Arts Council Collection Acquisitions 2018-19

ACQUISITIONS 2018–19

RACHAL BRADLEY3 FLO BROOKS5 PAUL COLDWELL7 KATIE CUDDON9 JESSE D A R L I N G 13 F R A N C E S D I S L E Y 15 J A C Q U E L I N E D O N A C H I E 17 C O S E Y F A N N I T U T T I 21 R O S E F I N N - K E L C E Y 25 H O L L Y H E N D R Y 27 E V A N I F E K O Y A 29 Y O U N G I N H O N G 31 R A C H E L H O W A R D 33 C L A U D E T T E J O H N S O N 35 G I L L I A N L O W N D E S 37 C H A R L I E M E E C H A M 39 D A W N M E L L O R 43 I M R A N P E R R E T T A 47 M I C K P E T E R 49 S U S A N P U I S A N L O K 51 T A I S H A N I 55 H A Y L E Y T O M P K I N S 57 J O H N W A L T E R 61 Z A D I E X A 65 R E H A N A Z A M A N 69

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CONTENTS

The Arts Council Collection continues to grow through the purchase of new work every year. In 2018–19, 59 works by 25 artists were acquired for the nation. Recommendations to purchase works of art are made by a changing group of external advisers to the Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Committee.

For 2018–19 they were: Anthea Hamilton, artist; Charlotte Keenan, Curator of British Art at Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool; Helen Nisbet, curator and Artistic Director, Art Night, London and Fato Üstek, Director and Chief Curator at David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF).

The chairman of the Acquisitions Committee for 2018–19 was Sir Nicholas Serota, Chair, Arts Council England. The three permanent members of the Acquisitions Committee are: Jill Constantine, Director, Arts Council Collection; Peter Heslip, Director, Visual Arts, Arts Council England and Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery, London.

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INTRODUCTION

Rachal Bradley b. 1979, Blackpool, UK. Lives and works in Nottingham, UK. Rachal Bradley is interested in systems as a ‘set of things working together as parts of an interconnecting network; a complex whole’. Investigating the overlaps and interlaps between different system operations, the focus of her work is not necessarily the finished product, but the processes of relations created therein.

Interlocutor, 2018 was first shown as part of the artist’s solo exhibition of the same name at Gasworks, London. Here, her series of purposeengineered, vacuum-formed units were installed on the exterior building.

The network of red power cables also encircled and penetrated the institution’s hidden areas, such as offices, corridors and a terrace. Inside each unit is a component which expels negative ions into the surrounding atmosphere. Negative ions are said to be abundant in nature, especially present in waterfalls and thunderstorms, and to bring energy and vitality to humans. Adorning Gasworks’ facade like a complex alarm system, the units transformed the organisation into a large negative ion generator.

Bradley plays with this overt visual reference to security and privacy, as well as the inversion of a ‘negative’ force into a ‘positive’.

The exhibition Interlocutor was commissioned and produced by Gasworks, through the Freelands Artist Programme, in partnership with Künstlerhaus Stuttgart.

Interlocutor, 2018 Vacuum-formed high-impact polystyrene, electrical components, wiring, junction box and installation hardware Dimensions variable Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich Photo: Andy Keate

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Flo Brooks b. 1987, Exeter, UK. Lives and works in Brighton, UK. The work of Flo Brooks spans painting, collage, drawing and sculpture.

His works represent numerous thoughts, experiences and themes that are often autobiographical, referencing family, communities and coming-of-age.

Bringing together notions of cleanliness, normativity and morality by way of dramatised satirical fiction, the artist explores the ways the body is manipulated through the lens of hygiene.

YessSIR! Back off! Tell me who l am again?! and Butts Only (that’s the sound that lonely makes), both 2018, were made on the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition at Project Native Informant, Scrubbers. The show consisted of five works that described a fictional commercial cleaning company working its way through a number of familiar institutional spaces – a public toilet, gym, a psychotherapy room – punctuated by coffee and cigarette breaks. The spaces represented in the paintings are those Brooks traversed during his own hormone transition and mental health support, and describe particular hygienic acts he’s exercised in a bid to recover his ‘authentic’ gendered, material and psychic self. Checkered with uncertainty, they feel more like spaces of entrapment and desperation.

People, objects, architecture and motifs are deliberately arranged in the works to convey a frantic tension. Brooks uses irony to mock the fact that the hygienic practices and commodities promising us ever easier, clean, authentic, and better ways to be so often lead to economic hardship and poor mental health.

YessSIR! Back off! Tell me who I am again?!, 2018 Acrylic on wood 197 x 177 x 4.5 cm Butts Only (that’s the sound that lonely makes), 2018 Acrylic on wood 109 x 136 x 4.5 cm Images courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Paul Coldwell b. 1952, London, UK. Lives and works in London.

Paul Coldwell’s practice includes print, sculpture and installation. He is interested in the capacity of domestic objects to contain and prompt memories and ideas. His works deal with notions of negative space, absence, loss and voids, responding to things that are present and speculating on things that seem missing. His exhibition at the Freud Museum in 2014 was the result of visual research into the archives of the Museum and Bethlem Royal Hospital, and engaged with notions of anxiety, self-perception, worth and identity.

What Remains – Possessions, 2015 is a print from the artist’s series What Remains, which explores how photographs can both reveal and conceal. The objects depicted were originally cast in white resin and made for Coldwell’s Freud Museum exhibition. Through the juxtaposition of the items in the image, such as scissors and a scenic postcard of a snowy cabin, Coldwell aims to convey emotion, rather than simply relying on gestural mark-making. He weaves together elements in a way which suggests the fabric of one’s self, in which conflicting aspects are held together, reflecting on the passing of time and fragility of life.

A Mapping in White, 2013 Screen print and relief dusted with metallic pigment 98.5 x 77 cm Edition 11 of 20 What Remains – Possessions, 2015 Etching 57 x 65 cm Edition 9 of 10 Gifts of the artist, 2018 Images courtesy of the artist

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Katie Cuddon b. 1979, London, UK. Lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Katie Cuddon has worked with clay since 1999, when she was studying at Glasgow School of Art. Her objects are difficult to define; they seem elusive and non-specific, not quite one thing or another. She feels that they occupy “an awkward space in-between subjects and consciously overt language. I think of the works as linguistic stutters and exponents of the inadequacy of words”.

The surfaces of the works, which are modelled and then painted, sometimes in a uniform colour or multiple layers of paint, seem to have been applied, rubbed away and reapplied; the effect is to make them seem almost restless or on edge. Shame, 2014 resembles a cowering creature, burying its head beneath itself; it’s possible to imagine its clotted pink skin quivering. A Problem of Departure, 2013 suggests a pillow clasped between dimpled thighs. Discussing her work, Cuddon has cited the twentieth-century French sculptor Germaine Richier, who said of using clay as a recorder of marks: “The more you touch it, the more it screams.”

Untitled, 2016 Black, buff and painted ceramic 17 x 9 x 13 cm

Listener, 2015 Painted ceramic, sheep’s wool, wood 17 x 29 x 24 cm

Photo: the artist

Photo: Jamie Woodley

Shame, 2014 Painted ceramic 50 x 37 x 77 cm

Exhibition, 2014 Painted ceramic and wood 104 x 120 x 52 cm

Photo: Cell Project Space, London

Photo: Jamie Woodley

A Problem of Departure, 2013 Painted ceramic, pillow 64 x 43 x 30 cm

Images courtesy of the artist

Photo: Fernando Maquieira

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2018–19

Katie Cuddon

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2018–19

Jesse Darling b. 1980, Oxford, UK. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany and London, UK. Jesse Darling’s sculptures, drawings and objects consider the vulnerability of the human body, while expressing a desire to resist the constraints imposed on our lives by social and political forces.

Their work Brazen Serpent, 2018 is a warped mobility crane, coiled to resemble a snake. It was created as part of the exhibition The Ballad of Saint Jerome, shown at Tate Britain in 2018. The works in the exhibition explored the story of Saint Jerome and the lion. According to legend, Jerome, a fourth-century Christian scholar best known for having translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, was confronted by a ferocious lion. Instead of reacting in fear, he recognised that the animal was injured and removed a thorn from its paw. Once tamed, the lion became his lifelong companion. For Darling, the fable is about power as well as healing, and raises questions about control, captivity and the subjugation of otherness. In the exhibition at Tate Britain, Darling populated the gallery space with works made from everyday objects and materials. These took on the appearance of both wounded and liberated shapes. While contorted canes have been a recurring motif in Darling’s practice, in this exhibition they became ‘serpents’, taking on a new symbolic dimension and questioning how we perceive objects as well as bodies.

Brazen Serpent, 2018 Steel, aluminium mobility cane, rubber ferrule, lacquer 93 x 120 x 34 cm Installation view The Ballad of Saint Jerome, Tate Britain, London, UK, 2018 Image courtesy of the artist and Arcadia Missa, London Photo: Tom Carter

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2018–19

Frances Disley b. 1976 Warrington, UK. Lives and works in Liverpool, UK. Frances Disley works with form and colour, using her own body to animate the painted objects and surfaces that she creates. She explores the potential of working with performance, which expands the gesture of painting across sculptures, garments and backdrops. These elements are always inhabited by and presented in relation to the moving body; objects, surfaces and bodies become integrated and activated. Presenting performances that are in a state of flux and open up opportunities for the audience to participate, the artist encourages an embodied experience of the work.

As a starting point, Disley often explores activities associated with the desire for self-betterment. Recent multi-sensory performance works have drawn from the vocabulary of popular activities associated with wellness, such as meditation, aromatherapy and exercise classes. RRR, 2018 stands for ‘Release, Re-Energise, Restore’ and took the form of a live dance workout class within a sports centre in Netherton, north Liverpool. This hybrid work existed as a free weekly class that ran for six weeks, in which the participants were surrounded by textile works and utilised art objects while completing a workout. A subsequential video work acts as an instructional version of the dance workout.

RRR was commissioned by Sefton Libraries in 2018 as part of their At the Library series.

RRR, 2018 Single channel video and textiles backdrops, garments, yoga mat, trainers and ribbon 34 min 19 sec Image courtesy of the artist Photo: George Ellis

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2018–19

Jacqueline Donachie b. 1969, Glasgow, Scotland. Lives and works in Glasgow.

Jacqueline Donachie is interested in the structures, platforms and spaces (both actual and conceptual) in and through which we construct and support ourselves.

The concept for her video work Pose Work for Sisters, 2016 came from her consideration of the work of Bruce McLean, specifically his photographic and performance pieces Pose Work for Plinths, 1971. Donachie found the use of both the term and the action of posing, employed throughout Bruce McLean’s practice, to be compelling. The staged format of McLean’s original photograph, with its playful, spirited images of a young man awkwardly posing in a staged setting reminded Donachie of a set of photographs taken with her sister Susan in 1995, long before she was diagnosed with a genetic illness. The artist decided to capture a moment their physical similarity had begun to separate, when Susan was expecting her first child. In the piece, two women wearing black are walking, sitting and standing. When they are static, little separates them, but as they move on and off the plinths there are subtle differences in gait, posture and ability that speak of inheritance in many forms. Deciding against studio lighting, the two had to work quickly to make best use of daylight; a spontaneous, uncomplicated session measured mainly by what Susan could and could not physically manage.

Text based on an extract from Illuminating Loss: The capacity for artworks to shape research and care in the field of genetics; Jacqueline Donachie, Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University 2016.

Pose Work for Sisters was commissioned by Glasgow Museums for the exhibition Deep in the Heart of Your Brain, 2016 and part funded by Northumbria University (doctoral research by the artist) and Glasgow Museums.

Following the making of this work, Donachie came across a black and white photograph that was taken in her studio, also in 1995. This shows a number of her ‘posed pieces’ on a contact sheet on the wall, including those taken with her sister, alongside a full-sized single portrait of Donachie herself from the same series. Exhibited as a new print (Studio 1995, 2016), this work provided a subtle framing for Pose Work for Sisters, in indicating this early body of work, the use of black and white photography and contact sheets, and a striking image of a young woman posing.

Pose Work for Sisters, 2016 Digital video 10 min 1 sec Edition 2 of 3 + 2 AP Studio 1995, 2016 Digital print on Hahnemühle photo rag 110 x 180 cm Edition 2 of 10 Images courtesy of the artist and Patricia Fleming Projects, Glasgow

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Jacqueline Donachie

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2018–19

Cosey Fanni Tutti b. 1951, Hull, UK. Lives and works in the UK. Cosey Fanni Tutti began her career in 1969, appearing in art performances and musical improvisations in and around Hull until 1972. In 1973, she moved to London and continued working as a performance artist. Often working naked in her performances, Cosey went on to investigate selfimage within the context of sex magazines and sex films, glamour modelling and striptease acts. Her experiences within these industries were brought into her artwork, seeing her explore the many aspects of sex as it is perceived and transacted as a commercial product.

Her series ‘Throbbing Gristle’ Partner, Vol. 1, No. 9, February, 1980 questions claims of authorship and modes of circulation. Unlike her other ‘magazine action’ works, the images, layout and text in Throbbing Gristle, in and amongst the pages of the entire magazine, portray Cosey as an artist, musician and a model, creating a cult of celebrity of sorts, a different kind of persona. This disclosure unmoors, at least from the outside, how a practice may be perceived and how, from the inside, labour can be defined.

Here, the artist’s practice can be understood as a way of life, a way of doing as being. This is literally and figuratively embedded in the magazine’s adverts, news items, photos, stories and illustrations. A diagram of the sex industry as much as a document of society, the work also considers what happens spatially when the private practice of consuming porn is made public as art.

‘Throbbing Gristle’ Partner, Vol. 1, No. 9, February, 1980 Magazine action, lithography on paper 5 parts, each 148 x 112 cm Images courtesy of the artist and CABINET, London Photo: Mark Blower

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Cosey Fanni Tutti

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2018–19

Rose Finn-Kelcey b. 1945, Northampton, UK. d. 2014, London, UK. From the 1970s, Rose Finn-Kelcey became a central figure in the emerging communities of performance and feminist art in the UK. In addition to performance she worked in a variety of media including video, sound, installation, sculpture, photography, papercut and posters, her practice deeply related to her ongoing engagement and negotiation with the world as a woman. Her works are conceptually powerful, and characterised by her dry wit. They consider social dialogue, populism and activism, and how these tools of communication intersect with complex systems of power.

Finn-Kelcey also engaged with religion and spirituality in her artwork, though this remained playful, seeing her produce objects that often appear cartoon-like. God’s Bog, 2001 is a toilet cast in Jesmonite, perhaps intended to resemble excrement, though it curls delicately like a seashell.

Displayed with the seat open invitingly, it aims to ask the question: “Can waste be recycled to infinity?”

God’s Bog, 2001 Jesmonite, polypropylene, paint 45.7 x 43.2 x 40.6 cm Image courtesy of the Estate of Rose Finn-Kelcey. © Estate of Rose Finn-Kelcey

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Holly Hendry b. 1990, Isleworth, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. Holly Hendry is interested in defining the architecture of spaces by exploring the possibilities of surface, colour and density, which is inherent in the wide range of materials she uses in her installations. The shifting scales and unusual positioning of her works encourage visitors to consider sculpture in dialogue with their surroundings, whilst also investigating the notion of absence, in the form of hollow spaces or voids.

Gut Feelings (Stromatolith), 2016 is a geological-style cross section that references undersides, be it subterranean or subcutaneous. It deals with ideas of preservation and putrefaction, ingestion, consumption, accumulation and compression. The sculpture consists of metal props, rock salt, marble chunks and comically sculptural dog chew bones. The white metal framework around the piece supports the cast sections that appear to have been sliced, implying that they are part of a larger system or object. Shapes like bite marks can be discerned in the metal, presenting it as a malleable thing that breaks the rules of the material’s usual properties and function. With organic and synthetic interspersed and their detail exaggerated, the work speaks of accretion, and the idea of the materials that outlive us building up in the world, with nowhere to go.

Gut Feelings (Stromatolith), 2016 Plaster, steel, aluminium, cement, marble Jesmonite, birch plywood, pigment, rock salt, soap, rawhide dog chew 170 x 225 x 100.5 cm Image courtesy of the artist

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2018–19

Evan Ifekoya b. 1988, Iperu, Nigeria. Lives and works in London, UK. Evan Ifekoya’s work seeks to start from a place of abundance rather than scarcity, plural over singular. Their moving image, sound and performance practices speak to, and with, the many intersecting forces that constitute their works. Using tools such as speculative fiction, polyvocality, cooperative making and personal ritual, Ifekoya questions and reconstitutes black queer knowledge production.

Ritual Without Belief, 2018 is a six-hour sound piece made by Ifekoya, in collaboration with friends and family. The enveloping, immersive sounds contain breathing meditations, recitations of Claudia Rankine’s writings, intimate conversations, music by Sade and more. Ifekoya describes the sound work as a “black queer algorithm”, a repeating and responsive code.

It is a system through which the artist processes information from different times and places, gathered over several years. Their digital photo series recentres the body and its spiritual-material relationship to the natural world. The small and everyday exist in conjunction with the expansiveness of oceans and time to reiterate flux and fluidity. Ifekoya draws from community, intimacy and the rhythms of daily practice. Each work, layered and contingent, echoes a central theme: that there is no ritual without belief.

The exhibition Ritual Without Belief was commissioned and produced

by Gasworks, with major support from Arts Council England, Catherine Petitgas and Gasworks’ Exhibitions Programme Supporters 2018–19.

The Gender Song, 2014 HD video 2 min 32 sec Edition 2 of 3 + 2 AP

Ritual Without Belief, 2018 Audio 6 hours Edition 3 of 3 + 2 AP

Ritual Without Belief, 2018 Digital photo series, giclée print 84.1 x 59.4 cm Edition 3 of 10 + 5 AP

Images courtesy of the artist

No 1_Start From a Place of Abundance Photo: Bernice Mulenga

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Young In Hong b. 1972, Seoul, South Korea. Lives and works in Bristol, UK. The work of Young In Hong encompasses drawing, textiles, sound installation and performance. She aims to investigate the processes and ideas around authorship, translation and reinterpretation. Hong’s large-scale embroidered textile works are often based on photographs and archival imagery, including moments of collective experiences such as protests and demonstrations in recent Korean history. They also allude to the politics and economics of the global textiles industry.

Burning Love, 2014 illustrates a scene from a candle-lit vigil that was held in Seoul, South Korea in 2008. The demonstration was triggered by the Korean government’s reversal of a ban on US beef imports and saw thousands of people take to the streets to join the protest, making it one of the most important democratic events in Korea’s modern history. However, very little was done to document this by mainstream media. Composed using viscose rayon threads and cotton, the meticulously embroidered image in oversaturated blue, orange, yellow and red portrays the crowd, each person marked by a dot of light. Through her painstaking method, Young In Hong encapsulates this under-reported event in a way which is poetic and poignant.

Burning Love was commissioned for the exhibition Spectrum Spectrum

by PLATEAU museum, Seoul, 2014.

Burning Love, 2014 Viscose rayon threads, embroidered image on cotton 290 x 360 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Cecilia Hillström Gallery, Stockholm Photo: Jean-Baptiste Beranger

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2018–19

Rachel Howard b. 1969, County Durham UK. Lives and works in London, UK. Rachel Howard plays with the tensions between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction.

Working mainly as a painter, she revels in the joy of the material and the intense physicality of her process. Over the past 25 years, religion, repetition, mortality, fragility, uncertainty, madness and violence have been recurring themes in her works.

Circle Square, 2015 comes from a series of grid and line paintings. These consist of intricate overlapping lines and disintegrated surfaces, which hint at unstable worlds, entropy and collapse. Howard often displays an irreverence for her material; for example, in the 1990s and early 2000s she used only household gloss paint, wanting to humanise this functional medium used mainly for painting doors and windows. Here, she used gravity as an invisible paintbrush to attain the desired effect, freeing herself from more traditional painting methods and nodding to her heroes, the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. The past decade has seen Howard return to oil paint for the first time since her teens and, once more, a desire to use this medium in an obtuse manner.

Circle, Square, 2015 Oil on canvas 61 x 61 cm Gift of the artist and Blain|Southern, 2018 Image courtesy of the artist and Blain|Southern, London

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2018–19

Claudette Johnson b. 1959, Manchester, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. Claudette Johnson honours the form, figure and strength of Black women in her drawings and paintings. The large scale of her work, combined with the sensuality of her style, establishes presence and quiet power. As a student she became one of the founding artists behind the BLK Art Group, and later helped catalyse the Black feminist art movement in the UK. Johnson’s work is attuned to the politics of representation within the arts, the depth of emotion held within a body and the capacity for drawing and painting to accentuate fluidity.

“I am interested in interrupting the linear narrative of portraiture and reinforcing a lack of fixity in drawing”, says Johnson. Figure in Blue, 2018 depicts a sitter whose body is turned away as she looks over her shoulder, gaze averted. The work is one of a series of drawings in which Johnson asked the sitter to put their body in a state of tension or contortion.

Monochrome pastels describe the figure’s unease, while flowing cerulean blue gouache hints at freedom of movement.

Figure in Blue, 2018 Gouache and pastel on paper 163 x 133 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London Photo: Andy Keate

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2018–19

Gillian Lowndes b. 1936, Merseyside, UK. d. 2010, London, UK. Gillian Lowndes operated on the border between fine art and craft and is renowned for her sensitive investigations of material and process, of serendipity and sculptural form. Pigeonholed by the craft establishment of the time, her work predated the expanded ceramics field of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, while her pioneering transformation of clay and found objects places her firmly in the language and discourse of sculpture, a critical context that remained closed to her in her lifetime.

Untitled, 1976 is from an important period for Lowndes, in which she began to use hand-building processes to construct intricate, basket-like pieces and complex architectonic structures. She used stacks of rolled clay and experimented with string and strips of fabric, dipping these in porcelain slip before firing. This marks a symbolic moment in her practice, as it was the first time she incorporated non-ceramic materials into her work. The piece retains the language of clay while referencing textiles – the legacy of her time in Nigeria in the early 1970s, where the West African art she experienced had a natural combination of different materials. This experience had a profound influence on Lowndes, prompting a major turning point in her career.

Untitled, 1976 Rolled clay dipped in porcelain slip 19 x 33 x 33 cm Image courtesy of the Estate of Gillian Lowndes and The Sunday Painter, London. © Estate of Gillian Lowndes

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2018–19

Charlie Meecham b. 1950, Oxfordshire, UK. Lives and works in Hebden Bridge, UK. Charlie Meecham’s upbringing in a rural environment has underpinned his practice throughout his life. With extensive experience in photographic processes, including film and digital, his works reflect an interest in photographic history and discourse.

The artist made a number of images in the Forest of Dean in 2018, part of an ongoing project that investigates how we relate to our immediate and surrounding environment. The series considers how trees behave in both rural and urban situations, as well as exploring topical concerns relating to our threatened environment. Scientists have helped us to understand how forests can reduce erosion and modify weather patterns; meanwhile, the increasing consumption of our dwindling natural resources seems too powerful a force to counter. Combined, this conjures a sense of isolation, anxiety and loss in these works. The artist suggests that a growing disconnect has developed between us and what we have come to term ‘the natural world’. In an attempt to overcome his feelings of detachment, Meecham plans walks through woodland in the UK and further afield.

Rather than seeking out classic perfection in individual trees, he is interested in commenting on the life forces expressed through chance growth and aberration. For him, sometimes fallen branches can appear limb-like, almost human. He also reflects on how different species of trees interact with each other, behaving differently depending on the locations in which they grow, another human trait.

Forest of Dean 1, 2018 Archival digital print 41 x 50 cm Edition 3 of 25

Forest of Dean 4, 2018 Archival digital print 41 x 50 cm Edition 3 of 25

Forest of Dean 2, 2018 Archival digital print 41 x 50 cm Edition 3 of 25

Forest of Dean 5, 2018 Archival digital print 41 x 50 cm Edition 3 of 25 Gifts of the artist, 2018 Images courtesy of the artist

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Charlie Meecham

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ACQUISITIONS

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2018–19

Dawn Mellor b. 1970, Manchester, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. Predominantly a painter, Dawn Mellor is perhaps best known for her parodic portraits of celebrities. Her work often deals with sexuality and violence and explores the intricacies of fame, identity and politics.

Her series The Austerians depicts a selection of public figures from the worlds of entertainment, film and politics. The name ‘Austerians’ refers to a group of art industry professionals that formed a not-for-profit collective in the late 2000s to protest the rise of service industry jobs within which they found themselves self-employed after graduating from American and European colleges. Operating on the fringes of politics, fashion and conceptualism, the group was a short lived but influential team of curators, historians, gallerists and directors. Mellor is said to have worked with the group in 2006 as an intern.

The artist aims to interrogate how mass-media figures are depicted and the way they are interpreted and understood, with responses ranging from ambivalence, resentment, hostility and adoration to obsessive stalking. The paintings, which are intended to be displayed so that the subject is looking downwards, depict the group in frontal portraits wearing Edwardian maid uniforms. They seem to be confronting the viewer, turning the tables on the voyeur.

Chief Financial Officer (Bette Davis), 2013 Oil on canvas 102 x 76 cm Museum Director (Judith Anderson), 2013 Oil on canvas 102 x 76 cm Front Desk Manager (Whoopi Goldberg), 2013 Oil on canvas 102 x 76 cm Images courtesy of the artist

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2018–19

Dawn Mellor

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2018–19

Imran Perretta b. 1988, London, UK. Lives and works in London.

Imran Perretta’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses sound, performance, poetry and moving image. His video work 15 days, 2018 is inspired by the time that he spent with former inhabitants of the refugee camp near Calais, France that became known as the Jungle. After the camp was destroyed in 2016, its former inhabitants began living rough in the surrounding woods and fields. The title of the piece is not a measure of the length of Perretta’s stay, but rather a salute to the hastily made-up name of one of the people he befriended. The alias ‘15 days’ may allude to the period since this man’s latest temporary camp was demolished, or perhaps reference the time he has been waiting in limbo, in the hope of a new and better life. Perretta’s work realises this state of uncertainty, animating a bleak environment against a backdrop of dank digital trees and muddy scrubland, interspersed with handheld footage shot on location in France. We see a tent flapping in the breeze, its flimsy outline a reminder of all that stands between its occupant and the world. Uncomfortable yet compelling, the work captures the intense emotions of living on the edge, bringing them to the centre of the viewer’s thoughts.

15 days was commissioned for the Jerwood/FVU Awards 2018: Unintended Consequences, a collaboration between Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Film and Video Umbrella. FVU is supported by Arts Council England.

15 days, 2018 Single channel 16:9 HD video, stereo sound 12 min Edition 2 of 5 + 2 AP Image courtesy of the artist and Film and Video Umbrella, London

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2018–19

Mick Peter b. 1974, Berlin, Germany. Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

Glasgow-based sculptor Mick Peter transforms imagery derived from fiction, illustration and graphic design into lively installations. His works, which are made from materials such as concrete, resin and polyurethane, resemble quick hand-drawn sketches that seem to have been cut from paper and catapulted into three-dimensional space. Mixing humour and absurdity, he sets up visual jokes in which fallibilities and contradictions of form and style are playfully exposed.

Peter often theatrically positions his sculptures within large-scale, stagelike concrete environments or ‘mises-en-scènes’. Untitled (Figure carrying Zip), 2015 was made for the artist’s exhibition Pyramid Selling, which took place at Tramway, Glasgow in 2015. Here, a cast of illustrated characters inhabited the gallery space, appearing to work to move around huge blocks to create an enormous pyramid. The central character is a boss-like figure, who appears to be overseeing their productivity and checking his sales charts. The edges of the works are roughly finished and appear fuzzy, as though each figure is sliding in and out of focus, refusing to be static. The zip motif appears in a number of Peter’s works, perhaps referring to labour within the garment industry or collaborations between major fashion houses and artists.

Untitled (Figure carrying Zip), 2015 Metal frame, acrylic resin, rubber, paint 75 x 320 x 135 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Crèvecœur, Paris

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2018–19

susan pui san lok b. 1972, Essex, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. susan pui san lok is an artist, researcher and writer whose work questions notions of authenticity, translation and the changing materiality of objects over time. Her work ranges from installation and performance to moving image, sound and text. She carefully places archival and contemporary references in relation to one another, inviting viewers to imagine unknown histories. pui san lok’s work weaves critical feminist and postcolonial theory into familiar visual, aural and spatial cues.

For Trailers (RoCH Fans and Legends), 2015 the artist intercuts martial arts fight sequences with spinning scenes from Google Street View. She uses the titles, trailers, theme songs and publicity shots from 20 out of some 40 film adaptations of Louis Cha/Jin Yong’s The Condor Trilogy (1957–61), whose dynamic movement, colour and fantasy contrast with images of static suburban British high streets. Mundane and mythical landscapes overlap and diverge. These fantasies of fight or flight, forged from accessible and everyday footage, speak to wider poetics of diaspora, where place-making can be both banal and dramatic.

RoCH Fan, 2015 Concertina multiple 841 x 10 x 18 cm Edition 11 of 200 Image courtesy of the artist (detail) Photo: Marc Atkinson Trailers (RoCH Fans and Legends), 2015 Single-channel digital video, stereo sound 4 min Image courtesy of the artist

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2018–19

susan pui san lok

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2018–19

Tai Shani b. 1976, London, UK. Lives and works in London.

Tai Shani’s Dark Continent is a series of texts interpreted into performance, film and installation, as well as a commissioned soundtrack. The project is an expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan’s 1405 protofeminist text The Book of the City of Ladies, in which dialogues with three celestial females, ‘Reason’, ‘Rectitude’ and ‘Justice’, build a metaphorical protected city for women, using examples of important contributions women have made to Western civilisation and arguments that prove their intellectual and moral equality with men. In 2018, Dark Continent culminated in Dark Continent: Semiramis Performance, 2018, a large-scale, sculptural, immersive installation that also functioned as a site for a 12-part performance series presented over four days at Glasgow International, each documented episode focused on one of the characters of an allegorical ‘City of Women’.

The project draws on multiple references in addition to de Pizan’s text, including feminist science fiction, postmodern architecture and feminist and queer theory. These create both a physical and a conceptual space to critique contemporary gender constructs and imagine an alternative history.

The scale and scope of Tai Shani’s project challenges conceptions around traditional feminist art, which has historically centred on the domestic, craft, DIY and the personal body. Rather, Dark Continent considers feminist art practice in light of recent and ongoing rapid political shifts in regards to gender, race and class and how might art contribute in a meaningful way to these conversations.

Dark Continent: Semiramis Performance, 2018 12 Scripts 12 documentation films of performances Designs for installation Instructions for performance Notes on costume Files of posters and soundtrack Dimensions variable Performance at Tramway, Glasgow, 2018 Image courtesy of the artist Photo: Keith Hunter

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2018–19

Hayley Tompkins b. 1971, Leighton Buzzard, UK. Lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

For Hayley Tompkins, the act of painting is a process of thinking and exploring, rather than simply a means to produce images. Her works attempt to find new ways of challenging the medium’s transformational possibilities, in order to construct a balance between the pictorial and the physical. In her practice, she seeks to understand objects through an examination of the mimetic qualities of paint and painting.

Selecting items she happens to find around her, Tompkins draws upon their casual, familiar status while singling them out for attention. She calls the resulting works ‘objects’ rather than paintings or sculptures, and each one appears to have its own narrative; they are often weathered, as though they’ve been discarded then reclaimed by the artist. Her mark-making and colour choices are varied and often subdued, and could be described as lo-fi interventions. These works prompt us to slow down and observe our surroundings mindfully – a resolution decidedly at odds with the hustle and bustle of contemporary life.

Digital Light Pool CXVIII, 2018 Acrylic, plastic tray 22 x 30.5 x 5.5 cm Photo: Mareike Tocha Chair, 2011 Watercolour on wood 79 x 48 x 43 cm Photo: Mareike Tocha Spoon II, 2012 Found object 2 x 14.4 x 3.1 cm Photo: Ruth Clark Images courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

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2018–19

Hayley Tompkins

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2018–19

John Walter b. 1978, Dartford, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. John Walter’s work encompasses a diverse range of media, including painting, drawing, artist’s books, sculpture, costume, performance, video, sound, installation and spatial design. His oeuvre is characterised by an exuberant use of colour and pattern as well as an absurdist and tragicomic use of humour. He works serially, producing iterative bodies of work that accumulate to form large and distinct projects, and often collaborates with individuals and institutions such as other artists, scientists and museums in order to exchange images, ideas and narratives.

CAPSID (2018–19) incorporated 250 artworks, and was the result of a collaboration between the artist and molecular virologist Professor Greg Towers of University College London. The exhibition addressed a crisis of representation surrounding viruses such as HIV, by bringing new scientific knowledge about viral capsids to the attention of the wider public. Capsids are protein shells contained within viruses that help protect and deliver viruses to host cells during infection. The project used the imagery and narratives associated with research around capsids to create an immersive installation featuring drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, costumes, videos, film and sound, with an emphasis on privileging the handmade, the awkward and the asymmetrical, an aesthetic the artist describes as ‘shonky’. The title of A Virus Walks Into A Bar, 2018 came about after Walter began working on the CAPSID project; asked what it was about, he found himself replying, ‘Imagine a virus walks into a bar…’ This storytelling convention struck Walter as a pertinent way to narrate the life cycle of the virus in a clear, accessible way that anyone could understand – scientist, artist or other.

A total of 17 works have been acquired for the Arts Council Collection.

8 of these works are gifted by the artist.

CAPSID was co-commissioned by CGP London and HOME Manchester.

Supported by a Large Arts Award from Wellcome and Arts Council England Grants for the Arts.

A Virus Walks Into A Bar, 2018 HD video 19 min 54 sec Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP

Inhibitor, 2018 Gouache and acrylic on paper 25.7 x 35.7 cm Gift of the artist, 2018

Fist (Blue Shape), 2018 Red hulk drinking fist (beer cosy), expanding foam filler, milliput, vacuum-metallised in aluminium with cellulose 55 x 32 x 15 cm

Droid Torture, 2016 Ink and watercolour on hot-pressed Fabriano artistico paper 56 x 76 cm Images courtesy of the artist

Innate Sensing Mechanism (Crab), 2017 Sewn and stretched fabric with objects, expanding foam filler and silicone 183 x 140 x 20 cm Gift of the artist, 2018

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2018–19

John Walter

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2018–19

Zadie Xa b. 1983, Vancouver, Canada. Lives and works in London, UK. Working with performance, moving image, textiles and painting, Zadie Xa playfully interrogates the cultures that inform her experience within the Asian diaspora. She is interested in creating non-linear narratives that centralise around powerful archetypes, which are often female.

Moodrings, Crystals and Opal Coloured Stones, 2016 focuses on the central character of a Korean shaman, and channels the artist’s interest in magic, witchcraft and astrology. Fuelled by her research into female mudangs (or shaman) she develops a performance in which she acts out their rituals. Xa considers herself an ‘amateur’ in her understanding of Korean culture and identity, and therefore uses strategies of mimicry in attempts to perform or attain authenticity. In this video work, the artist wears SVN Stacks/Moon Marauder, 2015, an intricate, hand-sewn garment. Her textile works often combine references from contemporary streetwear, such as Western-style varsity athletic jackets, and traditional Korean folkloric clothing. The ‘G’ logo on this work references ‘Ganggangsullae’, an ancient Korean women’s folk dance that was performed under the brightest full moon. It also features familiar symbols used to identify Asian bodies as ‘other’: the commodified yin-yang symbol, lucky numbers and ‘monolid’ eyes. Her work’s deployment of these exaggerated motifs challenges perceptions of Asian identities, while creating new alternatives.

SVN Stacks/Moon Marauder, 2015 Synthetic hair on machine stitched and hand sewn fabric 130 x 165 cm Moodrings, Crystals and Opal Coloured Stones, 2016 HD video 21 min Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP Images courtesy of the artist

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2018–19

Zadie Xa

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2018–19

Rehana Zaman b.1982, Heckmondwike, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. Rehana Zaman’s moving image and performance practice attunes viewers to the intimacies and overlaps in lived experience. She considers the layered social dynamics at play in individual lives, and how these lives intersect with others’, often along racial, socio-economic and gendered axes. Zaman’s work is rich in textual references while also drawing from personal exchanges in public and domestic spaces.

Tell me the story Of all these things, 2017 is an accumulation of several narrative threads, which captures the fragmentation, hybridity and dislocation inherent in diasporic storytelling. The work takes its title from Korean-American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, a book that brings together thoughts, drawings and notes about Cha’s family history of migration to the United States. Its textured style and contrasting imagery is reflected in Zaman’s film, and is used to communicate experiences of British Muslim women with nuance and complexity. Candid conversation between Zaman and her two sisters is punctuated with screenshots of the UK government’s anti-terrorism e-Learning site ‘Prevent’ and ominous animated visions of a metamorphosing body in a desert-like landscape – a body caught between terror and desire. Throughout the film, Zaman pays close attention to the motion of hands while preparing food. Known but unspoken histories remain embedded in these gestures.

Tell me the story Of all these things, 2017 3 part HD video, stereo sound 22 min 47 sec Edition 1 of 3 + 1 AP Images courtesy of the artist

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2018–19

Unless otherwise stated, all works are Š the artist.

Texts by Grace Beaumont and Priya Jay. Graphic Design by Narrate + Kelly Barrow, narratestudio.co.uk, kellybarrow.co.uk

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The Arts Council Collection is based at Southbank Centre, London and at Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. For further information about the Arts Council Collection, please visit artscouncilcollection.org.uk To enquire about borrowing work from the Arts Council Collection, email loans@southbankcentre.co.uk To enquire about acquisitions and gifts to the Arts Council Collection, email acquisitions@southbankcentre.co.uk