Louis Appleby Liz Ford Maggie Hargreaves
Artificial Landscapes Exhibition of the Emerging Artists Programme Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal 1 May - 15 June 2015
Empty Room
Louis Appleby
Richard Foster
Chief Executive, Brewery Arts Centre
We are delighted to welcome you to Artificial Landscapes, the exhibition which marks the completion of the Brewery’s first Emerging Artist’s Programme for Visual Artists at the Brewery. Working with partners Castlefield Gallery has been an exciting experience, challenging the organisation as well as the artists themselves in how it seeks to develop the careers of new artists, especially in a rural location. Alongside the visual arts programme, the Brewery has also been piloting a programme of support for performing artists at the start of their professional career, working with our Youth Arts department. I believe the Brewery is now well placed to continue its work with emerging artists into the future and we hope you enjoy the fruits of this first remarkable programme.
Global Warming on the TV
Power Country
Louis Appleby
Liz Ford The view from Newbarns beach is a favourite location and a great place to paint out of doors. Whitbarrow Scar undulates on the far shore with more distant hills disappearing into the far horizon. The mysterious waters and currents of Morecambe bay beckon from the near shore’s grassy banks. Newbarns to Whitbarrow
This painting depicts the walk from from Far Arnside to Newbarns with its many views of the bay shrouded by trees. However, perhaps all is not as it should be - the rising trees in the immediate foreground of this painting have been ‘borrowed’ from Derwent Water.
Kwong Lee
Director, Castlefield Gallery
Castlefield Gallery is delighted to be involved in The Brewery Arts Centre’s Emerging Artists Programme (EAP) 2014-15, from being part of the panel of the Open Up North competition, to creating a bespoke series of artist development events for EAP artists and mentoring sessions for the three selected mentees. The events we programmed have brought in a number of professionals and artists working in contemporary art to share their expertise on selforganisation and marketing; how to work with curators and commercial galleries; and how to gain resources such as funding and other development opportunities. We organised the events to take
place in Liverpool, Manchester and Kendal to encourage the artist’s awareness of the art ecosystem across the North West, as each event has also included informal tours of selected art venues relevant to emerging artists. It has been a pleasure to work with the three mentored artists who have different backgrounds and needs. Starting with studio visits with Louis Appleby, Liz Ford and Maggie Hargreaves, we have been in regular contact to respond to their specific ambitions, and provide a mixture of critical feedback on their work and practical advice on their development as artists.
Heysham in Perspective 2
The contrasts between the town and the hillside and the segments/layers of time and history. The hills and castle rising above the town centre; its town hall nestling yet rising to the sky. Then up the other side of the hill with the chimneys and air conditioning conduits. Capturing man’s hand throughout the painting.
Scout Scar is a favourite location and has inspired a good number of my paintings. The title of ‘Heysham in Perspective’ seems appropriate both in terms of tackling the vastness of Lyth Valley, and that, there in the far distance, innocently sits the power station.
Liz Ford
Kendal Town Hall
The painting of Kendal town hall was an image I captured whilst wandering up and down the winding streets and yards of Kendal. It summed up my first experiences of looking at the town when I moved to Kendal in 2008.
Maggie Hargreaves Print The delicate prints combine photo-etching and soft ground etching processes to re-present photographic and natural materials together.
Assortment 1
Scale is manipulated so that people and the other species represented are of equal importance, co-existing in a web of forms floating on the picture plane.
Jamie Barnes Funders Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is delighted to be supporting Brewery Art Centre’s Open Up North Emerging Artists Programme, showcasing emerging Northern talent and strengthening the visual arts in Cumbria. We hope that by supporting these types of initiative, artists in all parts of the UK will be able to find the opportunities to make long term and sustainable contributions to the cultural life of their area.
Curator
It has been my absolute pleasure to work alongside Louis, Maggie and Liz to help them plan, curate and hang ‘Artificial Landscapes’. From changing the colour of the gallery, to balancing three very different art styles, the process has been an enjoyable challenge. I was even able to pass on several of my Curators’ top tips. The development of the artists’ work over the last year is plain to see. It is testament to their commitment and drive, and to Castlefield’s excellent mentoring programme. I wish all three artists very best wishes in their continuing art careers.
Space Invaders
Assortment 2
These large charcoal drawings attend to our relationship with the outside world. The inclusion of children playing in the woods hints at nostalgia but this also queries where they are now; in what ways has our society moved on so our children no longer play out freely?
Boy Placed Beside Tree Swing
The Space Invaders drawing concerns our use of land and its recovery or otherwise, after we have moved on. The drawing process involves leaving white spaces on the paper and completely covering the remainder with charcoal. The image emerges from the blackened paper by repeated erasure and reinstatement of line and tone and gradually detail is defined. The bright white areas are untouched bare paper showing through the layers of charcoal dust. These large, immersive drawings invite viewers to enter the depicted spaces and scenes, through scale and the level of ‘almost reality’ achieved. As the work is approached, the drawing marks re-assert themselves as such and the illusion is broken. The artifice of their construction is made evident in revealing gestural processes and materiality, creating a state of vacillation in the viewer between the drawing space and the gallery space.
Maggie Hargreaves
Drawings
“I’d describe myself as a self taught hardworking artist who has settled down to working with oil on canvas. The process from stretching my own canvasses to priming and getting started on an image is totally absorbing. Using oil paint is a slow deliberate process giving time to pause and consider. My earlier work entailed extensive use of palette knives. The need for a wider range of mark making brought about my use of brushes, and the palette knife is now used very sparingly. I like the flatness that brushes enable, more effectively creating the illusion I have in mind. “Initially I painted figures and portraits, which are readily defined by their own borders. Landscape painting came about more gradually following careful looking and re-looking before choosing a framed image from the landscape which included those elements that gave a composition I wanted to work with. For me the image comes first and has to stand alone without explanation. It may be that a story will may become apparent; possible references to other subjects may be alluded to. Essentially, interpretation such as there may be, is left to the viewer.”
Helsington Old School
Maggie creates scenes which are not what they appear to be: although the places are believable, their photographic starting points have been digitally manipulated then mediated by drawing or printmaking. Re-presentation in a processed form takes the scenes a further step away from reality, blurring boundaries and challenging our understanding of what is real and what is fictional. This re-presentation refers to our acceptance of a secondary experience of the world through internet and TV etc.
Feral
Using drawing, print, sculpture and installation Maggie Hargreaves explores the constantly shifting space where we interact with the natural world, considering how we deal with it physically, socially and culturally. Our increasing reliance on indirect experience of our surroundings through TV, internet and cinema alters the way we treat what’s actually there.
Louis Appleby was born 1991 in Lancaster, and currently lives and works in Manchester. He graduated in June 2014 from Wimbledon College of Arts, where he did a degree in Painting. He recently won 2015 Young Artist of the Year award in the Lynn Painter Stainers Prize at the Mall Galleries London. The painting can be seen on his website: www.louisappleby.co.uk “I produce work that explores the relationship between ourselves and the world. I paint a constructed version of reality combining images from the TV and from the internet. Man’s image is reflected in the things he buys and the home he lives in, it is reflected by the trophies that hang on his walls. His opinions are shaped by the things he watches on TV and reads in the news. I use imagery that vaguely hints at things like world warfare, animal extinction and global warming. This open ended imagery allows for multiple different readings of the paintings.”
3D Printer
Maggie Hargreaves Liz Ford Louis Appleby
After working as a Research Biologist, Maggie recently studied Fine Art at Bolton University gaining a BA (1st class) in 2011. She has exhibited throughout the UK and is the 2014 winner of the John Ruskin Prize for Drawing.
The Brewery Arts Centre, 122a Highgate, Kendal, Cumbria. LA9 4HE
www.breweryarts.co.uk