Model / Maquette: scale, illusion and space.
Review by Dave Stephens
Model / Maquette, a show curated by Alexander Hinks and Juliette Losq, is a well thought-out and executed exploration of the ways in which artists experiment with a multiplicity of inroads into their practices. The curation has been carefully and cleverly kept open-ended rather than prescriptive and if for instance you take the exhibits of Hinks and Losq themselves you discover two widely divergent starting points that both fulfil the brief even though coming at it from very different angles.
Losq’s approach has been to build a model to large-scale proportions, an installation that the viewer can move in and out of. Using highly refined qualities of painterliness and a sharp eye for proportion and scale a dissected picture has been moved forward and backward in order to question our perception of pictorial reality. There is theatricality involved in the process which tends to make the piece feel like it is a structure within a narrative, a reflective set of qualities that make the viewer ponder on the possibilities of what has occurred within its environs.
Hinks comes at his contextual problem from a much more diagrammatical viewpoint. The main wall piece entitled Astral that he has created has the feel of a cosmic DNA type structure. Molecular in nature it is made up of a series of identically sized triangular pieces of wood which can be used on a wall in whatever formulation the artist chooses, hence its feeling of atomic structures. However, each triangle had been covered in amorphous patterning that is reminiscent of oil on water. This extends the idea of a flow within the structure but also makes the fundamental geometric nature of the form into something that moves out of its own parameters.
Image Above: Juliette Losq, Erebus
Recalling Losq’s imaginative use of atmospheric space the work of Suzanne Moxhay reflects on the potential of film and painting causing the viewer to transport themselves into a world of mystery and undefined narrative. Mood is dominant in this work and the storytelling functions to guide you through its fields of sensation.
Louise Bristow is an obvious choice for this show because her work runs through the gamut of model making from archival photos of strange industrial brutalist type architecture through to incredible creative townscapes. Her studio practice involves much research and occasional visits to archeological sites and Eastern Europe and the Communism hold a particular fascination for her. Her striking images seem to record a period or event in history that is tied in to structure and space. Early abstraction with its geometry and spatial concerns appears inhabited by a race of uniformed beings that fit with an imagery that has its foundations in propaganda. Bristow’s work however offers many layers of experience in the same way that we observe our surroundings and the beings that inhabit them. It’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland meets Thomas Demand polishing and cleaning up the views with scale and scenic devices being a mainstay of both Lewis Carrol and Louise Bristow. But this is combined with an almost scientific dissection of the scene which makes Thomas Demand an apt and timely connection.
The work created by Gail Seres-Woolfson takes the form of a room-sized installation incorporating elements including film, slide-projection, experimental sound, sculpture, architecture and collage. The piece functions as a whole with film and slides inspired by her collage work of building in different parts of London and built structures which also appear in the film. This whole process is an intriguing example of how the theme of Model / Maquette could be identified, explored and redefined in order to make an installation that itself becomes a record of the processes involved in its creation. Based within the concepts of architecture and geometric abstraction the installation also seems to intensify ideas of growth and expansion. If I were looking for a piece that seemed to bridge the ideas involved in Hinks and Losq’s work this is probably the one that I would choose.
Image Above: Gail Seres-Woolfson, Pink City
Architecture and its abstract qualities is explored more formally in the work of Patrick O’Sullivan whose piece deals with the contrast between geometric balance and the effect of expressive material interventions that interrupt the whole.
Good things come in small packages and this is certainly true of the pictures of Jonathan Alibone whose small pictures have incredible power through their remoteness and sense of isolation. The use of landscape with fragments sticking out of the ground give a feeling that something has happened a long, long time ago and we only have the monumental debris to indicate clues. Caspar David Friedrich came to mind and also the prints of Emma Stibben but neither had tried to display such a theme on a small scale. This is a genuinely courageous gesture.
I gained a fantastic sense of wonderment when I thought I had discovered a child’s plasticine model on a shelf in one corner only to discover that the models of sleeping bags and other detritus were actually made of bronze and were the work of the artist Thomas J Ridley. More of these tiny insights into a street existence were to be found around the walls ready to captivate me. What a truly a great way to experience art – by accident and in disbelief.
Samuel Zealey extends this exploration in reflections on the imagination of youth. His diagrammatic plans for paper planes lend weight to the childhood insistence that things happen because you say they do. I can fly in my own plane and it can be made out of the back page of an exercise book or indeed a large sheet of steel.
Marc Beattie’s work with FRAGILE tape struck me as an intriguing observation on what we try to send through the post, including people who have posted themselves. These pieces are a pertinent reflection upon issues to do with human travel and specifically immigration and human trafficking.
Image Above: Bob Hinks, Festival
In a similar vein Russell Herron presents us with the problem of our concepts of worth and how our prejudices are affected by a debasement of material. The throwaway becomes takes on value when time and skill are introduced to explore it as an artistic resource. Both Herron, with pencil, and Beattie, with paint, use highly accomplished observational work to transport objects which appear almost castoffs into high art.
Isabel Young and Bob Hinks both exploit the use of boxes as a way to enclose and frame the work and in Hinks’s piece literally a whole festival is contained in a suitcase.
Young uses a box to contain a form of magical storytelling with devices such as ladders being used as ways of directing our thoughts. It’s as if we have encountered a strange mining process which both astounds us but also makes us worry about the whereabouts of the inhabitants.
On encountering the work of Sasha Bowles the pomp and ceremony of a classical interior meets the dream world of a futuristic scenario which questions the way that we perceive time and the restraints that occur within the norm.
Tom Down has a multilayered approach which deals with the concept of landscape being idealised and romanticised. As with Bowles we have an experience which questions the way that we view a situation and how we introduce stylisation as a way of deliberation.
With the work of Kim Keever we again have the use of the incidental or accidental to explore emotive visual imagery by dropping paint into water and photographing and recording it. A split-second of motion that could occur within an expressive painting technique is frozen in time.
In contrast to this approach, in the work of Melanie Miller we find we can discover new worlds in woodland. A dusky sneaking among trees until a hollow reveals a peek into another being’s world, home, nest or comfort zone. Out of the darkness comes a separate world which is a haven from danger, a mossy nook in a perilous world.
Throughout the exhibition there is an incredible feeling of an intense involvement with the puzzles that life can present and ways of manipulating art that can be discovered to explore and extend them. This is a process which can help partially explain but in real terms opens up new questions.
There are 17 artists in the exhibition and there were no weak links. This is a reflection on the intelligent and informed way that the show was curated. Hinks and Losq have a wide knowledge and a deep understanding of the processes that fire creativity. It is a credit to their approach that the show works so well as an exploration of how artists actually source their activity. The exhibition opened out the possibilities of scale, extended our conceptions of illusion and redefined the ways in which we consider space. It was also immensely enjoyable and asked all the right questions.
The Cello Factory is a real discovery.
List of exhibitors:
Jonathan Alibone,
Marc Beattie,
Sasha Bowles,
Louise Bristow,
Tom Down,
Russell Herron,
Alexander Hinks,
Bob Hinks,
Kim Keever,
Juliette Losq,
Melanie Miller,
Suzanne Moxhay,
Patrick O’Sullivan,
Thomas J Ridley,
Gail Seres-Woolfson,
Isabel Young,
Samuel Zealey
Review written by Dave Stephens. 2021.
©Dave Stephens.
Image Above: Juliette Losq, Erebus. Samuel Zealey, UFO. Alexander Hinks, Astral.