January exhibitions

The Land Has Many Parts
January 15 – February 15 . 2014
Jane Deering Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA

Silence Unbound: The Artist’s Lexicon in the Making
January 17, 2014 – March 29, 2014
Center for Book Arts New York
Organized by Heather Powell

The artists featured in Silence Unbound often work in familiar forms, but have at some point been driven to create or conceive of an object that incorporates their language into a book-like design. The juxtaposition of the book next to an artwork- painting, print, photograph, or performance ephemera- is meant to delineate a space that considers the translation of the artist’s aesthetic vocabulary into writing systems. Featured Artists include: Dean Ebben, David Hammons, Candace Hicks, Christopher K. Ho, Jenny Holzer, Alison Knowles, Jessica Lagunas, Matthew C. Lange, Dani Leventhal, Barbara Rosenthal, Buzz Spector, Emily Speed, and Kristen Tordella-Williams.

Lady Garden

Last week, I was building, tiling, painting and gardening in Bristol at the incredible Tyntesfield, a National Trust property making a new work for ‘STILL/life ecologies of perception’ the inaugural exhibition from Trust New Art Bristol.

Lady Garden

The exhibition runs from 8th September until early November and the bumpf about the new work is here:

Lady Garden is a new installation which takes its name from an intimate walled area adjacent to the Orangery at Tyntesfield known as Lady Wraxall’s Garden. The structure, which can be entered, encases a micro garden of plants typical to an Orangery. It is able to move between various locations in the Jubilee Gardens and once settled, becomes part of this constructed landscape, a hybrid garden and folly structure. On close inspection the structure mimics a range of architectural, ornamental and design motifs from the house, such as the Turret Room, Minton floor tiles, floral wallpaper and the coloured gloss paint found in some utility areas.

The structure provides shelter in a compartment that is just big enough for one person. This compartmentalization makes reference to the strong gender division of roles and division of rooms in Tyntesfield which was usual in Victorian country houses. The Morning Room, Drawing Room and Mrs Gibb’s Sitting Room (now Lord Wraxall’s sitting room) were primarily female spaces, while the Oak Room and Billiard Room were chiefly used by the men of the house.  The architectural and decorative divide between male and female spaces would serve to enforce role distinctions, much as the growth of plants and flowers in Lady Garden are contained and controlled within its structure.

‘Lady Garden presents its best face to the public but that contains a leafy, wild garden inside’ Emily Speed 2013

Tightrope

 

tightrope

 

Tightrope

Curated by Kate Pantling, Tightrope brings together the work of four international emerging artists Takming Chuang, Echo Morgan, Emily Speed and Hanae Utamura. The artists share a performative approach to their practice, where a sense of harmony, dissonance and a raw energy are connecting threads. Each artist takes their own body as a starting point, orchestrating narratives that explore the impact of encounters with materials, environments and cultures. Their work is personal, particular and often intimate but speaks to broader political and cultural concerns. By approaching their work from the context of performance, the artists bring a strong sense of dramatic tension to their artworks. Each of them embraces the visual impact of their interventions to create work that encapsulates a moment imbued with anticipation. They create projects that play across multiple mediums eluding easy categorisation and bringing dynamism and depth to the expression of their ideas.

Sfogliatelle – a print

My new print (made with amazing printmaker Emma Gregory) Sfogliatelle is currently on sale at the Bluecoat to help raise money for the Print Studios.  Each print is £120 (unframed) and they are available to purchase from Tickets & Information in the hub.

Sfogliatelle

Sfogliatelle by Emily Speed, Ten-layer Screen Print, 2013, Limited Edition of 50

About the work:

Sfogliatelle (a type of Italian pastry and meaning ‘many leaves/layers’) continues to explore a sculptural work Facades/Flats that Emily Speed made in Rome in 2012. Façades/Flats looked at the layers of theatrical façades that exist within a city, especially those whose bricks, design or size communicate power and clearly signify exclusion. Speed is also interested in the ever-changing nature of cities and how quickly buildings appear and disappear. In the print, several layers do not really exist; they are made using only negative space and hopefully create a slippery space that one can never be totally certain about.

www.emilyspeed.co.uk

http://liverpoolprintmakers.blogspot.co.uk/

I LIKE THE WAY YOU MOVE

The Transmitters by Serena Korda, HD video still, courtesy of the artist.
The Transmitters by Serena Korda, HD video still, courtesy of the artist.

 

Yes I do. And if you’re in Edinburgh this Wednesday 7th August, you should come along to a film club night Elizabeth Murphy and I have put together for Edinburgh Art Festival at New Media Scotland. I did a commission for the festival last year (Human Castle) so I am really pleased to be a tiny bit involved again

‘I Like The Way You Move’ is an evening of film and performance featuring – Romany Dear, Andrew Gannon, Candice Jacobs, Serena Korda, Jen Liu, Lucy Pawlak and Catherine Payton. They are all BRILLIANT.

Murphy and Speed have selected the programme after ongoing conversations about their shared excitement when melodrama, slapstick, dance, hysteria and glamour are integrated into contemporary practice.

EAF Film Club is supported by New Media Scotland and The National Lottery through Creative Scotland. TICKETS HERE

The Boulder Project

Granite Boulder GloucesterTomorrow I shall be heading for Cape Ann, Massachusetts for a few weeks, to work on a short research project. At the invitation of Jane Deering, I shall be working in a small village there for a period of time that is intended to give artists some time and space to create new work.

At the property there is a huge granite boulder in the garden, which used to have this amazing pavilion/bandstand structure upon it. The whole area has a mass of large granite boulders left during the last ice age and I love the idea of these huge stubborn things left unmoved for centuries. An abandoned quarry town nearby, Dogtown, is now a natural park with the old roads acting as footpaths. Here, a philanthropist, Roger Babson hired stone cutters to inscribe boulders on the old common with words of inspiration during the Great Depression. I have no idea what will happen here but I shall let you know.

Map of the inscriptions
Map of the inscriptions