Here Today Gone Tomorrow
Here today gone tomorrow
Liz Harrison, Cara Rainbow, Naomi Siderfin, Susan Sluglett, Erika Winstone
The Cello Factory, London
20-22 April 2018
Five artists have been invited by Erika Winstone to exhibit together at the Cello Factory over a three-day period. Each woman brings a complex creative process to the equation that will be played out as the work is installed, exhibited and performed.
Finely balanced on liminal thresholds of content and meaning, the event is strongly bound by conceptual overlaps between each exhibitor – in either theme or medium. The artists are united through research-based practices that span drawing and painting, video and audio, a sculptural focus on the use of space and personal performance. Reflective surfaces including silver foil, glass and mirror, facilitate a segue from one work to another, bringing themes of displacement, temporality and contingency into dynamic relation. The ephemerality of digital works is grounded by the materiality of paintings and sculptures and scheduled performances.
The concept of corrugated metal as a ubiquitous building material, forms the basis of Liz Harrison’s central sculpture. Made from and exploiting the fragility of aluminium foil, a material widely used to conduct heat in crisis environments, ‘the work symbolizes the frailty of the human condition, asking questions about “home” or “shelter’”. Naomi Siderfin echoes the inference of human displacement: ‘In 2015 I was taken on holiday to Malta. It was only later that I realized that in the same sea that I was swimming, many others were dying.’
Susan Sluglett picks up the theme of vulnerability in her contingent use of materials. Slugglett often paints from drawings and assemblages she has constructed from found or made objects. The temporality of these objects has been described ‘… like the activity of a stagehand and underlines a preoccupation with theatre and artifice’; themes that are also present in the films and performances of Erika Winstone and Cara Rainbow.
Winstone explores mother-daughter relationships through her reinterpretation of a film by French New Wave director Jacques Rivette. ‘My work is the result of an ongoing dialogue between video and painting… a form or energy emerges out of my countless repeated attempts to capture individuals’ communications both spontaneous and performed from different eras.’ Approaching moving image from a more playful direction, Rainbow’s aim is to disengage the viewer from their everyday life by plunging them into a simulated environment. She sees the fictional characters that inhabit her films as representing people from a range of generations and cultures ‘all trying to figure out where they belong’. Rainbow will be making live performances on Thursday 19 April at 7pm and Sunday 22 April at 3pm and 4pm.
LIZ HARRISON
Liz Harrison’s practice spans a broad range of media, incorporating the sculptural object, site-specific installation, lens based projection and moving image. Much of her work, through the use of video/film, explores the temporality and duality of time, providing a focal point and symbol for a disappearing and engulfed time space: ‘in general my work is driven by a socio/political /aesthetic akin to my experiences, playing with the possibilities of spaces and buildings as objects, material, physical matter, and, through words, concepts, philosophies…’ She exhibits both nationally and internationally which has included the ICA, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel Art Galleries. She was Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts from 1987- 2008. Recent exhibitions and activities include: ‘Cold Storage’ University of Greenwich Galleries, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, ‘Lost Fathers / Perdute Padre’ Museum of Modern Art Ugo Cara – Muggia, Italy, ‘When I get home I hope’ South London Gallery and Southwark Cathedral, where she was recently commissioned for a large scale installation in the chancel.
lizharrison.co.uk
CARA RAINBOW
Cara Rainbow graduated from Goldsmiths, University of London where she attained the Elke Lacey Textiles award. She has exhibited and performed continuously since leaving college and has since been awarded the Zsuzsi Roboz and Alfred Teddy Smith Scholarship at Morley College, where in the summer of 2017, she exhibited her most ambitious body of work in her first solo show at Morley Gallery. Rainbow’s work is heavily influenced by her move from rural Wales to London. The contrasting visual landscapes and cultural differences have been the inspiration for creating fictional characters that live in imagined worlds. To make sense of her surroundings she transforms into mythical characters, that occupy spaces in different natural habitats, such as the forest, gallery space or a stranger’s doorstep. New worlds are created through a multidisciplinary approach of performance, installation, video, sculpture and ceramics.
cararainbow.co.uk
NAOMI SIDERFIN
Naomi Siderfin is an artist-curator and a founding director of the artist-led organisation Beaconsfield with which her personal practice has been closely aligned. The curation of an international programme of visual art projects in this context reinforced her departure from studio-based painting into a situated art practice relying on site and duration to drive it. This has most prominently manifested in the collaboration of BAW (Beaconsfield Art Works), whose commissioners have included Tate Modern, Freunde guter Musik, Berlin, Stavanger Biennale and Alta Museum, Norway and TOUCH music. Siderfin is currently completing a practice-based PhD at Slade School of Fine Art, which is reconnecting her with a more singular personal practice. Her current research interests interrogate the relationship between installation practice and exhibition conventions, exploring the threshold between ‘sense’ and ‘sense’.
beaconsfield.ltd.uk
SUSAN SLUGLETT
Susan Sluglett grew up on Mickey Mouse and studied graphic design before she decided to pursue Fine Art, and this training is indicative of her practice. Her seemingly frenetic execution is underpinned by slick, tightly controlled compositions, reflecting in paint the same conflicting emotions of the subject matter. She works quickly on several paintings at the same time and uses oil paint because it remains
wet for longer, allowing her the freedom to change direction. Sluglett’s ideas tend to come from found objects and historical research. Sluglett studied painting at Wimbledon College of Art. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Selected exhibitions and projects include: Jerwood Painting Fellowships 2013, Borough Road Gallery’s first Artist in Residency, 2015; culminating with the exhibition, Hands Rhythm: Susan Sluglett (a conversation with the Borough Group) and Creekside Open 2017, selected by Alison Wilding.
susansluglett.com
ERIKA WINSTONE
Erika Winstone is a London-based artist, curator and lecturer best known for her wall installations combining drawn-paintings and video. She works with gesture; however, in contrast to traditional gestural abstraction, her actions are attempts to transitively capture the communications of others. She uses video and film as a screen to filter how individuals relate from different periods in time, mixing both personal and fictional experience. Her practice also includes performance, video and the medieval practice of drawing with metal point. These individual elements are configured in her installations in response to particular situations. She creates spaces in which to contemplate a meeting between that which is fluid in motion and that which is formed, however transitory. Winstone is a member of The London Group and [NAME], a collaboration of four female artists. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is featured in the British Museum catalogue Drawing in Silver & Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns. She has curated exhibitions at the Griffin Gallery, Danielle Arnaud, 4COSE, Harts Lane, The Crypt, and Hortensia Gallery.
erikawinstone.net
