Art in the City
- Agnieszka
- Mar 17, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 23, 2021
These series of talks were presented to us online and featured international artists being interviewed by UWE Fine Art and Arnolfini. I found two artist especially interesting: Sean Edwards and Chantal Joeffe.
Sean Edwards graduated with an MA from the Slade School of Art in 2005, and is currently Programme Director for Fine Art at Cardiff School of Art and Design.
In 2019 Edwards represented Wales at the 58th Venice Bienalle :
The exhibition was called: 'Undo things done'. The installation was created out of everyday objects - thin pieces of MDF bent together, in a repetitive and rhythmical arrangement.
Sean shares his personal story and says that being as honest as possible helps artwork to be more relatable. Sean talks about his lower working family roots, how their stories are mostly about some kind of loss and aren't normally fully represented in the art world. Dislocation and fragmentation are themes in families like the artist's and the sculpture is meant to represent that.
Sean talks about the impact of music of Bruce Springsteen that he was listening to whilst working in his studio, and how it affected his process.The artist got into the same narrative as the singer: telling stories with small details, picturing the simplicity in storytelling, everyday life, anchored in bigger, political events.
Maelfa, 2011- one of his early exhibitions. Camera looks on Sean's everyday life. Maelfa was a shopping centre in his neighbourhood, in a council estate, on outskirts of Cardiff. His photographical recordings of the mall have very rhythmical character, which I enjoy:
I find it very interesting how humble elements multiplied and put together can create something much bigger than just a sum of them.
Sean shot a film about the shopping centre and was contemplating about its function, and how it failed to become a lively community hot spot it was meant to be.
Sean also talks about process itself-how he starts creating without specific idea where he wants his art to go and then it takes life of its own.
I fully appreciate story and history told by Sean's art. It is its form though that caught my attention. Creating installations in spaces in some kind of a rhythm, or pattern relates to my own artistic aspirations.
This big scale installation made me remember another Biennale in Venice made by Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger, which took my breath away:
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I remember when I saw this for the first time -I instantly thought that I want to make installations like this: immersive, beautiful, giving people one of a kind magical experience. I always thought that it would be great to do it with music, maybe design something for a festival setting. I can see elements of my wallpaper designs being transformed into elements that can be hung in a vast space, lit up playfully, sway to music, or being still and naturally illuminated.
Chantal Joeffe
I love her thick brush strokes, where you can almost feel consistency of paint and its materiality. Here I chose few of her works with colour palettes that I like a lot:
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'If I don't paint, I can't hear my thoughts' says Chantal.
Painting as a way of remembering and releasing memories, emotions in order to move on. Cathartic, therapeutical aspect of the process. Chantal talking about her difficult experiences and how art help her process them. She also mentions an exhibition of an artist who manages to survive largely by letting out her darkness through art, and not getting fully consumed by it herself.
In relation to covid she reflects on trying your hardest to do the truest thing to yourself, about passing time and prioritising what's really important, which I find very relatable.
Chantal is painterly in conversation with Bonnard's work. I had a better look at his legacy and found few pieces, which colour palettes spoke to me:
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