'Flow' Catalogue by Tonbridge School

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Cover image: Solveig Settemsdal Singularity 2016 full HD video

( Flow is…..) ‘being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.’ *

‘Flow’ refers to the action of materials used to create the artworks in this exhibition – whether paint, gelatine, plaster, elastic or clay. It also refers to the state of mind that artists can become immersed in during the process of making. A state in which their skills, knowledge and experience of a material come together to enable them to work in a way that feels most like ‘intuition’. All the artists allow their materials, at least partly, to find their own form. Their creative process is a balance of controlled manipulation and openness to the mutability of chance. They are mediating the unexpected; whether this is paint sliding and shifting over its support (Alexis Harding) or ‘random’ computer algorithms creating forms that appear extraordinarily organic (Jonathan Keep). The results are an exhibition in which matter oozes, pours, sags, cracks and hangs in the balance, vitally influencing form and scale. Tension is created through the intention of the artist and the potential of the material. Accident, chance and design merge in this process that evokes the play of childhood and our first encounters with the way matter responds to touch. Cherry Smyth has shared this openness in her written response to the exhibition. Smyth visited each of the artists in their studios to engage directly with their work. I thank her for bringing her wide-ranging knowledge to the essay accompanying this catalogue, and for so eloquently sharing such thought provoking ideas about each practitioner. I also thank each of the artists for their immediate and warm response to the invitation to take part in the exhibition. And thank you too to our wonderful team of Gallery Stewards and Assistants without whom the exhibition programme would not be possible. EMILY GLASS, CURATOR

* Interview with the Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Garland, J. Go With The Flow Wired Magazine, Issue 4.09, September, 1996 3

‘ NOTHINGNESS COURSES THROUGH YOU’ BY CHERRY SMYTH

‘You make rivers, Ancient marshes But there you lose yourself, Losing your mass And that nothingness which courses through you.’ 1

Dive through a large wave and it appears hefty, almost solid, something that could crush you, a wall of water; yet, cup a handful of sea in your hand and it disappears, is utterly transient. All the artists in Flow are concerned with exploiting the tensions between mass and nothingness, between the fluid and the static, whether they are using spray paint, porcelain, rope, gelatin or plaster. Mobility has become so central to our social organisation through travel, both virtual and real; through our increasingly nomadic relationship to work, home, family and tradition, that we can’t help but see phenomena as plastic, contingent and changing. Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterises our state of constant flux as ‘liquid modernity’. He argues that while modernity celebrated the imposition of systems of categorisation and control to try to make society predictable, postmodernity signaled the failure of that model. He replaces the aim of lasting solidity with an acceptance of fluid social relations that leak through the grids we try to fix on them. As liquid modern humans, we are less bound by space and time: think avatars, and more prone to shifting rather than staying still. ‘Fluids,’ he argues, ‘neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize their impact and thus downgrade the significance of time… fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready… to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space …they fill “but for a moment.”’2 Alexis Harding’s painting experiments rely on the physical principles of flow. Reluctant at first to use a tool on his paintings, he liked to open his process to chance, time and temperature by using spray painted shapes on a wet oil ground. He works with the canvasses on the floor and then over weeks, tilts and turns them to encourage the shapes to slide on the surface, leaving a trace, before wrinkling and hardening into a second skin. The legacy of slow friction is a pleasurably smooth and thick gesture through the oil, 4

suggesting one body moving over another, influenced by the unseen laws of relationships whether it is fate, impulse or entropy. In paintings like Double Rebound (pinks), 2016, Harding uses the intersection of gravity and paint to revel in the imperceptible clinging and cloying intimacy creates. The minuscule arrests of motion also invoke the pull of gravity on human skin and how each of us must negotiate our disintegration. In FT, 2004, a black grid that defines and corners formalist abstraction slips down the picture plane and threatens to fall off, as if Harding is displaying the death of geometric hegemony. In Fill Line, 2013, the tactility of skin is evoked by the purplish streak down the centre of the putty pink like a wound or opening. Exploiting the ‘bad behaviour’ of paint, Harding celebrates mistakes of creases, wrinkles, air pockets, folds and drips that allow sculptural embodiment to emerge and failure to present itself as one-off success. Solveig Settemsdal’s practice also depends heavily on the chance chemistry of materials. In Singularity, 2016, she devised a system by which to inject a cube of white gelatin with white ink to invoke drawing with a liquid within a liquid and found a short window of malleability to film it. The white mass pulses as if with a heartbeat or breath, at times looking like a cell about to divide or a new life longing to break free from an embryonic sac. The ectoplasmic blob seems to move from micro to macro scale as our brain is compelled to try to comprehend its universe: it’s both empty and full; inside and outside the body; in a void and voidless at the same time. As jagged lines loop out from what appears to be a self-enveloping organism, ‘the drawings’ capture the latency of thinking and how a creative idea or insight seems to burst forth. Settemsdal renders the idea of the line and the line itself visible as if we are witnessing how a thought moves and is born through almost neooccultish means. It makes us wonder what is the generative spark that still distinguishes human from artificial intelligence. The video ends with the form folding back in on itself as though it’s eating itself. The activity fades and the form vanishes. The extraordinary conduit for inventing an entity that seems to have its own will and volition is gone. There is sadness and a sliver of loss in the absence. Space itself is Harriet Hill’s medium: how does a line across a room or people wearing alphabet costumes change the physical space? Here Hill uses red plastic rope and electrical tape to mark out diagonals through the air, which invite the eye to travel through a familiar space differently and block the body from entering in the customary way. This imaginary journey questions the hierarchies of the space: in an earlier work, she built a white, curved platform in her studio, leaving only a waist-high walkway for visitors to navigate. Thus the studio was defamiliarised and yet routed, so that a body could enter and explore it in a way that that mimicked how the artist’s brain creates new or awkward juxtapositions out of the everyday. Last summer, she took the word PECKHAM and built a mustard-coloured canvas costume for each letter which was then walked around the Borough, re-imagining what ‘Peckham’ could look like, if animated, engaging people to stare and laugh. For Hill, the performance of the visitor’s body in her site specific piece aims to collapse the line between artist and spectator, performer and audience. The lit lines create shadowy echoes that further dematerialise the drawing itself. As artist Hannah Black suggested recently, ‘Contemporary art is only interesting when it’s trying to abolish itself.’3 5

Stasis is an important component of flow: its antithesis and its fear. Jonathan Keep investigates the transformative elements of 3D modeling software whose algorithm creates a random pattern, and a 3D printer, to produce porcelain pots in a way that mimics coil built clay models. ‘I am writing the parameters,’ explains Keep, ‘but the outcomes are beyond me.’ In the Iceberg Field series, ongoing, the cylindrical pots have vertically scalloped corrugations that suggest eroding icebergs or the layered fungal platforms that grow on trees. The porcelain denotes delicacy yet these forms also appear extremely resilient, like the ridged trunks of ancient oaks. Although using the sharp edge of digital technology which is perceived as ‘anti-nature’, Keep stresses the ironic fact that the software’s mathematical function not only mimics natural forms, but cannot help but do so. His work emphasises our inescapable connection to nature with its infinitude of astounding forms. In Random Growth, ongoing, the pots resemble the grotesque Medieval figures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Here is the unruly human form, contorted with protuberances and protrusions. These slightly clownish figures seem to delight in their precarious balance – encumbered but yet rambunctiously upright. Just as the Iceberg series suggests the pressure ridges in ice, so the Random Growth series evokes the bumps and lumps that manifest in the human body that cannot be contained, or even often explained, despite the miraculous evolution of science and medicine. The figure also haunts Emily Glass’s sculptural forms. What looks like large, puce coloured gloves or udders, sewn roughly in cloth, slump or stand uncertainly on their extremities, ‘digits’ or ‘limbs’. It’s hard to ascertain if they are hard or soft but in fact Glass has filled the fabric forms with jesmonite, a quick drying acrylic plaster, and manipulated their posture while they set. Often starting from the same template, the shapes differ in pose and effect, much as a group of siblings with the same DNA, physically respond to life and alter in unique ways. Like over-loved, transitional, childhood objects, they recall a threadbare teddy or eyeless doll: do they comfort us or vice versa? They seem to come from the time we all enjoyed before toys became gendered and the freedom of that non-binary symbolic. Her sculptures invoke the line between dependency and independence; they appear squishily vulnerable and yet are unresponsively hard and make us wonder how we can preserve the vulnerability of childhood without taking on inhibiting armour. Some exude abjection, others an air of doughtiness, yet there’s something in the discomfiting recognition that elicits ‘a hasty wobble of pleasurable panic.’4 Can there be strength in vulnerability? Isn’t the process of weaning and attachment something that continues in diverse forms throughout our lives? Perhaps Glass is proposing art itself as a kind of self-soothing: we negotiate levels of comfort proffered from the art objects we place around us. Clare Price’s paintings begin life on the floor where they receive a poured layer of acrylic paint, onto which she spray-paints a sharply stenciled geometric shape, that acts as a transparent lens to view the painting’s ground. She then applies a third action in passionate, dense brushstrokes in oil. The process operates on three levels of permission: the first is abandon; the second tight control; and the third a controlled release. Price navigates the layers between the three uses of application and material, shapelessness and coherence.

The aim of her practice could be learning how ‘to be anchorless but not unanchored’5. Often the dominant shape made by the pour is an X: is it a cross of faith or a crossing out? I ask. ‘Faith,’ she replies resolutely, ‘a great faith in painting.’ There’s a seductive, sensual diaphanous quality to her pastel pours, that often seems to dance from corner to corner of the canvas, but the shaken free dynamism of the brushstrokes on top carries the immense sweeping energy of a fast thing at rest about to speed to high velocity. These heartily embodied gestures seem to erupt beyond the pretty permission of the ground into something raucously animal. Price’s energy may have filled the space ‘but for a moment’ but the paradoxical legacy and power of art is both to freeze and release this energy long after it has passed through the artist. Each artist here demonstrates in multiple ways not only the outstanding mutability of art’s materials and forms, but also the instability and flux of the very category of what defines an artist.

1 Guillevic, E. Carnac (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1999) 2 Bauman, Z. Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) p.2 3 Black, H. quoted in a piece by Lizzie Homersham, Art Monthly, Issue 412, December, 2017 4 Gordimer, N. Why Haven’t You Written? (London: Penguin, 1992) p.213 5 Philips, C. ‘Like Stitches Where the Moths Have Made an Opening’, from The Rest of Love (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004)

ARTISTS Alexis Harding Solveig Settemsdal Harriet Hill Jonathan Keep Emily Glass Clare Price

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Credits 34

Alexis Harding Alexis Harding studied at Goldsmiths College and lives and works in London. He is Course Leader of the BA Fine Art at the University of East London. Harding has had numerous one person and group shows both nationally and internationally and in 2004 won the John Moores Painting Prize. His work is in private and public collections including the Arts Council of England and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. I use the ordinary language of abstraction and aim to fundamentally change it; to harness it and stretch it to breaking point. To do this I have had to change the way paint normally behaves and functions. The way I make the work is a combination of strategy and control and irrationality and abandonment. Pictorialism has been an unexpected residue of the very direct collision of materials I use to make these paintings. I want to manipulate the core ingredients of painting, their dumb attributes, through a type of subjective filter- to see an urban entropic image come out the other end. www.mummeryschnelle.com/pages/harding.htm

ALEXIS HARDING

FT 2004 oil and gloss paint on aluminium 200x100cm

Exit (Twice) 2015 oil and acrylic on aluminium 30x50cm

ALEXIS HARDING

Double Rebound (Pinks) 2016 oil and acrylic on MDF on steel frame 160x145cm

Solveig Settemsdal Solveig Settemsdal was born in Norway and lives and works in London. She is currently studying for an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art. She has a BA in Fine Art Painting and Printmaking from Glasgow School of Art. Settemsdal has exhibited widely in group shows both nationally and internationally and was awarded first place in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2016 for her video work Singularity. My practice investigates the fluidity and transience of materials, be it sculptural, geological or cognitive. The pliable medium embodies the potential to easily be transformed by surrounding forces. Effects of pressure, heat, gravity and light become integral to the work. Ephemeral objects can reveal the processes working on more solid objects and compress geological time into an observable frame. Strong links between material, process and concept are vital to my research. Inorganic and biological substances are often pitted against each other, allowing their material properties to intermingle with their conceptual qualities; generating a balance between conscious intention and unconscious material process. www.settemsdal.com

SOLVEIG SETTEMSDAL

Singularity 2016 full HD video

Segment I.I 2013 inkjet print on glass 24.5x28cm

SOLVEIG SETTEMSDAL

Segment I.III 2013 inkjet print on glass 24.5x28cm

Harriet Hill Harriet Hill was born in Wales and now lives and works in London. After completing a BA in Fine Art at South Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education in 1987, she spent time designing and making clothes, running away with the circus and designing and making for theatre and interiors. Returning to Mid-Wales in 1995 she established a successful practice as a contemporary felt-maker, producing functional interior pieces, wall hangings and sculptures. In 2007 she graduated with a Distinction in MFA Textiles at Goldsmiths College and focused her practice on sculpture and installation. Based in South London, her art practice continues, supported by on going work as a freelance designer, sculptor and prop-maker. Hill has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in the UK. I create sculpture and site-specific interventions that feel to me like three-dimensional drawings. Working in a playful and dynamic way I respond to the visceral qualities of specific spaces and materials: structural, spatial, experiential and tactile. I am interested in the way these affect us and how they can be manipulated. By revealing or highlighting what is already there, a viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception of an object and its environment can be shifted or changed. www.harriethill.co.uk/artwork

HARRIET HILL

Big H 2016 cotton canvas, fibreglass rod and velcro

Studio Residency 2016 elastic

HARRIET HILL

Open Studio 2016 plywood, timber and paint

Jonathan Keep Jonathan Keep was born and grew up in South Africa, obtaining a BA in Fine Art from the University of Natal. In 1986 he moved to England and settled in Suffolk where he continues to live and have a studio at his home. In 2002 he received an MA from the Royal College of Art; his postgraduate show was awarded the Lattice overall prize-winner award. He has exhibited widely and undertaken a number of artist residencies in the UK and abroad. Keep is also a visiting Lecturer in the UK and France. In the series (Random Growth), as in nature and the formation of stalactites or ant hills, these forms have an underling coded structure and logic, but there is also an inbuilt variation or random function and a different form is created each time the code is run. I am selective as to which of these computer generated forms I select but my interests are in how us humans have an inbuilt desire to make sense of the world around us, even from the most random forms. I want the viewer to bring their own subjective interpretation to the forms. www.keep-art.co.uk/digitial_random.html

JONATHAN KEEP

Icebergs 2016 computer generated artist 3d printed ceramics porcelain glaze dimensions variable

Random Growth 2014 computer generated artist 3d printed ceramics porcelain glaze dimensions variable

JONATHAN KEEP

Artist portrait 2013 Image ÂŠ Jonathan Dayman

Emily Glass Emily Glass lives in London and works in London and Tonbridge. Since completing an MA in History of Art at Edinburgh University in 1993, she has worked in the arts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; organizing events and exhibitions. Glass gained a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University and an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College. She has exhibited in a number of group and solo exhibitions, most recently at Studio 1.1 and APT. Glass is an Art Teacher at Tonbridge School and Curator of OBS Gallery. This series of sculptures explore the complex relationship between mind and body; a struggle between inertia and energy, form and formlessness, control and collapse. The forms are partly determined by the elasticity of the fabric and its porousness, so they cannot be completely predetermined. They suggest the play of improvisation and chance. These sculptures continue my interest in anthropomorphism and our need to read a human or animal form into an abstract shape. Some of the sculptures combine elements that can be read as animal, human or vessel. www.emilyglass.co.uk

EMILY GLASS

Plump 2016 fabric and jesmonite 13x14cm

sac (1) 2017 fabric and jesmonite 19x21cm

EMILY GLASS

sac (2) 2017 fabric and jesmonite 17x23cm

Clare Price Clare Price grew up in the North West of England and moved to London to study at Central St Martins. After a break in which she worked creatively in TV in motion graphics and directing, she returned to painting and graduated from Goldsmiths College in 2016 with an MA in Fine Art. Price has a studio in London and has exhibited widely in solo and group shows in the UK. The paintings explore ideas around the bodily materiality of paint…… in the paintings voluptuous gestural elements are set against translucent geometric planes. These shapes, drawn from modernist forms and digital tools ‘pin’ spilled wet vistas to create ambiguous spaces. Stains and poured goo on the raw canvas refer both to the body and to Abstract Expressionism. www.floorrmagazine.com/issue-9/clare-price

CLARE PRICE

Plume 2014 oil, acrylic, spray paint and pen on canvas 178x153cm

f.r 2017 oil and acrylic on canvas 94x114cm

CLARE PRICE

I.I.I.I 2017 oil and acrylic on canvas 178x153cm

OBS Gallery Tonbridge School High Street Tonbridge Kent TN9 1JP 01732 365555 obsgallery@tonbridge-school.org www.tonbridge-school.co.uk/obsg Published to accompany the exhibition Flow at OBS Gallery 27 January – 4 March 2018 Curated by Emily Glass All quotes by the artists are in italics Designed by Michael Lenz at Draught Vision Ltd aka D/VISION Published by OBS Gallery Images © the artists

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In Flow matter oozes, pours, tears, sags, cracks and hangs in the balance, vitally influencing form and scale. Tension is created between the intention of the artist and the potential of accident. Flow explores the ways in which the physical materials that artists choose and use to create work influence and direct the final outcome. It includes sculpture, painting, photography, film, ceramics and installation by the following artists: Alexis Harding Solveig Settemsdal Harriet Hill Jonathan Keep Emily Glass Clare Price

IBSN: 978-1-9999434-3-1