The Craft

Titled 'The Craft', this exhibition employed the inventive re-use of popular material from daily life to construct a fictionalised realm within art works. The realm described is very loosely suggestive of a 'folk or craft museum', which proposes the existence of some cult or community, who have appropriated material for their own usage. The exhibition deliberately seeks to highlight the place of narrative within contemporary art.
Within a context of contemporary expanded painting and sculpture (e.g.: Marc Camille Chaimowitz, Paulina Orlowa & Lucy Mckenzie, Kai Althoff, whose work also involves performance, but I am here referencing their use of paraphernalia and painting with object and environ) this exhibition operates in relation to current concerns about the cross-over of pictorial painting, object-making and installation. It seeks to propose a mode of ‘translation’ between these media.
The exhibition is a collaborative project, and consists of large-scale assemblage installations made jointly by Cathie Pilkington and myself. Five of my large-scale narrative paintings (not previously exhibited) are installed on a jointly designed plywood structure along with two freestanding sculptural pieces by Cathie Pilkington. The exhibition was also shown at Transition, London April 2007 to May 2007. These exhibitions were accompanied by a small catalogue (Marlborough Gallery) with an essay by Robert Clark (critic, 'The Guardian'), which critically explored issues raised by them. The exhibitions were developed in association with Marlborough Gallery. Web page: www.metropole.org.
'The Craft' is conceptually related to an issue of 'Garageland' entitled 'Painting and Translating' which I guest edited and to which I contributed an essay. The central aim of this edition was to provide a platform for painters to think about painting as a form of ‘translation’. Contributors included Edwina Ashton, Dexter Dalwood, James Faure Walker, Dan Hays, Silke Otto Knapp, Karen Kilimnik, Anita Taylor, and Stella Vine.