_MATTERS FINE ART DEGREE SHOW 2014
YELLOW/ CURIOSITY/ FOOD/ RECALL/ TELEVISION/ AURA/ DARK/ WHISPERING/ TIME/ ANTAGONISM/ REVERSING/ DOMESTIC/ CULTURE/ ESCHATOLOGY/ SURFACE/ FLUFF/ FLICKR/ FEMINISM/ SIMULATION/ CONFLICT/ NOTHING/ DAD/ HUMOUR/ OPPOSITION/ DREAMING/ INTIMACY/ TRANSIENCE/ SIZE/ IDENTITY/ MATTER/ ENGAGEMENT/ GREY/ _MATTERS
_Matters is the apex of the undergraduate careers of 32 multidisciplinary Fine Art students from the University of Leeds. Bringing together a diverse group of artistic practices, _Matters takes place across the three main studios on campus over 6 days and hosts an exclusive reading room featuring publications by the artists, local art institutions and contributors from further afield. This show invites each of the 32 participating artists to explore what _Matters to their practice and to explore the context in which it sits. The 32 answers display the diversity of influences and motivational factors in the practices of students who choose to study Fine Art at a higher academic level in 2014. Simultaneously, the show refers to ‘matter’ as a noun, and the physicality of matter as material agency. In this way _Matters seeks to make explicit the links between the physical act of making art and the critical dialogue, art theory and history of art which forms half of the overall course structure for Fine Art at the University of Leeds.
Why Art Matters The title for this year’s undergraduate degree show came in part from our students’ engagement with the lectures and seminars given by the Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of Documenta13, 2012. Carolyn has led discussions about “why art matters”, and the role of art in the 21st century, a subject which gets to the heart of a vital debate for the School, as we recruit, teach, and aim to inspire the next generation of artists, curators and academics. In everything we do, from working with schools, collaborating with our partner organisations such as Leeds Museums and Galleries, The Tetley and The Hepworth, to advising on the redesign of qualifications, and, of course, in our lecture theatres, classrooms and studios, we constantly consider why and how art matters. In the current economic climate, as we feel the impact of public and private sector cuts and student fees, and listen to the politicians’ rhetoric, we need to continue to shout loudly about why art matters just as much as the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects that dominate the UK’s planning for the future. It was pointed out by the students recently that this should be re-articulated as STEAM, placing art and culture at the centre of research and innovation. This is why the University of Leeds is committed to research-led art education in an international context. Our students, whose ideas and thinking are represented by the work you will encounter in this exhibition, have invested their time and money into this question and we send them out from Leeds as the next generation of critical practitioners who will continue to shout. While a number of universities do not accept Art ‘A’ Level, we continue to include it as a ‘facilitating subject’, a vital part of the curriculum and an ‘informed choice’ equal to all other subjects. We aim to produce the next generation who will fight back and demonstrate in all they do and say… “why art matters”. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev spoke in her recent lecture about art as ‘the space of the fragilisation of knowledge’, where we are forced to ask difficult questions, to not simply accept but to question and debate. We always say that students who come to Leeds need to be ready to ask questions, to speak up and to challenge the status quo, to look to the past and the work of artists from all cultures and periods to inform their understanding of why art has always mattered and where their place will be in the social history of art of the future. This is our challenge to them, and while we celebrate their achievement and convey their degrees, we are proud to see in their work a continued and emphatic statement of why art matters.
Dr Abigail Harrison Moore Deputy Head of School
Underscoring What _Matters Underlining words on a mechanical typewriter was easy. Impressing an emlength horizontal line was normally the second function of a numeral or punctuation key, much as it now is on a computer keyboard. While holding down SHIFT, one keystroke would press a sharp ‘underbar’ or ‘understrike’, in ink, onto the paper just below the baseline of the type. Its significance – be it to give emphasis or identify headers or whatever else – always depended on its pattern of use within each text because the underline is just a diacritic mark, like an accent, not a meaningful unit in itself, like a grapheme. That changed when the very same stroke started to be used beside words and numerals rather than under them. Typographically speaking the underscore may just be an underline displaced but its new place is symbolically complicated. Underscores are most commonly used to represent the impossibility of blank space, not because we can’t see or imagine emptiness but because computational processing systems, like hard-drives and server networks, can’t process nothing. Underscores, therefore, are a funny paradox: they literally appear to join things to things, like folders to sub-folders, by signifying nothing. But (and this is the bigger paradox, which obsesses metaphysicians, priests and theoretical physicists alike) nothing is always something. So, what matters about the kind of nothing underscored by this year’s degree show title? It’s not my place to tell you for sure. Here in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds we work against the pernicious trend for turning degree shows into marketing exercises. As we support the students to make their own decisions, good and bad, they curate their own show as a learning experience and the results are different every time. That said, having talked with these student-artists during the year I’m better placed than most to take a guess. So here goes... Actual reality and virtual reality are not the same kind of reality but now more than ever they’re interwoven, inter-dependent and equally real. Whereas virtual realities were once confined to virtual spaces, now not only are their affects experienced in the actual world but so too are the previously unimaginable sights, sounds and stuff that are exported from the virtual into the actual, from the buildings of Zaha Hadid to 3D-printed human body organs. These strange things have an often-overlooked materiality as digital data (i.e., nothing at all) and then an often-illegible materiality once actualised (i.e., nothing about them explains how they were made). How we see, think about and crucially make these things is an everyday question for digital natives. Why wouldn’t young artists wonder how these new materials matter?
There’s a misassumption that the creation of strange and new born-digital materials will make all previous materials and formal concerns redundant in art. But ‘new media’ are now ever-present. Their fading new-ness can no longer sustain simple differentiations between new and old media, new and old things, new and old concerns. Visit any young artist’s studio to see for yourself that the techniques and outcomes of contemporary art work involve constantly remixing the supposedly old and supposedly new. The underscore in this exhibition’s title was invented on an old medium, the typewriter, and connects the word ‘Matters’ with nothing and everything – anything that might be signified by the blank space above the underscore, and everything that could be implicitly placed before the underscore. I guess this, then, is an exhibition about how the thing-ness of everything, anything and nothing can matter to any and all of us. I hope it will show off two things at least: how one group of talented young artists can remind us that matter matters; and how spaces for educating new artists, who will reimagine how and why it does so, matter too.
Nick Thurston Fine Art Lecturer
_LILY ACKROYD-WILLOUGHBY
All matter speaks to us in different ways. We are in constant conversation with materials and the information they impart. My sculptures are preoccupied with surfaces – how we read them and what meanings they might carry. Fusing handmade and altered found objects, my work explores notions of reality, authenticity and desire, and the relationship between base materiality and technology.
lilyackroyd.co.uk lilyackroyd@gmail.com
www.mdainsworth.blogspot.com ma05031991@hotmail.com
_MIKE AINSWORTH
As an artist what I am really interested in are issues of a socio-political nature. Although my work really is about people, much of my work rarely features them visually within it. Instead I am drawn to socially activated areas, interactions and exchanges, objects and the contemporary vernacular of modern society that imposes itself on our retinas on a continuous basis. To this end, the city, and attempting to critically observe, understand and realise the city plays a large part in my practice. As a compulsive documenter and a process-led practitioner I am constantly looking for the things we perhaps overlook, or do not notice when isolated, but when collected can offer insight into how we as a society think and function. Work rarely maintains a common medium in my practice, working with many materials and processes such as printmaking, photography, performance and found objects and imagery.
_FRANCIE ARTHUR
Landscape is the context and the source of inspiration for my work. Specific rural locations and materials are abstracted and explored throughout my practice. Two recurring themes include the juxtaposition of nature with human culture and the transitory elements of the natural world. I use photographs as micro and macro views of the earth, often fragmented and expanded in scale in order to gain a different visual understanding of that site. I displace natural materials such as clay and chalk to consider the ways in which the landscape has developed in its physical sense, and how humans have altered the appearance of the land. By manipulating these elements of nature, I am exploring how we relate and respond to the environment and in turn, present new ways of looking at the world around us.
http://franciearthur.wordpress.com francie-edie@hotmail.co.uk
I use the abject innocence and celebratory nature of iced cake as a means of opening up sometimes controversial and sometimes futile conversations around traditional feminist subject matter. Cake becomes a catalyst for discussion, bait in a trap, a sweetener for something unpleasant. Whilst my work has introverted tendencies, it sits within a wider, extroverted, conscious and more analytical context. The current but outdated economic and cultural climates which conserve the tradition of patriarchal control are being challenged by a new generation of feminists who are bringing feminism back to the attention of an entire population and simultaneously empowering both men and women.
emmabakel@hotmail.co.uk
_EMMA BAKEL
Overall, my practice exists as the causatum of an exploration of what it means to be a Western feminist in 2014. Every new piece of work comes from the central question upon which my entire practice is built: Am I a feminist?
_SOPHIE BUTLER-MANUEL
Sophie Butler-Manuel’s work is centered on her series ‘Fruity Females.’ This series of characters has been created as a reaction to how fruit and vegetables are used as examples of figure types for both men and women. By using real fruit and vegetables, these miniature sculptures are a comical interpretation of the figure stereotypes, and a comment on society’s obsession with the most desirable shape, size or diet. Wit and humour pervade Sophie’s work with the fruity figures being associated with current celebrities, demonstrating the current mass media as an immediate catalyst to her oeuvre. For the final degree exhibition, Sophie has designed a theatrical diorama, housing all her fruity figures in a momentous dolls house. This installation transforms the notions of childhood into an intriguing projection of a dream-like world, where the Fruity Figures play the actors. Their cleverly constructed narratives provoke questions on household, the family unit and the media.
sophiebutlermanuel@msn.com
Art has the power to prolong the life of fleeting things. It is salutary to think that one day not a trace will remain of our precious possessions, our clothes – even our everyday photographs, which, ironically, are themselves attempts to capture our ephemeral lives. Making prints directly from clothes, photographs and other objects is exciting because I feel I am reworking them into something new and alive.
https://zipporah.see.me/ zipporahchappell@gmail.com
_ZIPPORAH CHAPPELL
Printmaking facilitates the creation of a series of impressions. In my practice I like to exploit this aspect of the medium because it feeds into the idea that I am making something new, living, evolving. In addition, as a printmaker, my focus constantly returns to the process involved in making prints and the textural possibilities of a finished piece of work. The results tend to be ambiguous, like an x-ray image – or like life itself.
_JOE CHEETHAM
Over time, certain photographs acquire a distinguishing value – that is, a realisation that they can stand alone, free from the protection of their medium. It is then that I want to paint them.
www.joecheetham.com cheethamjoe@gmail.com
http://poppydvs42.wordpress.com poppydvs42@gmail.com
_POPPY DAVIS
My work attempts to create an experience that is both visually stimulating and tactile. I hope to reassess the rule of ‘look but don’t touch’ that is imposed on art in exhibitions and galleries, instead inviting the audience to look and touch in equal measure.
_EMMA DRAFFIN
My art focuses on communication and interpretation. Typically, I create sculptures or films that explore the social, biological and psychological aspects of the way we express our innermost thoughts, and attempt to communicate with others. My work contains darkly humorous moments, and for the most part depicts an evocative aesthetic that I refer to as ‘fragile aggression’. A person’s voice is important, but when I say ‘voice’ I am not solely referring to the vocal sounds that a person can make. Equally, it is important to recognize that there are numerous ways to ‘say’ something without the use of actual words. How do we make ourselves heard? Do our voices matter? And what is the power of silence? On experiencing my artworks, I want the audience to reflectively consider these kinds of questions, and individually contemplate their own ‘voice’. Often, effective communication comes down to the clichéd phrase ‘it’s not what you say but how you say it’, but I look at what is left unsaid as much as what is.
www.cargocollective. com/Draffin emma@soojon.co.uk
http://nataliedrenth.tumblr.com nataliedrenth@hotmail.com
_NATALIE DRENTH
The foundations of my practice have been shaped by my interest in Neolithic sites; this led me to question the power of an art object, specifically sculpture, and how it has the ability to evoke reverence. In art academia reverence is viewed negatively, this is partly due to its links to religion and its spiritual overtones. My sculptures explore and produce a reverential affect as I wish to dispel the negative perception of spirituality in art. By doing this I want to enhance the viewer’s experience, creating work that goes beyond the readily visible to prompt an appreciation of more than the aesthetic.
_KATIE ENRIGHT
I am interested in the aesthetic of the everyday, and in my practice I have been putting the surfaces we see around us under a microscope. Through drawing and print I have created books and paper installations centered on detailed viewpoints of found textures, marks and patterns. The imagery I am using is sourced from a series of photographs from which I have chosen sections to zoom into and blow up to a much larger scale, thus altering their appearance. Through exploring the depth of materials in print, I am looking at the way in which separating these patterns from their original contexts and transforming and repeating them can transform them into ambiguous, illusory surfaces capable of encompassing the viewer.
katie.enright92@gmail.com
‘There’s nothing more boring than hearing someone recount their dream’ is by all means a fair statement. But in gathering the visual accounts of friends, family and complete strangers, the monotony of hearing has become filled with expression, and the enormity of this unique experience has become clear. An experience that I feel is all too often overlooked.
fglass@hotmail.co.uk
_FRANNIE GLASS
A desire to access the subconscious mind continues to fascinate and perplex; this mysterious part of the mind that even Freud and Jung could only hazard at an understanding. With much guidance from the Surrealists’ and Susan Hiller’s investigations into dreams, my process has developed out of the mechanics, creativity and enigma of dreaming; from midnight automatic drawings to collaborative dreambased collages.
_EMILY HILLS
My work explores the role of science, medicine and art in shaping society’s future and present. This is part of a wider exploration into the relationship between our society and its deepest concerns such as placebos, preservation and morality. My practice incorporates references from both science and museology, intertwining them into a range of installations, sculptures and photography. By organising, curating and manipulating found scientific objects, I investigate the influences of science and medicine on human existence and the trust we are prepared to give professionals of these industries. Using ephemeral and raw materials alongside ready-mades, I manipulate these objects, placing them into unusual contexts. This creates juxtaposition between the scientific and the organic in order to emphasize society’s attempts to control natural processes. The pieces often reflect my concerns of living in a twenty first century society, which I believe is strongly obsessed with preserving the ‘self’ and the ‘being’.
http://emilyjanehills.tumblr. com/ emshills@googlemail.com
twitter.com/edyhurst edyhurst@googlemail.com
_EDWARD HURST
Impossibility, failure and magic, like glowing stones on a bone-dry ocean, guide me down a dark and narrow tunnel. Running my hands along the surface, the unaccountable moment of causation, be it metaphorical or physical, is the method of choice. My work deliberately attempts the impossible, taking on mammoth tasks with a sponge and a rusty spanner. Do we dare? Do we dream? Striving towards nonsense in the grand procession of adventure!
_JOE KIFF
Our perception of the properties of matter has been transformed. Human agency is being colonized under the homogeny of the digital age. All histories are now told in immediate high-definition. The individual can only contemplate the totality of the raw material being broadcast. Light, in the form of the camera and the cinema, and sound, in the form of the microphone and the phonograph, have subverted the human agency of recording and reproducing as our experience. The aesthetic experience has been compromised and decompressed by the acceleration of matter in these new mediums. The original cannot exist with the digital. Production has become an algorithm. The ‘work’ being transposed into the binary network, reassembled as projection as if anew, is inherently a copy. Appropriation has become the most natural state of a contemporary artist. The artist must make claims as to what is theirs, taking refuge in the detritus of the digital material. It is only appropriate. The digital has rendered the agency of the artist immaterial.
jakiff@hotmail.com
goes by styles and methods change. At one time in history we could be faced with a style that is gestural, alluding to the artist’s hand. In another instance it could become geometric and mechanical, denying the artists hand. These very different styles have caused movements to be defined within art history. They continue to battle within my work. Furthermore, my interest with the processes of light has brought an element to my work that is more or less out of my control. Although I am able to control whether my work has gesture or geometry by using a variety of materials and techniques, when light becomes a factor, the effect of its processes are not necessarily up to you.
mayalaud93@hotmail.co.uk
_MAYA LAUD
I have always been interested in the formal innovation within abstract art, however as time
_ELLIE MACGARRY I make paintings and objects that are awkward or clunky; unusual spatial configurations are set up through the use of surface effects and jarring colour relationships. ‘Colour is truly fluid: it spills over subjects and seeps between disciplines; it escapes those containers that were built to house it and drips into the places that were designed to keep it out.’ (David Batchelor)
www.ellie.macgarry.com www.elliemacgarrydrawings.tumblr.com ellie@macgarry.com
Remixing elements taken from mass consumer culture with ‘high’ art, my work is an exploration of cultural distinctions and the complex ways in which we navigate objects and images, from contemplation to distraction. I am particularly interested in the physicality of things, simulation, and the increasing co-existence of the virtual and the real. As the lines become blurred I choose to combine brute sculptural form with the ‘insubstantial’ projected image, probing our relationship to tangible matter and our (dis-) embodied selves.
_TOM MCGINN
www.tommcginn.com tom-mcginn.tumblr.com tom.mcginn1@gmail.com
_JULIA MIORIN
Inspired by mundane surroundings, fragments and details, I engage with various materials, making objects that question the function of things and their relation to human use. The works might tell stories of past or future actions, somewhere between the leftovers of an action and a potential engagement with the objects. Through a careful formal reduction towards modest but tactile forms and by being selective with the choice of colours, the work moves between the familiar and the unknown.
www.npiece.com/julia-miorin j.miorin@gmx.de
My motive is to investigate concepts such as home, identity or the sense of place. As a reply to the accelerated rhythms of modern life I try to reflect the importance of small movements and pauses. Oil paint requires as much time as the possibilities it gives. It is so much older than I am, there are so many things it knows that I don’t. I let questions remain in every brushstroke, hoping they make me understand why I am here.
http://julsjulie.tumblr.com/ juliamoscardo@gmail.com
_JULIA MOSCARDO i CHAFER
The space, not the infinite one but the long muted that scares. Domesticated rooms and individuals. Nonsense and laziness. The canvas, the other space.
_LIZZ MOUNCER
I seek within my work that abstract relationship which we hold with our landscape. The sociological interaction with history and muddy earth, the established memory that is held in the significant locality, and static that is left behind in the wake of a hasty withdrawal. I’m interested in the intangible connection between skin and earth, exploring my personal identity with the ancestral landscape of the Llynfi Valley. I disperse my images, scattering landscapes amongst the contours of familiar skin, creating blurred constructs of memory. My mother is my subject, and therefore she speaks in this work, the Welsh language of her childhood – poetry in her mother tongue and in the English words of her daughter, her beloved poems, echoing the landscapes of her memory. This work creates an environment to which personal identity can be considered with the refined memories that we hold with landscape.
http://breakyourback. tumblr.com lizmouncer@gmail.com
www.eleniodysseos.co.uk elena.odysseos@gmail.com
_ELENI ODYSSEOS
Reflecting on our image-laden world, these paintings explore architecture and the built environment, less in the engineering terms of how it was made and more in terms of how we constantly re-make it in new combinations. Based on fragments of photographs that shape scenarios my eyes could never witness, they exaggerate these newly combined spaces and explore what might happen in them. That liberty allows me to experiment with material specificities of paint just as much as to experiment with formal issues of composition. 3D animations penetrate the picture plane as the medium specific identity of the work takes the backseat, questioning our preconceived notions of reality.
_SARAH PENHALL
Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies. We exist in an age of representation, living through images and second hand experiences of life, mediated by the computer. Reality is condensed and reduced into convenient shapes and block colours, simplified through the digital process. I am concerned with various methods of reproduction, creating reductive and simplified versions of their original. The resulting objects connect and link, forming awkward formations and landscapes that pay a somewhat disconnected homage to the original image. They act as an exploration into the translation of the flattened world of the digital, out of the screen and into the physical.
http://sarahpenhall.tumblr.com sarloupen@hotmail.co.uk
‘It is not the form that dictates the colour, but the colour that brings out the form.’ Hans Hofmann My work is an exploration of colour, how it enlightens our senses and forms our world. The paintings move away from the conventionality of stretchers and two-dimensionality, flirting with objects and form and breaching the barriers between painting and sculpture.
_NED POOLER
nedpooler@hotmail.co.uk
_STANLEY GIACOMO QUAIA
I’m exploring both individual and social memory, as personal and inter-personal phenomena that art can deal with in different ways from psychology or the hard sciences. I make drawings, sculptures and videos, and I’m interested in assembling all of these forms together in inter-media installations. I’m particularly drawn to using installations as sites for participatory engagements between objects and people, and how the format of the art installation can situate our thinking about the embedded and embodied nature of consciousness.
http://www.behance.net/stanleygiacomoquaia stanleygquaia@hotmail.com
www.eloiseraab.tumblr.com eloiseraab@hotmail.com
_ELOISE RAAB
I am curious about illustrating the often mystified parts of individuals thoughts. My work explores concepts of loneliness, fear, and everyday life. These themes are juxtaposed in my practice by the use of animated narratives, intuitive graphics and subtle humour.
_TESSA RATUSZYNSKA- PRICE
My practice is predominantly focused on the in-between, the transitional, and the innate fear associated with this position – the uncanny. A primal fear of the internal unknown. I am interested in art’s similarity to dreams in its ability to access and explore these fears. I am naturally drawn to film making because of its quality of being neither completely fictional nor an accurate transcription of reality. I often explore works that exist between mediums: combinations of film, sculpture and optical illusion. My work often uses animals as the representation of this in between state. Beings that exist between us and inanimate objects. In particular, not domestic or exotic animals, but those familiar and yet un-anthropomorphised – fish, birds, rabbits and horses. Animals that exist captively and yet behave completely instinctually. Representing the uncanny, ‘the other’, existing with us and yet beyond our understanding.
https://vimeo.com/user15817610
01.t.price@live.co.uk
At the start of the year she was focusing on different projection styles, yet the melancholia surrounding the projection process interested her further. This mysterious air of something that had passed led to the questioning of the role of memory in the present. She wishes to convey an intimacy between film and the audience, making the viewer aware of their own mind, memories and presence in that moment – delving into personal spheres of consciousness.
chazzok@hotmail.co.uk
_CHARLIE ROGERS
Charlie works mainly with digital mediums, ranging from photography, projection, sound and film.
_EMMA THOMPSON
Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.’ Macbeth Stagnant artwork no longer reflects the restlessness of a constantly evolving society. As someone fascinated by society, my work emulates the fractured throw-away civilisation it is housed within. One where possessions, feelings, livelihoods, even ‘timeless’ art itself, can only ever be temporary. Broad material experimentation shapes my art. The process of change frequently demands the slow adaption or degradation of my initial composition; manifesting fleeting time. This ephemerality evokes fragility; intrinsically entangled with life itself. The impermanence dictates the viewer to seize their moment of engagement. As transience takes hold the original perception shifts, leaving a temporary mark on the space, but a lasting memory. Just as my time as an art student comes to an end, my art is also eradicated.
emma.thompson_92@hotmail.co.uk
The objects I create stem from an enjoyment of making. The materials I use react to one another, slot together, fill one another, and sit on top of each other. My work has ended up intriguing, tactile and maybe a little bit odd. This tactility combined with playfulness raises questions with regard to viewer interaction. Curiosity and a need to touch comes into play, something I am especially interested in.
_LEA TIERNAN
http://leatiernanart.tumblr.com leatiernan@gmail.com
_WILL TURNER
The fabric of ‘home’ is fickle. I remember when the word was the evocation of a static filled room, a radio in the corner. I remember when the word was summer, a tepid humidity of light and secret garden places; or winter and a body of dark night safely wrapping the walls and windows. My memories of home are childish, simple, colourful and yet they have fractured over time. Impositions and imperfections, strangers and strangeness have entered from outside the room and appeared within its depths. Memories expand, dripping out in all directions; they lengthen and diminish across the rocksurface cracks of the walls, picking up dust and detritus, dwelling in the cracks and hardening. What remains is a tactile ideal, crafted with the rough-edged intimacy of the handmade.
w.r.turner@hotmail.com
‘I am inspired by nature, the serendipitous cycles of change and the organic rhythms of life. I wish to explore this energy within myself by questioning the subconscious, the internal and the intuitive.’ ‘My practice allows me to act out my cultural agency as a mediator of the space between. Exploring a third space that emerges through the negotiation of binaries and playing with this line.’
http://zhango.tumblr.com/ laura_zhang2442@hotmail.com
_LAURA ZHANG
Laura Zhang is a mixed media artist living between the United Kingdom and Hong Kong.
Immaterial / In-material
The attractiveness of the word ‘matter’ derives from its polysemic potential: it’s a sign that has multiple meanings and which anchors a large semantic field. The word’s etymology can expand our appreciation of the dynamics and diversity of works in this show, ‘_Matters’. There is no single uniformed style or stage of development for graduating artists, and nor is there a single outcome. But we do all have to work out how artistic education has affected us individually. As artists we are engaged with matter as material stuff and what matters in terms of our social concerns. The noun matter is defined as: an event, circumstance, fact, question, state or course of things, which is or may be an object of consideration or practical concern; a subject, and affair, a business’, derives from materie subject of thought, speech, or expression.
This etymology comes from the Latin materia, ‘substance from which something is made’. It can also qualify a scientific definition, as an expression of how atoms form ‘objects having both mass and volume’ - what we call material. Yet it has a parallel root in the term mater, meaning ‘origin, source, mother’. Furthermore, ‘matter’ as a verb explores the subjective faculties with which we mediate the objective world, such as the ‘senses relating to physical matter or substance’ and ‘senses relating to significance or importance’. Whether through explicit or implicit means, ratification or negation, what an artist does materially signifies and orders the subject and object relations of those things arranged inside the frame they nominate. This particular group of graduating artists share a preoccupation with our changing understandings of material in the digital age. The artist is no longer society’s expert on material matters. The alchemy of the artist has been superseded by the efficiency of technological engineering and scientific discourse. The artist now relates to her or his materials as an amateur. The role of the artist can be reduced to syphoning creative paths away from modes of production that dominate other spheres of industry. All of those graduating this year have had to negotiate voluntary and involuntary engagements with the digital. The material substances of their environment have slowly been transcribed into binary code. The universe has paradoxically expanded into a contraction of direct experiences. Subject-object relations have become mediated and filtered through the digital. Technological advancement has accelerated and compressed matter, through reproduction, into things that are both near and distant at the same time. Hypertext, virtual reality and cyberspace are examples of how the Internet has made material immaterial.
This shift is referred to as digital mysticism, whereby the ontology of software is considered to be immaterial, as if it existed as a transcendental new nothing. However, a more accurate statement is to say that the digital is in material because the software cannot exist outside of the hardware. Therefore, new media are not simply a metaphysical non-substance in virtual space, but tangibly located in data carriers. ‘The age of the disembodied, immaterial virtuality and cyberspace is upon us, and therefore we are compelled to think about material objects.’1 Art practices that engage with digital making are working in the context of the mystification of digital material not a complete immaterialisation of culture. Beyond simple enactments of nostalgia, artists are critically looking at older techniques and modes of reproduction, reviving some and taking refuge amongst others. Artists have a licence to synthesise methods from lots of different historical epochs, bringing them to bear on the present as an attempt at representing or even analysing cultural progress. The etymological root of ‘digital’ derives form the Latin digitalis, ‘pertaining to fingers’, from digitus, meaning ‘finger or toe’, which carries a secondary meaning of dealing in counting and numeracy. The artist is responding to the mouse and the touch-screen having altered the value and function of the hand. Computers generate outcomes that demand only minimal physical gestures on the part of the artist. Objects rendered wholesale as CAD files can now be translated and reproduced by 3D printing. Our agency is carried out by our digits [fingers]. Our bodies remain fixed, static, as our eyes experience an endless stream of connected metadata. The artist’s job, as an occupation, changed as the cultural industries left some or all of Modernism’s obsessions behind. The mixed skill-sets of contemporary artists, which are cognitive and theoretical as much as practical, can take up critical positions toward digital culture. But they still owe a huge debt to the developments of the 20th-century, when the artisan traditions were fundamentally challenged. Brave artists challenged the division of labour that massification seemed to make sensible. Whether through adaptation or negation, artistic practice has been influenced by industry. As John Roberts argues, artists have developed skills dialectially: the de-skilling and re-skilling of art-making is not a terminal decline, but rather a response to and expression of a position of alienation in light of reification, which dictates the institutional structures of art’s industry.2 Moreover, the changing skills of artistry have influenced generations of young artists to focus on developing transferable skills and to become
1 Mitchell, William J.T, What do pictures want? The lives and love of images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 149. 2 John Roberts, Art After Deskilling (Henry Moore Insitute, 2010) [audio file]
responsive to social conditions. Artistic trends have adapted socially-oriented tropes of connectivity and collective action through participatory and sociallyengaged, issue-led forms of art. Trying to understand digital material ontologically has become a trope for new artists. Boris Groys deconstructs our understanding of the digital by claiming that it is defined by relationships with digital material, which happen through transactions of [image]-to-[image-file] and back again, and again, and again. He claims that ‘digital images have... the ability to originate, to multiply, and to distribute themselves through the open fields of contemporary means of communication, such as the Internet or cell-phone networks, immediately and anonymously, without any curatorial control’.3 In these networks, there is simply raw material, which can then be curated or otherwise reused, composed and assembled. He argues the image is simply a visualisation of, and an effect of, the image-maker being decoded by the computer, which interprets it by reproducing it. Digitisation creates an illusion, or the myth, that there is no difference between the original and the copy. The fact and method of transfiguration is hidden and mystified behind the interface and the hardware of presentation. From this point of view, the image is an event. It is a staging of, and performance of, the mystification of the original. Groys claims that digitisation is ‘an interpretation and every interpretation is a betrayal, a misuse.’ The social destination of digital images as art, the exhibition of digital images, demonstrates the heterogeneous state of image files as digital files. A file does not carry over any intrinsic quality of its file-ness when it is replicated in print, yet every different printed use of it changes the visual presence of the image. The discomfort and frustration felt when wandering amongst a video installation develops because the viewer has lost control of the duration of their contemplation. In ways like this, the digital image reflects more accurately the contemplative state of real-life. Groys observes the extent to which video installations in museums subvert our two methods of controlling time: neither we nor the museum setting can immobilise such images, but nor do they demand the same immobilisation experienced when one is in an audience in a cinema. Understanding the ontology of digital images as reproductions of their image files means accepting that when we use such images we are performing acts of appropriation. This action or activity should empower the artist to exist confidently outside of the bureaucratic systems of counterproductive-cultures. The etymology of the word appropriation is rooted in a sense of seizing something that belongs to others and making it one’s own.4 Returning to the problem of the absent original, and the idea of possessing something that is inherently an original copy, quickly provokes second(ary) thoughts on our polarised views about ownership. If the artist is only ever in possession of a visualisation of the original, and not the 3 Groys, Boris. ‘From Image to Image File- and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization’, in Art Power, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), pp.83-91. 4 Marcus Boon, ‘On Appropriation’, The New Centennial Revier, Vol.7 (Spring 2007), pp.1-14.
original, the artist cannot take ownership or full possession of the essence that belongs to the original thing. Instead, the artist is taking ownership of the performance of reusing it -- the betrayal of the original in the misuse of its copy. Additionally, the second root of appropriation plays off a sense of what is right, proper and suitable. I think that questions should be raised about the judicial superstructures being built around the institutionalised ownership of culture and education. These questions are often at the forefront of critical artistic work with digital media. Jacques Ranciére’s ideas about the distribution of the sensible5 offer a clear rationale for this. According to Ranciere, societies need to understand how aesthetic judgement and culture are implemented, and they need to understand this as a political issue. This would involve analysing how the aesthetic field is organised to create inclusive and exclusive communities, and the impact of this division on society. Speaking back across an ideological void, the aesthetic is an expression of how an individual’s emancipated democratic rights are being influenced by the society that the producer of the expression takes part in. Artists have become a different kind of maker, no longer of their material, but instead of the distribution of the sensible and its reception. Not all artists, and certainly not all the students if this show, would categorise themselves as political. However, they have been students of a discipline that has inherent political structures and they are aiming to work in industries that have them too. As the educational veil slips away, graduates will have to navigate a professional world of social relations that are now being increasingly shaped by a reliance on electronic communication networks and binary codes. Our education in critical thought, aesthetic judgement, practice, and our self-directed pathways of learning will determine whether or not we are successful in adjusting to a career beyond the University of Leeds. Hopefully _Matters reflects how artistic education is resolutely anything but immaterial. As our environment becomes increasing digitised and our relations forced into binaries, the investment made by us students ‘in-material’ will remain in-valuable.
Joseph Kiff
5 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible, rans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum Publishing, 2006)
The Reading Room The structure of the Fine Art course at Leeds is set up to educate the students in an equal divide between art history, cultural studies and practical studio work. In light of this unique inter-disciplinary ethos, the Reading Room attempts to put into explicit terms the relationship between theory and practice. The ‘Practice in Context’ (PiC) dissertation projects undertaken by the students form the spine of the Reading Room. Whilst the direction of the PiCs operated as a laboratory for students to work through concerns that have influenced their practice, the resultant contextual shells act as a site of introduction to each student’s work. Every student has endeavoured to reflect their individual practice within their PiC, forming unique creative syntheses between exploratory research and studio concerns. The representation of this dialogue has been the core aim of curating this the reading room. Alongside these projects, the reading room displays artists’ books made by the students, books that stand-alone as artworks as well as more experimental pieces that continue to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical work. Countering and complementing this element of the project is a collection of essays from students who undertook history of art modules in their final year. Additionally, graduates from across the university have been invited to contribute texts to showcase the breadth and variety of research undertaken at Leeds. This has also been a key motivation in gathering publications and audio lectures from leading local galleries. Whilst pointing to the opportunities available to Fine Art graduates at the University, the Reading Room project is representative of the engagement between students, staff and these galleries. Finally, the Reading Room project has attempted to chart the extensive trajectory of alumni who have graduated from the course and have continued their practices locally, nationally, and internationally. Running parallel to the exhibition, the Reading Room encapsulates and frames the elements of the course that often remain hidden from the public.
The Reading Room is curated by Joe Kiff
Public Engagement Programme In order to engage both local and national publics, this year’s undergraduates have produced a programme to attract future Fine Art undergraduates, and members from the established artistic community.
Education Programme The education programme celebrates diversity in practice, and the links between theory & studio work, asking: what fundamentally constitutes artistic matter? Over the course of the show _Matters will host a Schools Preview and hopes to introduce young people to the importance of critical & creative thinking beyond their current studies. Our drawing and curation workshops, led by the students, aim to underscore the importance of having the freedom to play, explore, and learn from mistakes, which are integral to the study of Fine Art. The programme resolves to communicate that ‘Art Matters’ and ‘Engagement Matters’, using the current state of the arts sector public funding & educational reforms as opportunities to highlight the importance of creative learning.
Film Screening Objectified by Gary Hustwit “A feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them” 20th June 5pm
Public talk: ‘Hands on/off’ On 19th June, _Matters will be hosting an evening of discussions titled ‘Hands on/off: Making and Matter in view of the Digital’. We are inviting select artists and curators to address questions posed by matter, and its relative importance in an age dominated by the ‘immaterial’ realm of the digital and its various interfaces. Broadly speaking, we will be asking: How has the making, viewing and value of art been affected by the influence of the Internet? Correlating with the ‘89plus’ generation of digital natives, we will explore why in recent years artists have sought to embrace new technologies whilst reaffirming their engagement to analogue materials, and older ideas. 19th June 6-8pm
The Public Programme is coordinated by Emily Hills and Tom McGinn
We would like to thank all of the Fine Art tutors, technicians, FAHACS staff, and visting artists over the course of the year for their encouragement, advice, and support.
Many thanks also to our generous sponsors: