VEND : Dialogue Create Construct>
Elysium Gallery, Swansea 2010
1 Terri Saunders
Central to this piece of work is the idea of Home – a personal place that belongs irrevocably to our selves. Yet we allow certain spaces in our homes to be seen by others; the living room one of the few places we choose to reveal, where we exchange parts of our self in conversation or in other ways. This piece revolves around iconic items found in this space – the things that witness our exchanges with family, friends and strangers.
2 Sharon Cooper
Scientists have recently discovered the means to prove the permeable qualities of water: this, in relation to how we exchange information and how this can potentially affect our health, is the central concern for my practice. My latest piece, ‘A Quiet Splash’ is a response to the aesthetic qualities of water, to promote a sense of wellbeing, which has also led to a range of jewellery pieces for the purpose of Vend.
3 Eilish O’Donohoe
This is a limited series of hand-made books on the theme of quotes about visual culture. The quotes admonish, advise, humour or inform the reader. Each book is collated, scored and assembled by hand which allows for anomalies and a sense of individuality. This, in turn, reflects upon the notion of the book as either a mass-produced item or a unique object.
4 Bella Kerr
You suck! Which of you is the unlucky one and gets a blue mouth? You can’t hide the fact that you’ve fallen for this prank since you’ll be walking round with a bright blue mouth! Jokes invade more serious works and within them propose ideas and challenges as acutely as more earnest constructions. Drawing takes messages between artefacts, stopping on the way to make comments of its own, sometimes diverting into play. Reproducing these images permits changes in values – validated by the process, multiple, available, affordable.
5 Owen Griffiths
This structure is a container within which planning, discussion and other processes can happen. Inside the structure we will be preserving vegetables, an action associated with the home, and with the end of a season. In my practice I repeatedly return to collaboration and food – preparation, origin and documentation. This sculptural element of the work is a response to the site and to an image I have been drawing and dreaming of for a long time; the activity and process contained inside it and on its walls are in a state of flux. The only lasting result of the work will be the 10 jars of chutney produced, which will act as documentation, and a record of the collaboration.
6 Anthony Arrowsmith
16 years, multiple stories and a photographic code.
7 Sunny Todd
A collection of hand-printed silkscreen prints that combine bold abstract shape and strong colour with a photographic image of Princess Margaret and the iconic silhouette of the Queen.
8 Howard Riley
At least three levels of visual information about our world are available in the structure of light arriving at our eyes: the distal, the haptic and the proximal. Their deployment in drawing produces work more perceptually intriguing, a quality which, when balanced with a degree of conceptual intrigue, becomes a useful measure of judgement for students, both for assessing the merits of their own work, and other artwork of all kinds.
9 Melanie Evans
Text – An investigation into the balance and harmony of hand-drawn letter forms depicting a quote from one of Bede’s prayers. “Christus est stella matutina” – which translates as ‘Christ is the morning star’ and ‘Crist yw’r seren y bore’. I intend to investigate the poetry and spirituality of it through typography and also how we respond not only to the written word, but also how we respond to religious text. Bede ‘the Venerable’ was the first great English scholar and the first English church historian.
10 Tim Stokes
These experiments are a work in progress, originating from documenting sexual activity, searching for something other within sexual images. By playing with the surface of the collected videos through layering and re-sequencing still frames, these new, resurrected moving images condense time into a moment, and pulse and flicker, like energy or a heartbeat, through the oscillation of the compression and expansion of the stills. The abstraction of the videos is by virtue of their construction, and demonstrates the power of this medium to exult through ambiguity and via representation.
11 Osi Rhys Osmond
The juxtaposition of beauty and terror in an apparently innocent world.
12 Freddy Griffiths
This work explores the photograph as object, in relation to the author’s experience of space and place. The work was made in an exploratory mode which lasted 7 hours, 57 minutes and 41 seconds.
13 Kath Clewett
Ideas for the show evolved from current research into the relationship between artists and designers and what happens to their ideas and works when they are offered for public consideration or consumption. As curator, the work I have produced for this exhibition is involved with mapping and highlighting the work of others.
The catalogue provides a map by which you can navigate your way through the exhibition, and the lighting highlights the work of each individual artist. The recycled envelope sketchbooks and the blog provide a space for reflection and documentation, and also promote further dialogue.
