Telling Stories :Margate
Telling Stories: Margate Published by Zetetic Press 2011 ISBN-978-0-9569773-2-8
Copyright Š 2011 Cathryn Kemp First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Zetetic Press zetetic.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including, photocopying, electronic or mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher.
Previous page: Movement Artist Yumino Seki performs at the opening reception of Telling Stories: Margate. Marine Studios 07 October 2011. Photograph by Alexander Brattell
Telling Stories: Margate Exhibition 07 October - 01 November 2011 Marine Studios, Margate, UK Part of Pushing Print Fringe 2011
Contents Foreword by Cathryn Kemp Essay by Grace Lau
Alexander Brattell SinĂŠid Codd Dawn Cole Martin Everett Cathryn Kemp Louise Kenward Lucinda Wells Yumino Seki
Artist Statements
Telling Stories: Margate
Foreword Cathryn Kemp From the moment I stepped off the train in Margate, I was greeted with a familiar story; a seaside town, long past its holiday heyday which is being pulled, at times uncomfortably, into the future. Having come from Hastings, it was a feeling of being home-from-home. Immediately the contrasts, and similarities, appeared out of the winter mist, like the soaring iconography of the tower block which appears to bar the traveller’s way on entry to the town. The stretch from the station into its somewhat shambolic centre is strewn with boarded-up shops, cafes advertising a cup of tea for 50 pence and the Dreamland site itself. All of it waiting for something to happen, even though something rather huge just has. Despite the Turner being built, despite the planned regeneration of Dreamland itself, despite the chirpy good humour of the residents, there is a sense that this place is yet to decide what it will be – and in the process – who or what it will leave behind. We have long felt that in Hastings. Our fishing community and gallery-going chattering classes have stood at odds since the creation of Hastings as a fishing port itself. The conflict between the working man and the middle classes has, historically, divided the town – and now we are waiting for the Jerwood Gallery to be finished, for the day-trippers to arrive from London, for our ‘cultural’ life to begin on a national stage. It was on such a trip to Margate that the idea for Telling Stories began while in conversation with Dawn Cole, organiser of the annual Pushing Print exhibition and events. Why not have a fringe event. Why not build on the connections between Dawn’s work and mine and start some kind of dialogue as a form of cultural exchange, a way of linking person and place in search of the poetic. I wanted to ask questions about how living within this shift has affected and informed artists from both communities. I wanted to bring together artists from both places – and to see if their work imbued this sense of place, this marker of change, or simply this time of reflection, within the seismic shifts into the ‘future’. I wanted to see if we could find a common language and a point at which our dialogue and practice could meet, bridging the geographical gap and possibly those of culture and process as well. How to do this, though? How to bring together seven disparate artists and expect them to make any
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headway? The only way, I felt, was through a process of story-telling, of bringing together our collective narratives to start telling a new tale. From the beginning of human history, people of all cultures have told stories to process the journey through life and to engage with the realities of living in an unpredictable world, a world in which the only constant is change. Much has been written about the shamanistic role of story-telling, the unleashing of the hidden and shameful parts of the human psyche, the harsh metaphysical truths of existence through dark fairy tales which guide us into deep, treacherous forests of the unconscious. Through allegory and myth we construct a mode for living, a story of ourselves and the space we inhabit, giving us a sense of place which exists within the realm of experience as much as the physical. In bringing together artists from both coastal towns, I was interested in the gaps between our work and practice; the potential for dialogue and interplay, the displaced space to create new tales, hack apart bits from old ones, embed a narrative arc within the psychic and intellectual space between each artist, the work they make and the space they bring it to, or derive it from. I also wanted to ask more questions of us both collectively and as individual artists, and in doing so, come to understand the threads of interpretation which run between us. What drew us together? What narrative conventions or rituals spoke of a dialogue between us – and where did these meta-narratives take us? It was not until the work was installed and discussed, digested and experienced that we realised collectively that our work spoke of loss, of anthropological narratives of death, ritual, and hesitant rebirth in a kind of loving memorial – much like the places we are from; Margate and Hastings. From Wells’ waves which roll back into themselves against the tune of the mournful, nostalgic piano solo, from Everett’s silent epitaphs to Kipling’s grief at losing his son, from my broken, rotted nightgown which is reclaimed into a piece speaking of violence and beauty, to Cole’s poignant depiction of WW1 seen through the eyes of her long-dead Great Aunt Clarice’s memoir, and Kenward’s grandmother’s wardrobe which expels tiny notelets; sending messages from the heart of a space swollen with grief – there is a tangible presence of loss and yet an equal attempt to understand and process that loss. Death is no stranger to the photographer artist and the complex, critical components of a photographer’s work using time and light to record tiny moments which are at once on going through the harnessing of light to film, yet at the same time finished, a record of the death of a moment at the exact time of its birth. Historically, photography has responded to the revelation of captured
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experience through observation, through the clinical, distanced documentary of war, famine, disease and ultimately death. Always at a distance; presented as media shots, grabs of epic events brought in grainy fiction to the people. And yet, documentary can move into the intimate, from the public experience of death into a private space where the artist becomes witness. In Andres Serrano’s series entitled The Morgue, we are drawn into a relationship with each of the dead people as Serrano photographs them objectively, yet with a reverence that is at once startling and grotesque. Death is a revelation, it is the unknowable truth and as mere humans we are left, once again, to find ways of making sense of this final leveller. I would suggest that it is through stories that we create a narrative to live and work within – without the great narrative arc of understanding, memory and context, how are we to live with such short finite lives? In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes of the realisation that each photograph of the living becomes a photograph of the dead in time, a revelation which has the power to disturb and fragment our present happiness. Brattell speaks of this inherent dilemma in his chorus line of seemingly unrelated images entitled Non Linear 1. They span a time in his life – a time which no longer exists and yet the echoes of it resonate even now. Brattell, we feel, is longing to make sense of it even by acknowledging its disparity. The work acts as a set of clues which we can enter and deconstruct, thus bringing our narrative into play and embedding our experience within the work. We are co-collaborators with Brattell as he invites us, and our stories, into his narration. Codd takes a more playful approach by capturing images of people with bird tattoos as a development from a project started in 2010: The Hastings Rarities Affair, wherein Codd charted the controversial story of a great bird-watching fraud which took place some years ago. She brings this tale to Margate – and colludes in a new fiction by gently probing identity and notions of belonging in her new works, bound in an old photographic album. Truth and lies, death and rebirth, telling stories and hiding the facts; all the artists expose something of the structures which build understanding – yet which are as fragile as the wind. Truth can dissolve into opinion, facts into gossip, lies into myths – the endless gamut of human interaction includes us for a brief moment in time. It is this moment we are suspended in as we show work, as we expose something of ourselves and our stories to the public realm. It is easy to draw comparison to the wealth of photographic work which has alluded to this potential invasion and exposure of private space. Sophie Calle, for instance, acts as observer and voyeur in a way of working which strikes the viewer as intimate yet somehow distanced and dislocated from her subject.
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In our own way we are seeking the same half-truths in our symbolic gestures which hover somewhere between the said and unsaid in uneasy commonality of purpose and drawing from the same sources as Calle herself; anthropology and psychology. We are holding up the disturbing remains of our subconscious, inviting a kind of metaphysical trespass onto the sacred ground of our collective psyche. And because of this, there seems to me to be a fragility about the relationships and work in the exhibition – a sense of the intensely private made public and accessible. It is a vulnerability echoed outside of our private domain in the sense of chaotic integration experienced by our collective home towns. We love Margate for its people, their relentless enthusiasm and love for their town. Likewise in Hastings, we feel passionately protective of our town, its foibles and imperfections, its ‘social problems’ and its earnest solutions. We seem, as artists, to be holding up our feelings and experiences to be examined in an uncomfortable, and we hope, healing, series of ritualised questions. We seem to be holding our thoughts and feelings in suspended, protracted revelation; the preserved remains of our journeys thus far through life, ever moving towards our own ending. Maybe we are giving ourselves time for reflection and, eventual, emotional integration? Maybe we are liars and storytellers suggesting universal tales to entertain and provoke? Or maybe we are simply trying to understand, and in doing so, harnessing the immortal to talk of the mortal, the humanness we all share and revile in equal measure. Whatever the answers, it was clear that our expectations of Margate as our host town opening its arms to greet us and be enriched by our presence, actually became a catalyst for the outpouring that spoke of endings and the start of transformative processes. We were changed by being in Margate, much more, I suspect than Margate was affected by us being there. The vision and scale of the project continues to grow and develop, with the interweaving of complex narratives between artist, object and viewer. It feels like we have started a journey of discovery, both of ourselves and each other. We have initiated a conversation which we hope will run and expand to enrich our practice, both as artists and as fervent coastal dwellers.
Cathryn Kemp Artist/Curator Telling Stories
Telling Stories: Margate
Essay Grace Lau “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” (T.S.Eliot, Four Quartets)
Stories...fiction...narratives...myths and maidens, and even a monkey, are themes explored by seven artists from Hastings and Margate in their individual ways, yet which meld into a collective identity that allows the deeply personal essence of each artist to exist simultaneously. This collaborative exhibition called Telling Stories draws upon the evocative space of Marine Studios, in the coastal Kent town of Margate. It is a place which is saturated with bright light flooding through the bay windows of its historic architecture, into the elegant Edwardian drawing rooms with seductive seascape views. Inside it, the artists tell their personal stories, the audience is invited to read these tales and enter into their own narrative. The artworks suggest memories, dreams, loss and are largely devoid of human figures; physicality is expressed as formless and conceptual but ever present and ever watchful. The German critic Siegfried Kracauer, writing in 1927, was suspicious about photography’s relationship to memory; he argued that photography captures too much information to function as memory. It is too coherent and linear in its articulation of time and space. Memory, in contrast, is selective and fuzzy; intensely personal and often incoherent, shifting over time and becoming a malleable form of fiction. Roland Barthes also suggested that memory is not so much image as sensation, and to make photography the visual equivalent of smell and taste and feel, is the challenge. The seven artists here have faced the challenge and created an exhibition that evokes fading memories, sharpens these over time and space to give coherent layers of experience and suggestion – almost like a Photoshop exercise. Fuzziness can be retained if so wished, but I think most of us retain our happiest memories more sharply than we imagine, and if these can be regained or re-imagined through a meditational experience of artists’ works, how can that not be a pleasure?
Telling Stories: Margate
Childhood memories of stories about faraway exotic animals and the expanse of imaginative contemplation are suggested by Martin Everett’s silent, still photographs taken during his residency at Rudyard Kipling’s home, Batemans. Everett’s images from his project at the National Trust home of the writer of the Jungle Stories are projected onto a wall. Larger than life – as the tales were themselves - each image shimmers in the daylight then slowly reveals itself as the light fades, leaving an almost spiritual trace. The images of Kipling’s study exude an almost existential darkness which is dramatised by thin rays of daylight picking out shadows amongst heavy furniture. His desk, picked out by light, is where his prolific writings of grief for his son were expressed, as well as his famous Jungle tales. We see the private spaces, made more intimate still by Everett’s silent, steady gaze through which we gain access to the bedroom, the place where the great man dreamed up his fabulous stories perhaps. Everett has chosen to project the sumptuous images onto the gallery wall. I had previously seen the original prints hung up in a Hastings gallery which enthralled me in a different, slower and possibly, more satisfying way as I could linger and gaze upon Kipling’s objects and imagine his sad, solemn figure moving around his study. Maybe that is Everett’s intention – with the constantly looping, changing projections we don’t have time to guess at Kipling’s life - we simply stand within the work which alludes so much to light in all its myriad forms, and we enter the work in more profound ways. In the same room, Cathryn Kemp has installed her work ‘Loss and Restoration’ which explores narratives around femininity, fragility, rites of passage and temporal and spiritual ritual. Inside a lifesize glass museum case lie the remnants of her nightdress which she buried two months previously, and has just as carefully excavated, piece by piece. It lies in hundreds of dead, dirty fragments, but placed in the original shape of the nightgown, each piece revered and destroyed in equal measure, it speaks of loss; loss of childhood innocence and loss of life itself. It is a powerful work, evoking a bond of violence and beauty and talking of the shreds of life lived and unlived, a theme which weaves through Kemp’s work with her explorations in emotional archaeology . Outside the cabinet hangs a large black and white photograph of the nightdress before its demise, and this image seems to float in transparent space, whispering soft sensual secrets. But there are deeper secrets at work here in Kemp’s corporeal works. She has her own story to tell, her own emotional lineage attached to the piece which speaks of her time in hospital, four years of her life lost to an illness which almost took her life as well. The nightgown is then a symbol of illness, an illusion to an almost iconic state of wasted femininity, which
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the Victorian garment suggests. In its exhumed form, the gown becomes a curled, blackened symbol of death and rebirth, a bewitching allusion to the dark fairy tales of our childhoods; a Sleeping Beauty in all her gory splendour. On a more gentle, but no less potent, note, Louise Kenward’s Wardrobe Diaries greets the viewer with quiet grandeur at the gallery entrance. The elevated piece of furniture which belonged to her Grandmother, is a normal 1950s wardrobe through which Louise explores ‘the betwixt and between of the liminal’ and of her own memories of her gran. The door of the wardrobe is slightly open, suggesting whatever was hidden away in the dark recesses of the space has now been set free to inhabit the gallery space. In literal profusion, hundreds of tiny, blank notelets ascend from the open door, hung with shimmering, barely-there wire from the ceiling and enveloping the visitor on arrival. It is a portal into a place of quiet reflection, a space where the remarkable can happen and yet be quiet and contained. Much of Kenward’s work alludes to this place. The wardrobe itself has been presented in various venues and contexts; frequently it contains selected personal objects, sometimes it is left empty, but it is always infused with a spiritual essence created by Louise’s carefully considered construct. Kenward finishes her story-telling with a large image of the wardrobe photographed on the balcony of Marine Studios which has been applied to a central window. Light streams through the transparent image, igniting the space and creating a luminescent contrast to the solid physical form of the wardrobe itself. The image appears almost human, looking into the space, a piece veering calmly between the lonesome spectacle of a wardrobe outside looking in, and the exact opposite playfulness which is also a gentle thread through Kenward’s work. I always expect her grandmother’s spirit to appear from the wardrobe. Perhaps one day she will. Wandering amongst the artworks, I form my own narrative connected by the diverse pieces and connecting through a thread of memories to each artist’s personal stories. This is the strength of the exhibition, the audience is drawn through an anthology of tales, shifting and provoking in psychological space, until one’s own personal memories are sharpened and formed to make another new story. The first room drew me into Louise’s wardrobe, then into Martin’s image of Kipling’s study and further into Cathryn’s nightdress.In the second room, Sinéid Codd draws upon historic reference in her presentation of ‘Margate Rarities’ and tells a series of bird tattoo stories in photographic images, ingeniously mounted inside an old Victorian carte-de-visite album. This construct playfully conflates time and space through the contemporary tattoos presented in a historic context. The
Telling Stories: Margate
addition of white gloves to look through the album adds a touch of the precious vintage value of looking at something within the aesthetic of the museum. As we draw on the gloves and handle the beautiful books, we feel as if we are witnessing something special, something for posterity, something of the ordinary made extra-ordinary. The piece is also a literal connection between Margate and Hastings as Codd draws on the ‘Hastings Rarities’ project she initiated in 2010– showing each photographic album side by side as in the archives of a museum. Maybe these are archives – of the inherent human desire to fly, to spread our wings on a metaphysical and physical level and soar to the heavens. Codd’s work spans the processes of printmaking and photography within this exhibition and she constantly builds links and dialogue between them. Beside the cartes-de-visites albums, she shows two long digitally-printed pieces contained within perspex cases. Each piece consists of a series of images – seemingly unrelated, and yet drawing out her preoccupations with time, and particularly with narrative. She subverts the tale, we have to guess the ending and even the beginning, and that is what makes Codd’s work so compelling. Time and space and their cycles is the point at which we move towards Alexander Brattell’s seminal work Non Linear 1, 2011. We cannot avoid his questions or his subtle answers as the 12.5 metre-long print dominates the main gallery space. Narrative is emphasised and implied within Brattell’s lengthy monochrome print which lies along a table and drops in rolls both sides to the floor, inviting the audience to open out the rolls and see the images inside. The images which ride back to back along the single print, appear random, like peripheral visions which suggest a journey through life through side glances of pleasure and pain, of light and shade, interlaced to form a seamless narrative. There is romance in Alex’s story that reflects the pictures by the old French masters, Kertesz and Atget. I love the photograph of a white swan that seems to fly through water leaving waves of memories behind. There are no references to anchor the works, no concrete stories to describe, explain or enchant. We are simply left to enter the narrative construct and create our own meaning. Brattell’s piece leaves us in no doubt – we are the visionaries, the teachers, the artists as we step into his open-ended dialogue, it is up to us to find a beginning, middle or end, if, in fact, any exists. One such visionary, is Lucinda Wells, whose work arrests and compels without any clue as to how or why. Wells is as close to artist-as-shaman as the notion – and the work – suggests. She has done something simple – and by the strength of her artistic vision, has rendered it strange and playful, menacing and sweet in complex succession which leaves the viewer at once baffled and overjoyed, at
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peace and troubled. Wells has hung a series of four dreamy photographic seascapes which are anchored to the wall by fragile means. Yet of the four photographs, each a close-up of waves breaking on the shoreline of her home town St Leonards, Hastings, it is somehow clear and unclear at the same time that they belong to two different bodies of work. They are so alike, and yet so different that it becomes hard to find the ‘why’ within Wells’ work and impossible to hunt down the ‘how’. The photographs dare the audience to step into the loud approaching waves; seascapes are endemic of artists by the coast but these images conjure up both terror and a sense of infinite peace. Somehow, I felt lulled by the rhythm of the sea, timed to the video sequence, to wade in and submit to infinity. Her video piece entitled Sea Piano Fret plays solemnly on an old-fashioned TV on a battered metal cabinet which could almost have been washed up by the waves. It is left open and empty, eluding to the open questions Wells keeps asking of us. She has filmed the sea shore from further away, and as it plays backwards, each wave vanishing inside the previous one, the eery, somnolent chords of her mother Joyce playing the piano seem to tug at the waves in a visceral attempt to pull them back. Time, being pulled backwards and forwards, through and into memory, history and narrative is the thread which holds this show together. Printmaker Dawn Cole, who is the Margate artist represented in this, the first of the Telling Stories shows, is as much an archivist as an artist as she works with ideas of memory and recollection . Cole delves fearlessly into the past, working through the life and memoirs of her Great Aunt Clarice Spratling whose life in a diary of 1915/16 and photographs from the hospital wards and army camps was discovered by Cole in 2008. Clarice, who was stationed in France and served as a VAD Nurse, writes in calm acceptance of the gruesome battles which played out around her – and it is her tone which Cole carries into today, creating blind embossed bronze pieces as plaques which resonate with Clarice’s voice. A photograph of a hospital ward, with starched white uniforms, clean sheets and smiling amputees contrasts with the intrinsic horror of first-hand reports of the battlefield. Cole gently questions this rendering of history as propaganda with her compelling and beautiful solar plate etchings of the photograph. It is a surreal sight and when we look more closely at the print we sense what Cole is alluding to; something darker, a feeling that we’re looking at a historical construct designed to calm the fears of anxious relatives, to reassure at a time of questions and fear. In another part of the gallery we see a monkey on a hoop of fresh flowers, a literal visual translation from the ward picture which acts as a symbol of hope among the work Cole has scattered through the space – each piece holding a
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dialogue with other works as well as in the context of the piece as a whole, creating a narrative through questions which are, as yet, unanswered. Her small but moving pieces simply saying ‘Lest We Forget’ to remind us – of what? That we must pass on our own stories, like these seven artists have done, so that we keep remembering and keep passing our collective wisdom and truths down the chain of life to nourish and challenge those who come after us. In strange collaboration, Kipling’s faded words ‘lest we forget’ are barely visible on one of the notebooks on his desk, in one of Everett’s 10 images. It is a poignant reminder that memories fade – and only through story-telling can they live and breathe into the present from the echoes of the past.
Grace Lau Photographer/Writer
Telling Stories: Margate
Alexander Brattell
“The more an image is joined with many other things, the more often it flourishes. The more an image is joined with many other things, the more causes there are by which it can be excited.” Benedict Spinoza, 1632-1677, lens grinder & philosopher. (From Bento’s Sketchbook’ by John Berger, 2011).
Non Linear 1, 2011 1250cm x 60cm
Telling Stories: Margate
SinĂŠid Codd
Margate Rarities Digital prints with pigmented ink on archival paper in Victorian carte-de-visite album with cotton gloves 26cm x 2cm x 6cm
“I had a crisis and I started dreaming about birds, connected to freedom and close to my inner self.” Emma Axelsson
Skyward, 2011 Digital print with pigmented ink on archival paper in perspex casing 160cm x 15cm x 4cm
Telling Stories: Margate
Dawn Cole
Adventures of a VAD 19th December 1915 Xmas letter from mum and parcel to follow. Nothing spec in wards Keep busy but no very bad cases except Tate who has a bad knee and the other leg amputated. Has got something ‘Cocci’ a germ which is very deadly and he will not get over it.
Adventures of a VAD 20th December 1915 A letter from Eason, great joy. There has been an attack on Ypres. Convoy in this afternoon, gas cases principally. One man very, very bad, nearly navy blue in colour and another wound in head and fractured femur and is mentally ill.
Adventures of a VAD 25th December 1915 Had a very busy day, ward full. Patients had Xmas pudding for dinner. Some wards had a tree, we didn’t. All patients had something in their stockings. Had dinner at 8.30 at hotel, turkey, xmas pudding and Champagne jelly. Dancing till 11pm, bed.
Telling Stories: Margate
Martin Everett
Kipling At Bateman’s Series of archival pigment prints installed as a looped projection
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Cathryn Kemp
Loss & Restoration 2011 Archival pigment print, video loop 4 mins 17 secs, table, museum cabinet, exhumed nightgown (Ghost series) 417 pieces “And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in the machine.� Angela Carter The Bloody Chamber Overleaf: Ophelia 2011 130cm x 190cm
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Louise Kenward
“Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed without these ‘objects’ and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate iife would lack a model of intimacy.” “But the real wardrobe is not an everyday piece of furniture. It is not opened every day, and so, like a heart that confides in no one, the key is not on the door.” “...there will always be more things in a closed than in an open box. To verify images kills them and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.” Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of space, 1964
Telling Stories: Margate
Lucinda Wells
Still from Sea Piano Fret. Digital video 2011 Previous page: Sediment #1. Digital C-type 30”x20” 2011 Sediment #3. Digital C-type 30”x20” 2011
Telling Stories: Margate
Yumino Seki
Influenced by Butoh, I have been interested in the authenticity of the temporal body for many years, resulting in many pieces which were improvised in nature. The importance of place is evident in my work and has led to many site-specific pieces. My work crosses the boundaries of dance, performance art and installation. It is informed by the cultural depth and diversity of both the UK and Japan. My development in my movement has been a gradual exploration of both my collective and self-identity. My movement work starts from trust; trusting that the body has its own intelligence and experience. Not moving but being moved. I explore and reflect the inner landscape where the body becomes mere ‘being’ and where a point of transformation occurs. I question ways of communicating. My experience of being part of Telling Stories: Margate was about belonging. I felt a strong sense of belonging. Being part of the team of seven artists, communicating with them, I fed this into my work. There was throughout the exhibition – seven artists brought together, making work which enriched my practice with seven layers of meaning, seven layers of stories. I hope I nourished theirs.
Yumino Seki, 2011
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Alexander Brattell Monochrome prints from the alembic of the darkroom reveal significance beyond subject matter. Narratives emerge that explore shapes of thought and the revelatory nature of a peripheral vision beneath the threshold of language. brattell.com Dawn Cole Using archives as a starting point to explore ideas of memory and recollection. Often responding to assumptions made and knowledge implied. She works in print, installation and sound, producing works that are not always what they seem. dawncole.co.uk Sinéid Codd Using narrative structures to articulate ideas and feelings responding to location and community, drawing on aspects of memory, personal association and historical significance. She works in print, photography and installation, often devising collaborative and participatory projects. sineidcodd.co.uk Martin Everett In his pursuit of slight and silent traces that are often perceived and selected amongst the infinite variations of sceneries and scenarios rid of the human presence, the artist seems to start off from a minimum amount of significant entities to then load their purport and qualities with a gesture of silent attention. martineverett.co.uk Cathryn Kemp Exploring narratives around femininity, fragility, rites of passage, temporal and spiritual ritual and symbolism; the weaving together of the threads of life lived and unlived through emotional lineage and genealogy. Kemp works in textiles, stitch, sound and print, borrowing heavily from the aesthetic of the museum. cathrynkemp.com Louise Kenward Exploring the “betwixt and between” of the liminal, in the physical spaces we inhabit and the mental spaces we dwell. “...between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves.” William James. louisekenward.com Lucinda Wells Working with still and moving image she explores “the slip” from photograph to imagery in the Bergsonian sense. “...a certain image which is more than that which the idealist calls representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing – an existence placed half way between the thing and the representation.” lucinda-wells.blogspot.com Telling Stories: Margate Marine Studios Gallery, Margate, UK 07 October – 01 November 2011 marinestudios.co.uk pushingprint.co.uk