Viva Lewes Issue #126 March 2017

ON THIS MONTH: ART
FOCUS ON: Presumptuous Views
Work in progress, mixed media, Nikki Davidson-Bowman
It looks like lots of photos, stitched together…
It’s the transparancies from a number of slides.
Where did you get them? From a house clearance
company. The person who took them died,
with no relatives, and the slides were otherwise
destined for the skip. They were taken between
the 60s and the 2000s, and mostly they are of landscapes,
or of buildings. A lot of them were taken
around Sussex.
Are they good pictures? Not particularly. They
are very… ordinary. There are rarely any people
in them. It’s the world seen through someone
else’s eyes, re-catalogued by me. I have to be very
meticulous and rather anal, but reorganising things
helps me find a pathway through it. It’s my way of
dealing with chaos.
What other media are involved in the piece?
There was also a box full of love letters. These
were as personal as the photos were impersonal.
I’ll be using them in the work. And there will be
sound involved, too.
You like working with found objects… I do. I
also like working with found words. Words I find
in magazines and books, mostly. I find it difficult to
read, without thinking ‘where’s that scalpel?’
Who have you been influenced by? People who
tell stories. Cornelia Parker. Mary Kelly. David
Bowie - he wrote some of his songs using a ‘cutups’
technique.
You’ve got a lot of space to display the work.
The whole of the gallery. I’ll have Monday to
Friday to set up the work, and over the weekend
it will be on display. I like what’s being done with
this space. It’s all about experimentation, and
experimentation is a good thing, in life as in art.
What artwork would you hang from your
desert island palm tree? Witness by Susan Hiller
- not sure how the technicalities of the installation
would work on my island but there's always a
way! I remember when I first saw this piece at Tate
Britain how it blew me away - intrigue, confusion,
technically amazing - I left wanting to know more.
It would mean I was always surrounded by other
people's stories and their versions of reality. AL
Martyrs’ Gallery (formerly Hop), Sat 4th, Sun 5th.
Two other artists have week-long residencies culminating
in shows at the gallery, Alex Julyan (11th,
12th) and Francesca Duffield (18th, 19th).
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