Traverse Creatives Open 2013
16th – 29th July
Malt Cross Gallery
Nottingham
Traverse Creatives welcomes both established and emerging artists and designers from any discipline to take part in our first annual Open Exhibition.
The Exhibition will provide a fostering environment between mid-career and emerging practitioners. By bringing established local and national talent together with Traverse Creatives’ growing base of promising future practicing creatives we hope to offer the show’s visitors a fully rounded experience of East Midland’s vibrant art and design scene.
Spaces will be limited so please apply as soon as possible; we will, however, attempt to accept as many works as we can.
All work can be sold without commission during the event.
All successful applicants will benefit from FREE online exposure of their work via Traverse Creatives social media and newsletter, The Flying Pyramid.
Entry Requirements
All artists and designers from all creative disciplines can apply to exhibit. Both emerging and mid-career creatives are encouraged to apply. Creatives from outside East Midlands and international creatives are also welcome to post their work should they be selected. To gain entry please provide:
· A completed application form with an included image of intend/related work
· Payment of the £20 entry fee at the time of submitting an application, applications without an entry fee paid will not be accepted. This fee is non-refundable and can be paid via PayPal at www.traversecreatives.com (click join)
To apply, go to www.traversecreatives.com and click ‘join’
Deadline for submission: Friday 28th June 2013
Like us on Facebook
Or maybe even Twitter @TweetTraverse
We want to know what you think of the way we run things around here! Complete our quick survey to have your say.
http://traversecreatives.polldaddy.com/s/summer-201
The second issue of ‘The Flying Pyramid’, our monthly newsletter filled with interesting articles, artist/designer profiles, opportunities and events is well on its way! Sign up today to receive our next issue featuring the work of animator Alex Widdowson and Alexandra Glew
To subscribe, just go to www.traversecreatives.com/ and click ‘join’
Darren Parker Scene 019
Oil and Enamel on Board, 76 x 54 cm
Through imagery, technique and suggestion, Darren Parker creates scenes that invite narrative, rather than dictate. Compositions are created with no predetermined plan or ideal vision; they are allowed to be formed, and inevitably modified during the process of painting until a composition is settled upon. The only goal is to produce a scene that is believable, yet juxtaposed and questionably existent, inviting narrative through suggestion. There is a collage- like aesthetic to Parker’s paintings, yet no collage has taken place before painting begins; everything is determined through the process of painting.
The imagery used in Parker’s paintings invite the viewer to connect their existence within the scene, and the artist suggests their connection through symbolic reference; a painting of a horse can be associated with majesty, elegance or a classical art reference, but when its pictured with a man in a gas mask, who conjures thoughts of apocalyptic events or war, its meaning and purpose changes. It’s this juxtaposed and jarring, yet seemingly natural and purposeful use of imagery that forces the viewer to reconsider what they first accepted as a believable scene.
In order to enhance these dialogues between the imagery that make up his paintings, Parker employs different marks and techniques when applying the paint. Evidence of different brushes, palette knives and scrapers are all found in a single painting, along with different mediums and different types of paint, yet what connects them all is a sense of energy through application. Parker’s scenes are viewed from a photographic perspective, so the artist incorporates his own energy and expression in order to breathe life into these freeze- frame moments.
These enhanced realities Parker creates touch upon themes that interlock each painting he produces. Familiarity and imagination combine to tap into what the viewer knows and accepts as believable, but in order to go beyond that Parker sets them in a place that they shouldn’t belong in, yet confidently exist there. Contrasting subject and setting serve as tools to evoke comments on society; man- made objects and man himself in an idealist alpine setting suggests the separation from and control over nature in humanity- questioning our role in preserving nature’s beauty. Such analysis and interrogation is invited and encouraged through Parker’s use of imagery and technique.
Since graduating from Loughborough University in 2012, Colette Griffin has taken up two residencies, exhibited in South Korea and has just curated her own solo exhibition.
A lot has happened in the last year for emerging artist, Colette Griffin. Since finishing her degree in Fine Art, she has been spending her time exhibiting her work in cities around the UK as well as internationally. In particular the International Daekyo Sculpture Symposium in Seoul, South Korea for which she applied for during her final semester and was selected along with eleven other international artists.
Whist working part time as a sales assistant to fund her creative endeavours, she has completed two residencies as well as continuing as a volunteer for Nottingham’s Surface Gallery.
“My practice has begun to progress from what I created during my degree. I have used the opportunity to experiment and taken full advantage of a busy and creative studio atmosphere…The experience as a whole has taught me a lot”
After entering the Nottingham Castle 2012 Annual Open she received the One Thoresby Street Award, securing her first solo exhibition which took place in March 2013 at the One Thoresby Street Gallery, also in Nottingham.
“The shapes are abstract” she says of her sculptures “and almost entirely random, so everyone interprets each differently… I want [the viewer] to enjoy the use of shape, textures, colours and materials.”
The pieces, which cover the floor of One Thoresby Street’s Attic Gallery, are an amalgamation of juxtapositions through which the spontaneous relationship between material and shape is dynamically established. She uses hard and soft materials as well as the machine fabricated and hand crafted, bringing them together to produce works of art that seem almost like the incidental results of a natural process.
“The work is unfixed, indefinite and therefore quite playful”
Using Evoshape software has enabled her to “breed and generate” unusual and unique shapes, creating unpredictable outcomes. Portraying a strong sense of fortuity, the work challenges the traditional idea of the sculptor painstakingly chipping a piece of marble into submission and instead leaves the final form of each piece almost entirely up to chance.
“Having a deadline or endpoint definitely helped to carry on making art, it drives the work and ideas.”
Colette’s advice to anyone embarking on a solo exhibition of their own is to “try to use it as a step into future opportunities, to meet people and to develop your practice…recording the event thoroughly will be beneficial if you choose to apply for funding for future projects.”
Finally, she adds a bit of guidance often overlooked, but as important as any other, that is simply to “enjoy it”.
An article by Kathryn Worthington
Photographs by Mathew Hoyland
Gerard Carson Package 2
Carson’s work takes form through a precarious catenation of interconnecting substances that mimic architectural and technological forms, where the object or construction presents a minimalist facade, underneath which a network of feedback loops exists. He is interested in the development of this abstraction that has come about in tandem with the rise of computing technology.
The utilitarian machine for the use of specialists has become a ubiquitous minimalist device, situated within the homogeneity of a wireless environment.
By using ephemeral materials (cardboard, paper, tinfoil, found images/video), he attempts to give reference to this environment of ephemeral data, which exists in a simultaneous dichotomy of both the physical and the ethereal.
Gerard Carson 2013.
Valentina LariBrighton
I believe in art that has a meaning and an urge. There is always a pain, and a joy to talk about. The difficulty is to find the right and honest way for you to express it.
As a visual artist and filmmaker I am ever so grateful to many writers, film directors, musicians and painters who’s work changed my perspective on life and death..
I always work with an analogue camera and I love printing my photos. When shooting film there is a feeling that the image may not come out exactly as you imagined, in fact it may not come out at all, but therein lies the challenge, the beauty of dealing with the unknown.
My images talk about decay, ghost and dreams and all the memories they leave behind.
Tamas Szikszay Madness
My name is Tamas Szikszay and I was born in Hungary. I am a painter and I was studied art with a private teacher. I have worked with a sculptor for five years and this inspirational job helped me a lot to increase my skills. But later I decided to move abroad and I live in Bristol since 2007.
Living abroad lets me think about the meaning of home. I have found the home is not just a place where I grew up, or where I went to school, the home means more about my family and the relationship with them as my main inspiration.
I strive to represent my own world with this inspirational personal background, and with my hobby long distance running. Running for hours keeps my body completely relaxed and this provides me with new creativity. Despite the fact that I am physically exhausted during the run, the long hours clear my mind and lead me to think about new ideas.
In the last couple of years I focus on portraits and self-portraits and this change of my subject from my previous artwork helps me to show my ideas in a more expressive way. The people usually are alone in my paintings in a very simplified way. Sometimes in surrealistic surroundings, turning their back on us, or closing their eyes. These things reflect the everyday life struggles, uncertain feelings about our fear, doubt, loneliness, and try to get me an answer where my place is in this world as an artist is. My work is based on photographs but not used for exact reproduction. I found using acrylic as a material is best suited for me, because of the ease of use, fast, impressive work.
I have attached some images of my work and there is my website if you would like to see more of them.
Rachel Walker
My work focuses on the re-invention of our traditional notion of landscape art by taking imagery from film footage of natural and urban landscapes and using it to create dynamic and interactive sculptural textiles which focus on not only visual stimulation but embraces haptic elements.
These images are digitally printed onto cotton and heat bonded onto flexible aluminium and the surface worked into using a variety of textile techniques to create three dimensional shapes that represent the physicality of the landscape.
The work explores the way man has shaped our environments and how we constantly mould and shape our surroundings. It also explores the notion of how we are shaped by our surroundings, how they influence the way we live, grow and see life.
The work captures not only landscape in a visual sense but the atmosphere, light, excitement, shadow, movement and shape that we often overlook creating a sense of empathy with our favourite spaces, childhood memories and dreams.
The work is intended to be touched and sculpted and shaped by the viewer and not only enable audiences to interact with art on a deeper level but allow a narrative about how man has shaped and changed our environments.
Jordan Rogers Leadenhall Building
The themes I pursue involve exploration between art and technology as a means to record and document everyday journeys drawn in the evolution of a Modern Metropolis. These include personal narratives and environmental awareness of Psychogeography specific to the location. Comparing historical, architectural and cultural influences raises questions about how far one can observe at any given moment. Integral part of my art as process addresses both what meets the eye and what the eye constructs. With consideration toward exhibiting my drawings on a small scale handheld device to one that through installation creates an experience almost of stepping into the environment.
Drawing is a map of time, recording the actions of the maker allows the viewer to move through the journey of creation. I ask what can the medium of drawing do in relation to altering the perception the landscape we live in today?
@jordanlrodgers