74 Artist profiles
Marianne Trewern Cornish born Marianne Trewern has been creating her ‘dress up items’ for just over a year, under the name KBV Trewern. An initial research period into Cornish history during her time at Falmouth University became a springboard for Marianne to create works which weave threads between the past and her own, current, understanding of the world. In particular the Bal Maidens have acted as a key source of inspiration. Subverting the Bonnet as a garment, Trewern
plays with ideas of BDSM, as well as taking from her Cornish heritage - dancing between modesty and exhibitionism. Trewern dabbles in other forms of media, including sculpture, and similarly to her work with KBV, the themes are often focused around ideas of the uncanny, duality and testing one’s perceptions and expectations, often with outcomes that deal with ideas of horror and beauty, but always with a playful take. www.mariannetrewern.com
Jesse Pollock Jesse Pollock studied Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts, but towards the end of his studies found himself far more inclined towards molten conduits of welded sheet-steel and slip-wheeling ceramics (writes Charlie Mills). Following his graduation in 2015, Pollock was quick to move back to his childhood home in Kent to pursue an increasing interest in wrought sculpture. He now lives in the small rural village of Teynham, where his studio is filled with sculptures reflective of the vestiges of rural England: fruit-picking ladders, cider flagons, milk churns and hunting rifles. Focusing on agricultural tools and motifs, Pollock juxtaposes bucolic convention with a distorted and contested reality of the countryside, suggesting something darker, more frustrated beneath its alluring facade. Fabricated
using welded steel and silicone, they reflect a brutal reality of material hardship, discord, class division and racism, as well as the fear and uncertainty of what we have lost or stand to lose from crises affecting rural life today. His latest commission, The Granary, speaks to a need to overcome these crises, as well as the vexed rhetoric that underpins traditional visions of the nation. You can catch The Granary in London anytime until 18 September at Bold Tendencies, a repurposed brutalist car park in Peckham. Pollock will also have new work at Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer in Buckinghamshire (end 24 Oct) and at the new show Where Things Fall Down at Fels in East London (9 - 18 July). @boldtendencies @contemporarsculpwww.contemporarysculpturefulmer.com turefulmer www. boldtendencies.com
Jane Hayes Greenwood Over the past two years Greenwood’s paintings have dovetailed into a rabbit hole of mystical plants and flora, delving deep into the histories of organic fertility symbols, midwifery and medicinal botany (writes Charlie Mills). Greenwood’s work evokes the wondrous and hallucinogenic properties of the plant kingdom, with her unique and individual species appearing to the common eye as either extinct or wholly outlawed. There is a clear psychoanalytic or surrealist preoccupation in the work as there are numerous allusions to the power of the organic body, its generative properties and the convoluted desires that emerge through the proximity of aphrodisia and maternity. Despite their beauty, these plants explore a series of
foreclosed histories; methods of cultivating, healing and being in the world that were purposefully suppressed by the rise of global capitalism. In the words of Federici, “It became a matter of exterminating or confiscating a certain ecology of body and soul, hallucinogenic treatments, and forms of pleasure or excitation.” Greenwood’s work is a testament to the revelatory powers of this suppressed ecology of entheogenic practices, exploring how desire, control and magical thinking manifest in our contemporary relationship to the natural world. Recent solo shows include The Witch’s Garden at GiG, Munich, and Lead Me Not Into Temptation at Block 336, London, of which Greenwood is also a founding Director. www.janehayesgreenwood.com
BEYOND THE RING AND THIMBLE
@kbv.trewern
@janehayesgr
