Tracie Shaylor
Tracie Shaylor’s practice shows an awareness of trajectories within modern art history and an understanding of where the individual’s practice can situate within that, whilst still finding a form of expression that was not imitative. There is a thoughtful engagement with ideas, with a clear rapport and understanding of the concept but not to the point of illustration. Prior practice dealt with issues of ‘feminism and sexuality’, with subject matters such as equality, patriarchal social systems and finally gender role reversal, with “Evolution and Atrophy.”
‘Lost Identity’ is a natural progression in response to recent articles concerning the possibilities of human cloning without the need of human sperm?
Lost identity concerns embryonic stem cell research and the potential outcomes of such scientific investigation. The aim is to create art that is ambiguous however bringing attention to the viewer the advancement of genetic engineering, since ‘Dolly the Sheep’.These scientific experiments take place, with new improved human cloning technology, which are destroyed after a certain stage of development, raising questions of ethics and eugenics.
Lost Identity originates from sculpted ceramics. The intended embryonic, amorphous shapes gradually become recognizable as human form.This work is part of a new series. The objective is to generate a collection of seven, referencing the biblical seven days of creation. The set of seven to emphasize the issue of a genetic re-engineering and the potential of an artificial cloned human race.
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www.tracieshaylor.co.uk
Stuart John Hine
Stuart has worked within the area of community arts for the past ten years. Currently his practice lends itself towards creating contextual visual art for the gallery space. Taking his experiences as a youth and community arts service provider his present work explores the area of identity, that of the individual and the group.
He is interested in representing those individuals or groups who have become marginalized, some excluded from regular social arenas and often from the community at large. His aim is to raise positive public profiles of such people, to elevate their social position and to celebrate their diversity.
In exploring portrait idioms and conventions traditionally reserved historically for the ruling classes, Stuart hopes to invert and critique their significance and provoke or to flip social and class ideals, placing people he finds to be the most fascinating at the top, regardless of their origins, and present them in a manner often reserved for the very highest elites.
Stuarts practice encompasses a number of disciplines including; ceramics, sand castings, print and painting. At present he is creating series of painted portraits. His medium is acrylics as he enjoys the irony of melding low art materials with high art practices such as the Italian renaissance.
Using unusual sitters and painting in an almost illustrative manner Stuart hopes to replicate something of the large, heavy gilt framed portraits we see within every civic building and gallery collections. His intention is to give a higher standing profile of the everyday man in a unique setting. He believes their histories are as important and worth celebrating too.
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Amanda Rae
Many of Amanda’s works are assemblages and she explores often using many materials. ‘Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form’. (Ovid, Metamorphoses) Amanda’s starting point may be a concept, thought or theme, through which she explores a process of bringing together form and material that invites thought from the viewer’s perspective related to that union.The use of mannequins within assemblage has become an important aspect in Amanda’s work due to their unsettling representations of the human form, the disturbing sense of the unheimlich which they create. Through these sometimes surreal associations, Amanda explores the sense of liminality inherent in the world, the constant flux that is experienced on a daily basis. The French ethnologist, Arnold van Gennep described these modulations as “liminality, the transitional time or condition in which one, or a group, or a territory, or the season, is not what it was and not what it will become, but something in between, something marginal, vague, and flexible”.
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http://sites.google.com/site/amandajrae/
Jason Simpson
Jason’s work is process driven through use of materials and a response to their environment in painting, sculpture and installation. His current body of work explores process, through intervention and the effects of environment and time on materials. Opposites take form through the organic, and inorganic presentation of the pieces evoking surfaces to be touched by the mind of the viewer. With no representation of scale in the pieces they express a subject matter that can be vast.
www.jasonsimpson.co.uk
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Denis Whiteside
From rationality to absurdity; the particular to the unspecific; self-defining mundaneness, these are some of the immaterial aspects that inform Whiteside’s text based work.
Through obfuscation he consciously operates where contrarious notions occur. When he states that ‘Nothing is nothing’, he may mean it’s something.
His art is all about the journey, the process and, like Samuel Beckett (possibly his biggest influence), he believes pasionately that “Art has nothing to do with clarity,does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear”.
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