthew Collings and his wife, Emma Biggs. He’s an artist better known as a critic, especially on TV. Did he have anything to say about CD from that perspective?

Yes, I can quote him:

I think criticism is unrecognizable now. In practice it’s someone that calls him or herself a critic saying more or less random things, whose only purpose is to make clear to an audience that figures and ideas in art with which the audience is already familiar are very well known to the critic as well. From the position of the sort of art critic I am, I would say the Collateral Drawing is really well conceived because it brings into focus the process of making.

Matthew and Emma have made a painting for the exhibition and show an old studio table that has years’ worth of layers of cheap paper masking taped to its surface, placed as a way of always having a more or less clean and tidy surface. Matthew states that, “at the stage we offered it to the Collateral Drawing exhibition it had some scribbled quotes in charcoal on it from YouTube interviews with Francis Bacon because I was writing an article about a show called ‘Bacon and The Masters.’”

Daphne always records the work she makes each day. How does that flow into the collateral way of things?

For CD she started working on May 22, 2015, in a temporary studio in an empty garden shed on a farm surrounded by plants, bees and migrating birds. Her collateral is through recording and collecting, and her work is always connected to the land. Elements, such as wheat and pollen in this piece, are then utilized to make the drawings, which are incorporated into the final installation; so there is a slippage between the collateral and the final artwork which John and I found very interesting.

I often find that unexpected conjunctions emerge from a group show. Is that the case in Ipswich?

Always. These formal things are what interest me the most in bringing a show together. This exhibition seems to adopt a visual contrast between the industrial and synthetic versus the raw and earthy. There is an interesting dialogue between the real and the unreal. And light is important in many of the works. Trisant’s shiny enameled paint surface draws the outside in, whereas Chris Hawtin’s sci-fi landscape creates a synthetic light through its painted illusion; the ethereal illumination in my fabricated landscape contrasts with the intimate candlelit space of John’s painting. And there’s much more: you can find surprising conjunctions through all the artists shown here.

The post “Surprising Conjunctions”: Paul Carey-Kent and Bella Easton Discuss the Collateral Drawings Series appeared first on artcritical.

January 30 to March 14, 2015
63 Margaret Street (between Great Titchfield and Great Portland streets)
London, +44 20 7580 1480

Royal Academy-trained painter and independent curator Bella Easton lives and works in South London. She regularly exhibits her work while also co-directing a project space, a platform for invited artists to produce a site-specific work. Her current curatorial and ongoing offsite projects include: “Collateral Drawing,” “The Opinion Makers” and “A5, Athens.” She found time to take in ”The Presence of Absence” at the Berloni Gallery in London, a 14-artist exhibition curated by artcritical contributor Paul Carey-Kent, and to discuss the show with him.

BELLA EASTON: How did the show come about?

PAUL CAREY-KENT: As with the four previous shows I have curated recently, it stemmed from a gallery that I know fairly well asking if I’d like to put on a show. In this case, Berloni had two preferences: for a conceptually based group show and for a minimal proportion of painting, as they felt their existing and planned programmes were painting-heavy and they wanted a contrast.

What’s the idea behind of “The Presence of Absence”?

It’s often said that negative space is as important as positive shapes in a composition. The works in this show turn around a parallel feature of content, as opposed to form: namely, what is not present is at least as important as what is present — so a key role is played by the paradoxical-sounding “presence of absence” in work by 14 artists.

What were your influences leading to that idea?

Probably my background in philosophy: I like a good paradox, and have always been interested in how far you can push an approach in art — for example, how little can possibly be enough? My standard operation procedure as a curator is probably that I see a lot of shows — some 800 a year, of which I write on about 150, so I do have a wide spectrum of artists to choose from once I’ve fixed on a theme. My preference is not to have heavily intellectualised theory, but to look for something simple and thought-provoking that can connect choices together without pretending to exhaust them: there will always be more angles on the work of interesting artists, and so a show can develop its own complexity.

How did you decide what to put in the show?

Just before being asked to curated the show, I had seen a rough cut of Maria Marshall’s new video. She made a film in 2001 in which a boy kicks a ball against the wall of a church; only the ball has been digitally removed leaving only its sound and shadow. It is an attack on the church of sorts, albeit not too effective, with a subtext of how football might have become a new religion. Her new film (premiered in this exhibition) shows a ball bouncing around the dilapidated interior of a church in Georgia. This time it’s the person who has been edited out and the ball bounces menacingly around, looking likely to knock over iconic religious images set on a table — but never quite does. The idea of putting these two films together pushed me towards this particular project, out of the range I had in mind. I planned to mix film, sculpture and photography with a small amount of painting. I decided that a sound-only piece would be thematic; and Giorgio Sadotti proposed the scent installation, which I was happy to accept.

Who else is in the show?

Films by John Smith (The Black Tower, 1987) and Liane Lang (The Last Days, 2012-13) use buildings, outside and in, to animate our understanding of what we cannot see. Stefana McClure gives us the longest films — albeit, it could be said, without images or duration — through two of the drawings in which she traces their complete subtitles. A sound installation by Bronwen Buckeridge creates an illusory space in the midst of the gallery. Nika Neelova presents a sculpture that seems to stand in for another absent work, echoing Rachel Whiteread’s characteristic casting of the negative, seen in her Herringbone Floor (2001). Blue Curry’s found object groupings stand indirectly for people and for differing constructions of their self-images. Alan Magee fills in two hoops with plaster. Anni Leppälä and Jason Oddy exploit the uncanny ability of the photograph to freeze into permanence what is and isn’t there. Two painters complete the line-up: Martine Poppe’s images come and go as we circle round them, and Ian Bruce plays with the absence and presence of people in their surroundings.

What’s that smell?

That’s Sadotti’s Vatican (2015): he instructed that incense be burned at the gallery daily in order to evoke an absent place.

Is curating a creative medium or process for you and, if so, could it be suggested that the outcome of the curation is the presence of the absence of the curator?

I suppose it is creative, yes, though essentially I do it for enjoyment. It’s a nice thought that I was present during the show while absent; though I was present several times guiding people around.

Has there been an audience favorite?

It’s encouraging that one visitor or another has named each artist in the show as a particular favorite. That said, it’s probably fair to mention three artists as being especially popular. The remarkably persuasive spatial illusions created by the three minutes of binaural sound that make up Buckeridge’s Mid Eye Long High (2013) provoked such animated responses in the people listening that I was asked at the opening whether it was a performance piece! It also proved the biggest hit with child visitors. Artists tended to be struck by the simple elegance of Alan Magee’s Return to Glory (2014), in which filling two hula hoops with plaster makes quintessentially light toys into heavy sculptures, removing their function and presenting them as art. Of course there was nothing in the hoops originally, so I see this as an absence of absence itself. The two Maria Marshall films were also very popular.

If given the opportunity to expand on this theme as a larger exhibition, is there anything you would do differently and who else would you include?

I originally asked 18 artists, expecting that some would turn me down, and four did. Normally, one would not mention that, but here it seemed thematically apt to imagine them as present: John Stezaker, with a work from the Tabula Rasa series, wherein the removal of part of an image stands in for a screen and simultaneously implies the possibility of other presence. I’d wanted one of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s cinema photographs, which curiously parallel Stefana McClure’s arrival at something like a modernist monochrome through the act of transcribing subtitles to the point of indecipherability. Paul Pfeiffer wasn’t included, but he’s an artist best known for editing out parts of video footage to great effect. Finally, I wanted Mungo Thomson’s The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963-1995, a sound piece comprised only of applause recorded at Dylan’s concerts. That proves oddly addictive, and would, I believe, have been a fitting presence for those who did accept my invitation. Still, I’d like those four to accept second time around, and it would be good to have a more substantial presence from some of the other artists.

Did everything turn out as you expected?

Perhaps not as I expected, but certainly as I hoped. A number of relationships occurred that I had not anticipated. For example: Neelova and Magee echoed not only each other, but also the windows of the gallery’s upper space; and the way in which works covered for each other’s absences was picked up by visitors and critics, such as Rowena Hawkins, who reviewed the show for The Upcoming.

Were there any unexpected or unplanned “presence of absence” surprises that came out of the curation?

What I had anticipated least was how several works would turn out to reference a critical question of presence or absence: does God exist? Wherever you stand on that, there’s no denying the charge that it brings to the work of Lang, Marshall and Sadotti, and there’s also implications of a world beyond in Leppälä and Magee, an angel in Poppe’s painting and a cross to be read into one of Oddy’s photographs of the Pentagon, which shows a rebuilt room 18 months after the crash of Flight 77 destroyed it on September 11, 2001.

What future UK or international curatorial projects do you have lined up?

Curation is very much my third string after my day job and art writing, but I have two definite plans for the rest of this year: a group show themed around “weight” at London’s Maddox Arts in April, and a ten-artist Anglo-German project in Berlin in September, which presents works of art alongside the collateral residue of their production (an interesting theme, but it’s my co-curators, you and Iavor Lubomirov, who came up with it!). I’m also booked well ahead to present a group show of process-based abstract painting at Soho’s St. Barnabas club in 2017. Then there are several possibilities that are more speculative at this stage, including an IKEA-themed show, and two potential co-curations with artist friends Jane Harris and Sara Haq.

Thank you Paul for your very personal and informed incite into a truly exciting exhibition. I look forward to your future curations and working with you on Collateral Drawing Berlin, later this year.

For more details see: www.berlonigallery.com
paulsartworld.blogspot.com
http://www.collateraldrawing.org

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