Sean Edwards - Tanya Leighton

Ten Men, Winter/Spring 2010

Artslant, 18 May 2010

Wanting a familiar anchor, I veer towards the paintings. Word paintings I have seen come to mind: John 

Baldessari and Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry. Edwards’ text paintings sit on the wall 

with a nice formality, the strong black and white motif compelling in its graphic boldness. Black machinemade 

text floats in a painterly white sheen, like islands in a sea. Comprised of dotted phrases and broken 

sentences with beginning and ending times (I assume) noted above, the text is apparently a description of the 

creative play of children. Cutting and placing and shifting and moving; these paintings are memorials to 

process, performative and documentary simultaneously. They reduce the act of creativity to an instructional 

recitation of activity. (I think to myself: cat plays with ball, child pours water.) The strings of words are not 

particularly memorable, not poetically profound or captivating in their content or language. Yet, like the cat 

video of Frances Stark, there is something arresting about this work. I want to loll with these paintings, absorb 

them as if somehow I could find that moment of creative magic hidden within the cryptic script. 

I circle back to the front of the gallery towards the bronze sculpture , being careful not to accidentally kick the 

wedge of wood or cardboard box that hold the space as sculpture. The hood sculpture sits in front of the 

image of an artist at work in the hills above a lake with his hoodie shielding his face. There is interplay 

between the photo and the sculpture – hood to hood. I assume the photo is a self portrait of the artist, and am 

told that it is iconic Edwards. (Evidently, the hood has played an important role in his lexicon of symbols.) At 

first glance, I assume the “hood” to be a “hoodie” reminiscent of grunge or gangsta culture, but really it is a 

rain slicker – much less hipster. 

Nameless, faceless, the artist in hood photograph conjures the asceticism of the monk bent over his studies. 

The artist sits with his small travel kit of watercolors faithfully working out his vision under a looming sky - 

through rain or sleet or snow the creative process wins out! There is something Joycean underneath this 

image, a fervor, a sincerity that is convincing and somewhat naïve that is undermined by the dark, brooding 

sky and the almost sinister negation of the artist hidden within the hood.

Trading on this portrait, the bronze sculpture reifies the hood further, as it rests heavy with tradition upon its 

pristine pedestal. Ironic and absurd, when I walk around this holiest of Hoods to finally peer at the face 

within its folds, I come smack up against a flat surface, a cold slab of disappointment. No artist at all exists 

within this hood. It is an impotent and unwearable hood. 

As with the Stark show of years past, Edwards’ work is about the Artist from the inside out – the process of 

creativity, the persona of the artist. More than anything I experience a sense of longing from each of these 

artists; a romantic nostalgia that must be denied, denigrated or debunked in order not to realize its absence. 

Whether it is home video cum high art, or Portrait of the Artist as Sunday Painter, each of these artists 

reaffirms that deep down inside, no matter how jaded or sophisticated, we all want to believe in the artist as 

hero. 

--Georgia Fee 

(Images: Sean Edwards, Untitled, 2008, Mahogony and household mat paint, 8x3.5x5 cm; Courtesy of Tanya Leighton Gallery; Sean 

Edwards, We recall how starting with purely practical, 2010, Enamel on Giclee Print, framed 114,2 x 84 cm, unique; Sean Edwards, 

It’s not what we wanted but we’ll settle, 2008, framed C-Type Print, 28 x 39 cm, Edition of 3; Sean Edwards, Settled, 2010, Bronze, 

pigment and graphite powder, 22 x 40 x 22 cm, Edition of 3; Courtesy of the artist, Limoncello, London, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin 

& galerie frank elbaz, Paris) 

Posted by Georgia Fee on 5/18 

> COMMENTS (0) [add a new comment] 

Copyright © 2006-2007 by ArtSlant, Inc. All images and content remain the © of their rightful owners.

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Sean Edwards, Photocopied the artist's pencil, 2008. Courtesy the artist and 

Limoncello, London 

Edwards investigates the sculptural potential of the everyday, 

often using remnants of previous activities as his starting point - 

including found or borrowed objects, bits of other works and 

studio knickknacks. 

Sean Edwards's work is in the Upper Gallery from Monday 21 to Monday 28 

July. 

Often using remnants of previous activities as base material – found or 

borrowed objects, bits of other works or studio knickknacks – Sean 

Edwards (born Cardiff, 1980, lives in Abergavenny) investigates the 

sculptural potential of the everyday. For his recent solo show at Moot, 

Nottingham, the artist exhibited two recuperated dowels, one of them 

elongated to match the length of the other, with a layer cake of cork and 

felt. The patterned regularity of the resulting assemblage displays a distinct 

graphic sensibility – one that is common to many of Edwards' sculptures. 

Since 2006 the artist has been buying a copy of The Sun newspaper every 

day, and has integrated the publication into a number of artworks. From 

this starting point Edwards has created works which exploit the tension 

between two- and three-dimensions. In K_007 (2007) the artist cut a sheet 

of dolls house paper into the silhouette of a page 3 glamour model, and 

twisted the paper into a cylinder. Another ongoing work has involved 

elegantly cutting and compiling the letters 'U' and 'N' from the mastheads 

of all the issues that Edwards has bought. However, The Sun project is more 

than just a formal exercise. By incorporating the purchase of the newspaper 

into his artistic practice, Edwards pointedly brings together the high and 

low, the quotidian and the 'timeless'. 

Edwards also sees this duality in the works of others. During the 2006 

World Snooker Championship the artist filmed the crew responsible for 

assembling the competition tables (Table, 2006). In this video the 

overwhelming abundance of raw materials – slate tabletops, swathes of 

green fabric, tacks – highlights the sculptural core of the craftsmen's 

activity. Similarly, 16mm film Lap Steel (2008) shows a close-up of an 

anonymous hand playing lap steel guitar. The wooden fingerboard and the 

metal slide look like the disembodied elements of a moving sculpture, 

brought together only by the skill and energy of the performing musician. 

Edwards' choice of materials is highly self-reflexive. In Untitled (Quilter's 

tape) (2008) a roll of tape is hung on a big nail hammered high on a wall. 

If not for its unlikely location it could be a read as a piece of utilitarian 

equipment, but removed from the studio context the object embodies sheer 

potentiality, reminiscent of Giovanni Anselmo's twisted cloth piece 

Torsione (1968). For his Nought to Sixty project, entitled turning it around, 

slowly, in the light, Edwards presents a sculpture fashioned from off-cuts 

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Institute of Contemporary Arts

nstitute of Contemporary Arts : Artists : Sean Edwards 

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Fiona Jardine 


Events: 



Salon discussion: The Private Salon 


Ben Rivers 

Maria Fusco 

Salon discussion: Contemporary art, 

music and fashion 




Salon discussion: feminism in current 

cultural practice 

ELECTRA with Macroprosopus 

Dancehall Band + party 

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Maria Fusco 



Nought to Sixty: 

Artists and 

Projects 

A cumulative lists of all artists and 

projects involved in Nought to Sixty. 

About Nought to 

Sixty 

Nought to Sixty presents sixty 

projects by emerging artists based in 

Britain and Ireland over six months 

from 5 May to 2 November 2008. 

Most of the artists in Nought to Sixty 

are under thirty-five, few of them 

have had significant commercial 

exposure, and in most cases this is 

their first opportunity to mount a 

solo project in a major public space. 

The season is not intended to 

announce any new generation or 

style, but to build up a multifaceted 

portrait of the emerging art scene in 

the two countries, and to provide a 

space for exchange. 

The Nought to Sixty programme 

consists of: 

of wood and cardboard. In this and many of Edwards' previous works there 

is a sense of objects being in-progress, indeterminate, open to change. His 

works function like propositions, leaving the conclusion to the viewer. This 

completion, however, is only ever realised in the exhibition environment, as 

Edwards believes that works only come into being as a result of their 

context. Not only does the incompleteness of the work invite the audience 

to play a part in its creation, it also undermines the perception of the gallery 

as a space for fully achieved artworks and closed to any further 

development. 

Coline Milliard 

Nought to Sixty in pictures: Sean Edwards 

Nought to Sixty 

in pictures 

Photos of the projects, artists and 

audiences taking part in Nought to 

Sixty. 

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Events happen at the ICA every 

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All Monday night events are free.

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Nought to Sixty. 

146 of 321 

Sean Edwards, turning it around, slowly, in the light, 2008. 

installation view. Courtesy the artist and Limoncello, London. 

Photo: Stephen White 

Essays 

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by J.J. 

Charlesworth. 





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Ben Rivers 

Maria Fusco 











Freee 


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Maria Fusco 




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Ursula Mayer 

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Freee 


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Maria Fusco 




Artists and 

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Not about 


why we are so 


by J.J. 

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Sixty 








15.04.09 17:17 






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Exhibitions: 




Ursula Mayer 

Sarah Pierce 

Giles Round 




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Ben Rivers 

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Freee 


Alun Rowlands 


Maria Fusco 




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Essays 

Not about 


why we are so 


by J.J. 

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London) 


Sixty 








15.04.09 17:17 






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Coverage: 








Exhibitions: 




Ursula Mayer 

Sarah Pierce 

Giles Round 




Ruth Ewan 



Fiona Jardine 


Events: 





Ben Rivers 

Maria Fusco 











Freee 


Alun Rowlands 


Maria Fusco 




Artists and 

Projects 






152 of 321 




Essays 

Not about 


why we are so 


by J.J. 

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organisations 

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Sixty 







‘In my horizon-edged cup / I drink from the brim / A simple swallow of sunshine / 

pale and icy.’ 1 

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ 

Some people dislike having children in a gallery. It makes them nervous, to have an 

unpredictable, uncontrolled entity in such a hallowed place. Surfaces that are crying 

out to be touched are surrounded by barriers of decorum that are somehow invisible to 

a child; looking but not touching is culturally defined, and must be learnt. 

Sean Edwards’ objects remind me somewhat of children – they are difficult. They are 

familiar and intimate, but precious; they are optimistic, but fragile. They teeter, 

balancing buoyant pine on top of cherry wood in unexpected places, full of nervous 

energy. As you turn your back to them, you almost expect them to reconfigure 

themselves, fidget slightly, taunting you to notice their difference. And they are full of 

dreaming; not nocturnal, symbolic dreaming that makes sense of the day, but of reverie, 

fresh wakefulness, vivid and burning with colour and excitement. Their unpredicted 

surfaces and crevices speak of their inner lives, and his hidden reveries. And they are 

intensely inquisitive, staring back at you with bare-faced cheek. (I wonder, if I dared to 

squeeze the cheek, if an impression, a bruise would be left on the form, like the dent in 

Proserpina’s marble thigh? 2 ) 

Before we came to learn how seeing worked, it was believed that objects gave off ‘minime’s’ 

of themselves, fragile films that floated around the atmosphere, bumping into 

eyes to make us see – these were called simulacra. How true it feels, that sight could be 

physical, tactile. After all, other senses tarnish each other with touch – not just a finger 

dampening a string, but a pulse of vibration kissing an eardrum, a texture rolling 

around the mouth. How can it not be that sight is also triggered by a sense of touch, on 

a vessel soaked and impregnated with vision? When someone passes a hand across a 

string, your motor neurones are pricked – it is not just your eye that responds, but your 

body that empathises. Your brain acknowledges the movement of the hand by 

whispering a trigger to your own hand’s author, to play too. Your body imagines, 

quietly to itself, the string bending in glissandi, unheld. 

Edwards’ works integrate everyday things that we have all held, or could hold. While 

many objects in the world of consumerism no longer function with the hand in mind, 

and become containers of a ‘symbolic void’ 3 , the objects Edwards creates feel domestic 

rather than domesticated. They are familiar, if not in their entirety, then in their form, 

the warmth or coolness of their surface, their manipulability. In the gallery someone 

toes one piece of work on the floor – they are attempting to understand through 

physical impact rather than explanation: these things seduce us into consulting other 

senses to establish the state of play. Many of the objects are, have been, or could be, 

1 Pierre Chappuis, quoted in Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of reverie: childhood, language and the cosmos, p174. 

2 See Gianlorenzo Bernini, ‘The Rape Of Proserpina’, Marble, 1621-22. 

3 This phrase is Jean Baudrillard’s, from The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, London, New York: Verso, 

1996, p54. One of his examples of this symbolic void is a cigarette lighter moulded into the shape of a pebble. While 

its design intimates the intimate coupling of tool, flint and hand – its curvature echoing the shape of the palm and 

resembling the natural – the actual physical act of making fire is withdrawn, mechanical and detached. 

Lisa Peachey, April 2008

vessels or containers – substitutes for the hand, or the body. (And it is a body: elements 

conversing via mutating, vibrating echoes across a space, accumulatively stimulating; or 

sometimes perhaps the right hand doesn’t quite comprehend what the left is doing, but 

the notes are played.) The hand that holds the work in its making becomes another 

vessel with both surface and form. For a moment, in reverie, object, hand and maker 

enact a symbiotic metamorphosis. The acts upon the objects may be slight, deft and 

delicate, but the evident intent – intense and absorbed – is as grounded as Antaeus, 

earth entrenched under his fingernails, on hands coarse and inhabited, rough enough 

to strike a match on. 

And yet for all this familiarity, all this touch, or perhaps because of it, all these works 

are tinged with regret. I notice the colours: either muted, distant pastels, or the bright 

primaries of youth – that inquisitiveness and optimism, that has been set aside. 

Edwards often uses DIY swatch colours – colours that we live with, that are familiar; 

colours that try to ignite our contact with the natural world – rose madder, green 

verditer, dusted moss. But they are not of nature, of the land in which his work is 

embedded, they only simulate it. Holding also suggests the possibility of letting go. 

Recently passed was the first day of British Summer Time, when we choose to lose an 

hour. Our containers of time slip (slip rather than clay) and lose form; while those 

simulacral barriers that hold us in the routine of control become palpable. 

‘We have lost the language of enchantment’, Bachelard said 4 . 

But the hour is not lost, it is stored, and given back, in autumn, while we dream. 

Edwards’ work might be made for that lost hour’s return, or out of it. These works – 

familiar, playful and full of tactile, visceral connotations – suggest a reclaimed, childlike 

enchantment, moulded into an inquisitive pawing, rather than a knowing gaze. That 

they are difficult and slight, and demand your delicate attention renders visible a 

serious comment on a state of seeing, of taking time – of reverie – that is easy to 

overlook in an insomniac culture exhausted from constantly looking without seeing, 

consuming without using, touching without feeling. Perhaps, given time, the artists’ 

reverie can suggest to us a way of connecting, regrounding with what it is that we have 

lost. 

Lisa Peachey, April 2008. 

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞ 

4 Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of reverie: childhood, language and the cosmos, trans. Daniel Russell, 

Boston: Beacon Press, 1971, p118.

The Stwidio Annexe, October/ November 2008

Sean Edwards exhibiting in Berlin 

15.04.09 15:36 

Sean Edwards exhibiting in Berlin 

Posted: 02.07.08 

Sean Edwards, visual artist based in Abergavenny, South Wales will be exhibiting work at 

the Centre art gallery in Kurfürstenstraße, Berlin from 13 th July until 30 th August 2008. 

Titled ‘18’, this exhibition is organised by Saim Demircan and Center (Dorothea Jendricke 

and Doris Mampe). 

Dorothea Jendricke was part of the Curators study visit to Wales in April 2008, organised by 

Wales Arts International, where she met Sean Edwards. She explains of this group 

exhibition... 'Using a simple brief and ongoing invitation process '18' presents what an 

edition means to a variety of artists of different disciplines; Artists were asked to contribute 

a single edition, multiple or 'imprint'. An edition can be any format, medium, size and the 

number of editions is entirely up to the artist. The artists can either make a new or 

contribute an existing edition. For some artists an edition might be produced alongside to 

their practise whilst for other it can be a context for the production of their work, as such 

the editions in this exhibition vary from loose interpretations to integral processes of 

numeracy and multiplicity and are all here presented without hierarchy. Since the nature of 

the show is informal and through association, in what might first appear to be a group show 

of individual works, this approach allows for the possibility of relationships to occur between 

work that are one of a series.' 

This exhibition features works by Yesim Akdeniz Graf, Katarina Burin, Liz Cohen, Coco 

Crampton, Sean Edwards, Rob Filby, Nicolás Guagnini, Matthew Hale, Wolfgang Mayer, 

Jonathan Monk, Rebbeca Roscorla, Mathew Sawyer, Juliane Solmsdorf, Lucy J Stein, 

Rosemarie Trockel, Tal R, Mark Van Yetter and Thomas Zipp as well as Daniel Rees who is 

originally from Swansea, Wales. 

Further information: 

w: www.center-berlin.com 

© Wales Arts International 2009 

http://www.wai.org.uk/index.cfm?UUID=E45E63B6-65BF-7E43-3CCAAE8BA07EA139&printTemplate=1 

Seite 1 von 1 

Wales Arts International, 2008

Moot, May/June 2008

Art World, Issue 3, Febuary/March 2008

Pilot:3, May 2007

Art Review, Febuary 2008

Open Frequency : Sean Edwards 

15.04.09 15:41 


(nominated by Cecile Johnson Soliz) 

Installation view, 2006 

Working with a range of artistic interventions and situations, including site-specific installation, video, threedimensional 

photocopies and the readymade, Sean Edwards' sculptures set up situations that lead you into 

examining your viewing habits. Through a formal analysis of both the real and the fake, often employing a notion 

of absurdity in the process, Edwards aims to expose the machinery of our take on reality and to lay bare an 

object's function and use value. 

Artist Andre Stitt comments: 'Edwards' work is both witty and intelligent. Through his minimal sculpture, we 

question the reality of material in relation to our own sophisticated knowledge of the world and the functionality of 

simple tools such as pencils and rulers. As an artist Edwards also poses questions concerning his own practice and 

the artist's means of production.' 

Edwards' investigations began with a series of photocopied works ('Photocopied Staedtler Noris HB Pencil' 2003) 

where items such as a school pencil were pushed through an elaborate process of sanding and photocopying to 

create an exact facsimile of the object which, having been sanded away, no longer exists. 

'There can often be an absurdity in the processes I implement. This results from a series of rules that I build 

around myself in order to begin a group of works. This then allows for a system in which the rules can be broken 

to get the unexpected from a piece. In my recent work I have worked with the actual objects. Treating them as a 

readymade, I have been placing them into situations which remove their use value and, in doing so, actually 

highlight their use value. 

Orange Doors (2004) 

The work can result from seeing something as simple as a piece of orange masking tape sticking a poster to a 

door, to someone looking for a missing table. This initiates a line of enquiry and visual examination that results in 

me, for example, applying a new coat of orange paint to the front doors of the Slade School of Art. This work, 

'Orange Doors' (2004) questioned notions of seeing and raised issues that had begun to interest me concerning 

the various levels of viewers for any given piece of work. 

Through the narrow passageway... (2005) 

The process of my current work can be likened to that of the collector, not dissimilar that of a 16th and 17th 

http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=127 

Seite 1 von 2 

Axis-the online resource for contemporary art, 2006

Open Frequency : Sean Edwards 

15.04.09 15:41 

The process of my current work can be likened to that of the collector, not dissimilar that of a 16th and 17th 

century collector who displayed their rare and unfamiliar objects in `Wunderkammern'. 

'Through the narrow passageway...' (2005) made use of a large collection of objects that I have been considering 

for some time. These obscure things, as I prefer to call them, find their way into the studio from the street, 

shops, internet auction sites or even people's desks. Some are kind donations by fellow artists. They appear 

through various installations as themselves, in photographs, recreated in paintings or recreated entirely again 

from scratch.' (Edwards, 2005). 

Biography 

Sean Edwards graduated from the MA in Sculpture, Slade School of Art in 2005, and was awarded the Slade 

Project Award. In 2004 he received the Young Artist Scholarship at the Newport National Eisteddfod of Wales. 

Recent exhibitions include Twenty to One, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London, and Super 8 Show, g39, 

Cardiff (2005). 

Edwards has been selected for the Oriel Mostyn Open 2006 and currently has a solo exhibition at S1 Artspace, 

Sheffield (until 11 June 1006). He lives and works in Abergavenny, Wales. 

www.onethingnexttoanother.com 

Copyright Axis 1999-2009 unless stated otherwise. No reproduction of text or media 

without written permission. For terms and conditions visit www.axisweb.org/copyright. 

http://www.axisweb.org/ofSARF.aspx?SELECTIONID=127 

Seite 2 von 2

Mostyn 2006, May 2006

Press release, s1 Art space, May 2006

Sean Edwards - Tanya Leighton

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