Venue
SJE Arts, St John the Evangelist church
Starts
Saturday, October 14, 2017
Ends
Monday, October 30, 2017
Address
109 Iffley Road, OX4 1EH
Location
South East England
Organiser
SJE Arts, Oxford

Material World brings together the visual spheres of artists from Oxford and several European cities, namely Bonn, Grenoble, Perm and Leiden, all of which have a cultural relationship with Oxford through the history of twinning. Artists include Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Diana Bell, Brook and Black, Hanneke Francken, Susanne Krell, Eric Margery, Jonathan Moss and Inna Rogova. The source of inspiration for these artists already exists around us, either in nature or in our urban environment. At a time when we are constantly consuming and disposing off stuff the key question is ‘What do we do with all of this stuff?’ How do we process it and what will its long term affect on our environment. The Anthropocene defines Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.
Relating to this, Diana Bell’s work contrasts discarded man-made materials with nature exploring the effect of such materials on the fragility of nature whilst Madi Acharya-Baskerville’s work addresses the disintegration of objects and materials over time and how through a transformative process they can come to embody aspects of ourselves offering a space for mirroring and self-evaluation. For Susanne Krell imprints on surfaces of buildings act as traces of attitudes and hidden values stored over time whilst Jonathan Moss through his work creates spaces for quiet contemplation , a retreat from a world with sensory overload. Eric Margery specializes in performance and the ephemeral, creating a universe, which is poetic and dreamlike using multipurpose everyday materials such as paper.
Using a variety of sources and materials these artists create a rich and diverse range of works in media including painting, sculpture, ceramics and site-specific installation, photography, film and video in the atmospheric cloister gallery of historic building St John the Evangelist Church, Oxford.