INSATIABLE MIND A Wiltshire Creative Exhibition
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INSATIABLE MIND 24 May – 13 July 2019 Opening hours 10am –3pm | Monday – Saturday Salisbury Arts Centre Bedwin Street Salisbury SP1 3UT
Cover image: Me Time © Eunmi Mimi Kim
Introduction by Mirka Golden-Hann The anniversaries of the Moon landing and the fall of the Berlin Wall provided the direction for this exhibition. The simple act of celebrating what are unarguably remarkable achievements would, I felt, have been a disservice to the events which consequently took place worldwide. What links both these events is the superimposition by the West of its own set of ideological values upon the East and succeeding. This wasn’t of interest to me whilst setting up the curatorial aim for this exhibition. I was driven by the overarching urge which is innate to humanity. The urge to break away, the urge to explore, the urge which would force a human to construct a spaceship and the urge of another human to step into it in order to walk on the Moon: the same compulsion behind the collective force to bring down the Berlin Wall and the with it the Iron Curtain. It was the power of human curiosity and the dissatisfaction with the familiar that provided the basis for this exhibition. Insatiable Mind had an open callout in order to reach the widest possible artistic community. The response was over 400 international applications from which the exhibitors were selected, with the help of a selection panel comprising Claudia Lastra (executive director Arts Catalyst), Pru Maltby (artist and curator), Jacquie Kingsley (director of development, Wiltshire Creative), and myself. We were joined by Sophia Sample in the role of young curatorial voice. Sophia was already programmed into the exhibition as part of our commitment to developing opportunities for emerging artists. A further six artists Oksana Chepelyk, Katayoun Dowlatshahi, Susan Eyre, Eunmi Mimi Kim, Niccolò Masini and Lindy María Márquez Holguín were selected. This is an international and an insatiable exhibition which brings together art and politics, science and technology as well as art and self-discovery. Some of the artists in this exhibition work as agents of circumstance whilst others question the fundamentals of culture.
Wiltshire Creative is a Registered Charity No. 249169
Wiltshire Council Where everybody matters
Brochure designed by The Design Unit
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Oksana Chepelyk Oksana is a Ukrainian artist focusing on contemporary art and new technologies and their penetration of the architectural environment in order to uncover its structure as a social space. She is trying to understand society and social space as viewed through the prism of a multifunctional model of human existence. Oksana connects theories of urban development with economic, ecological and demographic problems, in this way coming closer to the understanding of spatial relations, interactions between media flows and the human being. By means of her artistic message she embodies the conception of the synthesis of architectural space, contemporary art, and new media. The themes developed are especially geared for dialogue, oriented toward communication. Whilst interested in experimenting with installation, video and new media, Oksana’s works raise some problematic questions, concerning the functioning of the social space under the paradigmatic changes of the global world. The ‘Collider’ project works with space-time, science, public space and history. It examines the iconic places of 20th and 21st Century political history. The project deals with events which took place in different urban landscapes that influenced subsequent historical development. The ‘Collider’ project connects the perilous ‘political flashpoints’: from Sarajevo of 1914 and 1992–1995 to Independence Square, Kiev, Ukraine, the site of Euromaidan events of 2013–2014.
Collider © Oksana Chepelyk
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Dr Katayoun Dowlatshahi Katayoun is a British/Iranian artist drawn to the subtle qualities of light and form in natural and man-made environments that convey a narrative, however hidden or obscure. She has, over several years, developed a distinctive approach to her studio practice, embracing a wide range of materials to suit the context of a place or conceptual approach in a given project. She has been awarded several national and international residencies, exhibited regularly, both in the UK and abroad, and has completed numerous private and public realm commissions across the UK. These projects integrate contemporary art into new city centre developments and heritage locations. Having graduated in Fine Art Printmaking from Edinburgh, with an MA in European Art from Barcelona and Winchester, she was awarded a Doctorate in Drawing and Photography from Cheltenham. Since 1995 she has lectured in a number of universities alongside her status as a full-time professional artist. In 2011 Katayoun was commissioned to produce and document a significant new body of site-responsive work on the Isle of Wight, entitled ‘Orbit’. The work was inspired by West High Down, a former cold war site secretly testing rocket engines as part of the British space programme.
Orbit © Katayoun Dowlatshahi
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Susan Eyre BA Textiles Goldsmiths College, University of London, MA Printmaking Royal College of Art. Susan Eyre is interested in the activity of matter and unseen forces in the universe including intangible phenomena which cannot be explained in terms of materiality, such as the aura of place and the dream of paradise. She explores similarities in the search to understand the mysteries of our universe and human consciousness through physics, religious belief and mythology. Our ancestors mapped the stars and the shapes they drew across the darkness became familiar anchors for navigation. They described mythological characters and aligned celestial cycles with the fortunes of everyday life. As powerful technology opens new areas of the universe to our view, generating imagery we could never see with our naked eyes, we are drawn to experience space via mediated technologies. ‘Pentacoronae’ encourages the viewer to seek darkness, stargaze, wonder and map their own stories across the sky.
Pentacoronae by Susan Eyre | photo John Hooper
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Eunmi Mimi Kim Eunmi Mimi Kim defines herself as an experimental-media-practitioner in a contemporary art context. Her work at the intersections of visual arts performance, research, digitally-mediated experimentation, installation and sound art explores contemplative, technical and theoretical practice. Her work is usually research-driven under conceptually-led approaches. It reaches into biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology and prosthetic art, reflecting her interests in science and medicine. Eunmi’s interests during her postgraduate study at the RCA were focused on embodied cognition, neural activity and sensory deprivation based on her physical and mental features: due to her hormone/stress-related disease called hyperthyroidism, hypersensitivity and meticulousness, Eunmi is easily pushed into sensory overload. Based on this, she digs on transcendental consciousness and therapeutic experience. For instance, the < MeTime (4.0) > series is self-experimental, aiming to align her mind and body back into balance by reducing sensory stimuli through eccentric methods of sensory deprivation and isolation. Under her hypersensitivity and the avalanche of runaway thoughts, she often encounters an inexplicable cognition, perception, sense, thought and feeling in variable moments that are sometimes too elusive to define because of not merely the volatility of associative feelings, but also the confined manifestation. Not all things can be decoded by the linguistic and semantic way: “I’m eager for articulating who I am, what I think, ultimately, my own world by my own artistic language.”
Me time © Eunmi Mimi Kim
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Lindy María Márquez Holguín Lindy María Márquez Holguín is a Columbian artist, a Master of Plastic and Visual Arts at the National University of Colombia, Medellin Colombia (2011) and Doctor of Arts at the University of Antioquia (2017). She is a sister of Azul Mária Márquez Holguín. When making a “review” of our artistic process, we realize that this review is a constant act. We see the past as if there is something pending and only a return to the past will manage to settle this feeling. This makes us appreciate the experience through the re-creation or from the configuration of a memory told by two voices, or two gestures. We are twin sisters and we conceive the performances as the most sincere and true to ourselves. This is then formalized in video and video installations in order to stay with the image, space and expanded time in a gesture that is “bigger than a single being”. It is composed as a game of sororal relationships, through which we vivify our childhood, identity, memories, forgetfulness and the experiences that can only occur in living together.
Corriente © Lindy María Márquez Holguín
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Niccolò Masini Niccolò Masini is a multidisciplinary artist, illustrator and animator. Since 2011 he has studied fine art and design at The European Institute of Design, Milan, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. He is an award-winning artist with an international portfolio. Amongst his prizes is the 2018 best young artist of the year (Painting and Sculpture) Gemma young artist competition, GM conference Tokyo. It is essential to know in order to belong. Knowledge cannot necessarily only be found in books. Certain types of learning are to be engaged with in order to be fully grasped. It is an awareness of the world that one can gain through experience to identify, to move closer to, and even to become one with its world. Masini’s artworks lay in the realm of narrative and craft, but also poetry and anthropology. It guides both its creator and audience through an engaging narrative of methods, voices, views, and perspectives. Questioning the fundamentals and the hidden rules of the concept of culture, he draws his inspiration from literature, history, folklore, psychoanalysis, religion, anthropology or even simply daily life experiences.
White Time © Niccolò Masini
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Sophia Sample MA Fine Art and BA Creative Arts Bath School of Art and Design. Sophia Sample is an artist based in Salisbury. Her practice focuses on the parallel realities of time and event, both past and present, as lived experience, and as developed narrative. She takes inspiration from the places and moments in which we begin to grasp the intangibility and enormity of human history; stood before ancient monuments, within religious buildings, and before border walls. The paintings, in which the line between representation and reality is finely balanced, reimagine the stone, plaster and paint from these places of contemplation and separation. She uses the image of the wall as a symbol of the metaphysical barrier between the cultural and personal meaning of historic events. Walls and monuments serve both to impress and to warn; the great and terrible things mankind produces when ideologies are manifested in the physical.
America Mexico © Sophia Sample
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Science and Art
STEAM Exhibition
Jim Douglas discusses how science and art mix
(Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths) project
I want you to come to this exhibition bringing your own enquiring intellect with you. The ever-seeking brain is the distinguishing mark of human kind. My background is as a mathematician and I worked for a while in several Defence Research Establishments during the Cold War. My wife had started to read Shakespeare at an early age and our unifying factor was the study of Philosophy as part of our respective degrees. It seems inevitable from this to see both Arts and Science as the expression of the same quest to understand, to the limit, the world around us. Observe, analyse, synthesise, describe, whilst these are the rules for a scientist, they are also the modus operandi of the artist.
Part of Salisbury International Arts Festival
For most of history there has been little distinction between the artist and scientist because a single individual did combine both aspects of life. The separation between Art and Science, as with so many things, surfaced in the Victorian age. This was a very long period with the speed of change increasing in all aspects of life. The experiments of Faraday at the Royal Institution on the connection between electricity and magnetism are well known. Not so familiar is that he also established a link between polarised light and magnetic fields. James Clerk Maxwell turned these observations into a set of equations describing electromagnetic waves. Not a person known by many but considered as significant as Newton and Einstein for the revolution in thinking about the world he triggered. The range of frequencies of these waves allows us to see the world in different ways. Those that carry our data as radio, TV, Wi-fi, then Radar, eye sight, X-Rays and Gamma Rays. He also investigated the way the eye sees colour and demonstrated the principles needed for colour photography so accelerating the decline of realism in Art.
Enquiring Young Minds Enquiring Young Minds is collection of artworks created by students and community groups working across different creative media to explore the themes of curiosity and human endeavour to bring to light and investigate the unknown and unseen. This project encouraged students to interrogate ‘What would happen if…’ providing the platform to demonstrate their ability to challenge themselves in order to see creativity in science and art in discovery. Examples selected by a panel of judges from art, science and engineering backgrounds can be seen, enjoyed and queried during the Festival at Salisbury Arts Centre and Salisbury Library.
This changed Science from being something accessible to the ordinary person, no longer about the world you can see and feel. Matter and energy are interchangeable; it is not possible to know everything about anything. How are these disconnections from the laity for Arts and Science to be resolved? Increasingly science is providing radically different views of our place in the universe which have an artistic impact. One of the best known and understood is a figurative photograph taken from the moon called “Earth Rise”. One shares the feelings of wonder and humility that caused the individual to take the image. More, this feeling is shared with the millions of others who have seen it. The cosmologists have begun to explain what is happening in the vastness of space by developing coloured images from their raw data which have a striking similarity to abstract art but are in some way based on reality. Again, are they art or science? An artists’ response seems to strive to make the viewer a participant. There are centres of art that seek ways in which the issues science has raised can be represented to and involve the general public. In this exhibition be prepared to witness the re-connection of art, science and technology.
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Sarum College Sponsors of Insatiable Mind exhibition As an exhibition that is ‘inspired by human curiosity and the urge to challenge accepted norms’, Insatiable Mind is an ideal fit with the work and ethos of Sarum College. Set in Salisbury’s Cathedral Close, Sarum College is a community of learning that nourishes the human spirit, where all are welcome and questions are more common than answers. The college’s conference, catering and B&B facilities are also open to the public. 18 | Wiltshire Creative Exhibition
Sarum College Wide View: Photo by Ash Mills Cavell Room lecture: Photo by Ash Mills