Thresholds (The Unnamed)
Publication for the exhibition 'Thresholds (The Unnamed) at Anima Mundi. The exhibition, curated by Joseph Clarke, includes artworks by: Massimo Angei, William Arnold, Simon Averill, Paul Benney, Gabrielle K Brown, Jim Carter, Mat Chivers, Gabrielle Tendai Choto, Kate Clark, David Cooper, Judith Nangala Crispin, Phoebe Cummings, Claire Curneen, Roy Eastland, Laura Ford, Luke Hannam, Andrew Hardwick, Andy Harper, Rebecca Harper, Youki Hirakawa, Simon Hitchens, Henry Hussey, Sax Impey, Arthur Lanyon, Andrew Litten, Jamie Mills, Shiri Mordechay, Barbara Neill, Richard Nott, David Quinn, Peter Randall-Page, Jonathan Michael Ray, John Robinson, Tim Shaw, Roger Thorp, David Kim Whittaker, Evelyn Williams, Amy Gillian Wilson, Joy Wolfenden Brown and Carlos Zapata.
Publication for the exhibition 'Thresholds (The Unnamed) at Anima Mundi. The exhibition, curated by Joseph Clarke, includes artworks by: Massimo Angei, William Arnold, Simon Averill, Paul Benney, Gabrielle K Brown, Jim Carter, Mat Chivers, Gabrielle Tendai Choto, Kate Clark, David Cooper, Judith Nangala Crispin, Phoebe Cummings, Claire Curneen, Roy Eastland, Laura Ford, Luke Hannam, Andrew Hardwick, Andy Harper, Rebecca Harper, Youki Hirakawa, Simon Hitchens, Henry Hussey, Sax Impey, Arthur Lanyon, Andrew Litten, Jamie Mills, Shiri Mordechay, Barbara Neill, Richard Nott, David Quinn, Peter Randall-Page, Jonathan Michael Ray, John Robinson, Tim Shaw, Roger Thorp, David Kim Whittaker, Evelyn Williams, Amy Gillian Wilson, Joy Wolfenden Brown and Carlos Zapata.
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<strong>Thresholds</strong><br />
(<strong>The</strong> <strong>Unnamed</strong>)
“I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me,<br />
nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost,<br />
gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers,<br />
this dust of words, with no ground for their settling,<br />
no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say,<br />
fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them,<br />
those that merge, those that part, those that never<br />
meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m<br />
something quite different, a quite different thing, a<br />
wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry<br />
cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks,<br />
and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast<br />
born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of<br />
caged beasts...”<br />
Samuel Beckett,‘<strong>The</strong> Unnamable’, 1953<br />
1
<strong>Thresholds</strong> (<strong>The</strong> <strong>Unnamed</strong>)<br />
Stories. A meme just flashed, too brief a moment,<br />
no more than a few seconds, which said (and who<br />
knows if it is true): “In every breath you breathe<br />
in you inhale 10^19 atoms… Every breath contains<br />
atoms from every person that is alive now and has<br />
ever lived.” That feels like big news, flicking by in<br />
the blink of an eye. Put down the phone. Why would<br />
we ever feel so alone?<br />
Beneath the surface smile, beyond a heart engorged<br />
with love, ripened by social and familial contentment<br />
and professional achievement, lies an emptier and<br />
fearful void. Is the aim for it to become filled with<br />
a clarity of knowing or a deepening of mystery?<br />
<strong>The</strong>re remains forever, doubt in truth and<br />
certainty in untruth. A perpetual pushing against<br />
a potentially desolate state of being in the waiting<br />
2
of those whispers of magic that may reach us on<br />
the wind, lifting up for a moment on to the broad<br />
shoulders of forever. <strong>The</strong>re is purpose in a searching<br />
for poetry in the contemplated understanding of<br />
this, among other dichotomous states of duality that<br />
we are perhaps not alone in finding ourselves<br />
locked in.<br />
<strong>The</strong> artworks selected for this presentation with<br />
a degree of spontaneous intuition have not been<br />
done so to offer any conceptual solutions. Instead<br />
because they ‘feel’ to me to occupy a hovering<br />
space of unknowing or perhaps even a quietly<br />
humming place of gestation and potential – a<br />
captured moment within the fog of existential<br />
liminality, providing a threshold, which I hope,<br />
through recognition or affirmation, might offer the<br />
potential to connect.<br />
Joseph Clarke, 2021<br />
3
Amy Gillian Wilson (b. 1997)<br />
“I used to be a woman who knew how to<br />
make things out as I saw them, but I have<br />
since committed the pathetic error of<br />
thinking. Wanting to understand was one<br />
of the worst things to have happened to me.<br />
I care too much about the utter darkness,<br />
the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat<br />
back the lives that have been tossed forth<br />
from the womb to fail, to kiss and bestow<br />
them all a second chance. I’m sending my<br />
true love back to the bitch that bore you.<br />
She is the world-generating spirit who all<br />
creatures rise through: space, time, and<br />
causality – the shell of the cosmic egg.<br />
She is the enticement that budged the<br />
self-brooding absolute to the act of creation.<br />
All information inside her is systematized<br />
around an enigma invisible even in its most<br />
private nucleus. I’m handing you a world<br />
on fire. I’ve given up on figuring out how<br />
to figure things out. Every lure seems to be<br />
an expanding vortex. Fear comes from what<br />
surpasses me, and I fear myself becomes<br />
I’m always ready to suffer. To protect me<br />
who persecutes me, I’ll float in emptiness<br />
and become air, energetic air, or maybe I’ll<br />
be more like an instant of air. Yes, I want<br />
to be an instant. Rather than a soul in a<br />
body, I’ll be a body in a soul.” - Amy Gillian<br />
Wilson, 2021<br />
Amy Gillian Wilson was born in Boston,<br />
Massachusetts in 1997. Her interdisciplinary<br />
approach consists of sculpture, painting,<br />
installation, writing, video and performance.<br />
She earned her undergraduate degree<br />
from the School of the Art Institute of<br />
Chicago and is currently completing the<br />
Masters of Fine Arts program in Ceramics<br />
at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield<br />
Hills, Michigan. She has exhibited her<br />
artwork widely in the USA and beyond.<br />
‘Who Orders Me Around Is Only For Me To Know’<br />
mixed media wall hanging, 160 x 150 cm<br />
4
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David Quinn (b. 1971)<br />
Working on several pieces at once, David<br />
Quinn’s studio is an intimate, white,<br />
rectangular space where small scale, interrelated<br />
yet instinctively painted works, hang<br />
in line or grid. Each piece a self contained<br />
unit, both unique and yet part of a greater<br />
whole, as if individual words as part of<br />
a sentence, notes in a tune or hours in a<br />
day. What at first glance appears simple,<br />
minimal and understated, reveals itself<br />
upon closer inspection to be multilayered<br />
and imbued with quiet complexity, where<br />
a unique history is accumulated, built<br />
like strata in sedimentary rock. A finished<br />
painting is the summary of the process of<br />
its creation: a concentrated form or essence,<br />
containing both purity and imperfection,<br />
each tablet a poetic palimpsest, considered<br />
by Quinn as a marker of time, spent<br />
in contemplation - akin perhaps to a<br />
physical embodiment of meditation or<br />
a prayer.<br />
David Quinn was born in Dublin, Ireland<br />
in 1971 and currently lives and works in<br />
Shillelagh, County Wicklow. His paintings<br />
have been exhibited internationally and<br />
can be found in collections worldwide.<br />
‘Lugnaquilla 1 & 2’<br />
mixed media on panel, 21.5 x 13.5 cm<br />
7
Judith Nangala Crispin (b. 1970)<br />
Judith Nangala Crispin is an Australian visual<br />
artist, poet and musician, and a descendant of<br />
Bpangerang people of North East Victoria. Her<br />
skin name, Nangala, was given to her by the<br />
Warlpiri people of the remote Tanami Desert<br />
in northern Australia, a place she has lived<br />
for a few months each year for over a decade.<br />
Her work includes themes of displacement<br />
and identity loss, a reflection on her ancestry,<br />
but it is primarily centred on the concept of<br />
connection with the land. This work forms<br />
a part of Crispin’s ongoing series depicting<br />
the transcendent ascending forms of recently<br />
deceased fauna. Crispin’s camera-less method<br />
of photography incorporates a range of<br />
processes. Her own developed alternative<br />
process of ‘lumachrome glass printing’,<br />
combines elements of lumen printing, cliché<br />
verre, chemical alchemy and drawing. She<br />
works within a mobile geodesic dome which<br />
functions as a giant lens where light streams<br />
penetrate its plastic walls. <strong>The</strong> mobility of<br />
her studio allows her to go to the site of her<br />
subject, prior to respectful burial. <strong>The</strong> muse,<br />
is raised onto a plastic box, rested on special<br />
photographic paper for up to 50 hours as the<br />
passage of sun and moonlight exposes its<br />
posthumous portrait. Each work is viewed as<br />
a collaboration with nature, where honouring<br />
the subject is a key objective. In each work<br />
the animals are diaphanous where light has<br />
literally passed through their bodies. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
appear drawn in a primitive motion by a<br />
slipstream of spirit, levitating in a space of<br />
brooding luminosity that appears sentient<br />
and wholly focused on the task of enfolding<br />
each creature back into its care. <strong>The</strong> result<br />
offers a profound sense of what lies beyond.<br />
Nangala Crispin has published a collection of<br />
poetry, <strong>The</strong> Myrrh-Bearers (Sydney: Puncher<br />
& Wattmann, 2015), and a book of images and<br />
poems made while living with the Warlpiri,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Lumen Seed (New York: Daylight Books,<br />
2017). She is a member of Oculi collective, one<br />
of the chapter leads of Women Photograph<br />
(Sydney), and was the 2021 Artist in residence<br />
with Music Viva. She is also the Poetry<br />
Editor for <strong>The</strong> Canberra Times. She has<br />
also directed and worked on two major<br />
social justice research projects – <strong>The</strong> Julfa<br />
Project, which preserved photographic<br />
records of a destroyed Armenian cemetery<br />
and digitally reconstructed the site from<br />
new and existing images; and Kurdiji 1.0, an<br />
Aboriginal suicide prevention app, which<br />
strengthens resilience in young indigenous<br />
people by reconnecting them with community<br />
and culture. Nangala Crispin work has been<br />
exhibited internationally.<br />
‘Some spirits remain in this world only a moment– just to feel breath on their lips, a mother’s<br />
warmth, to smell wildflowers in the grass- and then they go, slipping back into the before-country.<br />
Lucy, dropping her body in the field, lifts into a Braidwood night and is greeted by insects.’<br />
lumachrome glass print, cliche-verre, chemigram, stillborn calf & bugs on fibre paper, with<br />
household chemicals, mineral salts & seed - exposed 48 hours in a geodesic dome, 140 x 100 cm<br />
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Richard Nott (b. 1963)<br />
Richard Nott’s paintings are unique. <strong>The</strong>re<br />
are no oil or acrylic paints in his studio, he<br />
works with industrial materials, bitumen,<br />
emulsions and varnishes, building them<br />
up layer upon layer, often over intimately<br />
drawn or gouged grids, lines or marks, into<br />
a textural palimpsest, before courageously<br />
scraping or burning them back to reveal what<br />
lies underneath. Viewing Richard Nott’s<br />
artwork is witnessing a protracted collision<br />
of creative and destructive processes. An<br />
evolution of matter, exposed, concealed,<br />
exposed, concealed, continuously. His<br />
paintings become the consequence of<br />
protracted time spent where Nott’s history<br />
merges with the history of the elements<br />
used. He has little interest in illusionistic<br />
‘texture’, the work must be its own entity,<br />
have its own story and be its own statement.<br />
His objective is to create an organic object<br />
that evolves like a living thing with truth<br />
and imperfection. His process of working<br />
allows for a contemplation of a cycle of<br />
existence to become imbued in to the work.<br />
Not a beginning with an end but a journey<br />
where genesis leads to dissolution, and on<br />
once again to genesis. Something eternal<br />
akin to alchemy.<br />
Richard Nott is a British artist born in 1963,<br />
who lives and works in west Cornwall. Nott<br />
gained his Fine Art degree at Lancashire<br />
Polytechnic and his MA in fine art at<br />
Reading University. In 1985 he worked as<br />
an assistant to Andy Goldsworthy on sitespecific<br />
sculptures in the Lake District. He<br />
was gallery assistant at the Royal Academy<br />
from 1986-7 and at Oldham Art Gallery from<br />
1991-2. He won the South West Arts Visual<br />
Arts and Photography Award in 1994. He<br />
gained a residency at the 12th International<br />
Weeks of Painting in Slovenia. Exhibitions<br />
have been extensive and international<br />
notable included numerous solo exhibitions<br />
at Anima Mundi over a long and fruitful<br />
working relationship, ‘Art Now Cornwall’ at<br />
the Tate St Ives and Chashama, Avenue of<br />
the America’s, NYC.<br />
‘Scarified 1’<br />
mixed media panel (bitumin, acrylic, varnish, paper), 102 x 102 cm<br />
11
Claire Curneen (b. 1968)<br />
Claire Curneen’s iconic sculptures are<br />
poignant contemplations on the liminal and<br />
precarious nature of the human condition;<br />
exploring themes around death, rebirth and<br />
the sublime. Universal and profound states<br />
of fear, loss, suffering and sacrifice fuse<br />
with devotion, desire, wonder and mystery<br />
to underlie each intricate, porcelain figure.<br />
<strong>The</strong>ir translucent and fragile qualities offer<br />
potent, metaphoric abstract narratives.<br />
Porcelain, terracotta and black stoneware<br />
create a grounded vulnerability to these<br />
works, with dribbles of glaze and flashes of<br />
gold to embellish denoted sacred qualities.<br />
Claire Curneen was born in Tralee, Co.<br />
Kerry, Ireland in 1968 and currently lives<br />
and works in Wales, UK. Works have been<br />
exhibited internationally and appear in<br />
many notable public collections including<br />
<strong>The</strong> Crafts Council, London; Shipley<br />
ArGallery, Gateshead; National Museum<br />
& Gallery of Wales, Cardiff; Victoria and<br />
Albert Museum, London; <strong>The</strong> Fitzwilliam<br />
Museum, Cambridge; Manchester City Art<br />
Gallery, Manchester; National Museum of<br />
Scotland, Edinburgh; Aberystwyth Arts<br />
Centre, Aberystwyth, Wales; Cleveland Craft<br />
Centre, Middlesbrough; Oldham Art Gallery<br />
and Museum, Manchester; York City Art<br />
Gallery, York; Middlesbrough Institute of<br />
Modern Art, Middlesbrough; Crawford Art<br />
Gallery, Cork, Eire; Limerick City Gallery<br />
of Art, Limerick, Eire; Ulster Museum,<br />
Belfast, Northern Ireland; Benaki Museum,<br />
Athens, Greece; Clay Studio, Philadelphia,<br />
USA; Mint Museum of Craft + Design,<br />
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA; Icheon<br />
World Ceramic Centre, Gyeonggi-do, Korea;<br />
Taipei Ceramics Museum, Taiwan.<br />
‘Anam Cara’<br />
tin glazed terracotta, 89 cm (H)<br />
12
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Jamie Mills (b. 1983)<br />
Jamie Mills is a musician, sound and visual<br />
artist. His practice is underpinned by<br />
investigation surrounding the dissemination<br />
of gesture between materiality and<br />
environments – referencing both internal<br />
and external landscapes. <strong>The</strong>se concerns<br />
are reinforced by an interdisciplinary<br />
approach to working and are made manifest<br />
through the renderings of sounds or<br />
materials often sourced or retrieved via<br />
immersion into nature or borderlands,<br />
and with particular reference to his aural<br />
works, articulated and manipulated through<br />
unorthodox instrumental preparations<br />
and the incorporation and processing of<br />
field recordings. <strong>The</strong> term ‘gestalt’ refers<br />
to a concept within psychotherapeutic<br />
fields, inferring that the nature of a<br />
whole is greater than the sum of its<br />
parts. Mills’ employment of the mediums<br />
of photography, sound and mark-making<br />
can be read in this sense whereby a reality<br />
is constructed not by the sole surface<br />
representation of any individual element<br />
alone, but instead there is a sense that<br />
the artists reality is presented through<br />
the relationships and the spaces between<br />
elements. In other terms, it is work that<br />
requires both on one hand a stepping<br />
away from, and on the other an immersion<br />
into, in order to extract an empathetic<br />
understanding of the essence of the<br />
work that presides from both a conscious<br />
and subconscious framework of mind.<br />
Universally inherent within his process of<br />
rendering, there is a conscious dialogue<br />
between, on one hand material intent (or<br />
‘essence’) and on the other, control (or the<br />
relinquishing of control), so as to make work<br />
that negotiates thresholds and occupies at<br />
times a liminal status. In this sense Mills’<br />
“intuitively composed” sound works, and<br />
his images or assemblages become markers<br />
to a series of internal journeys or rituals<br />
informed by an often poetic dialogue<br />
between material, form and environment.<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> Velocity of Inertia’<br />
single channel video & sound work<br />
15
Mat Chivers (b. 1973)<br />
Referencing that all life on Earth, including<br />
our own is carbon-based, ‘Carbon Mirror’ is<br />
one of a series of paired drawings made<br />
using this primary element. <strong>The</strong> left hand<br />
has been used to make a drawing of the<br />
right hand and the right to draw the left.<br />
<strong>The</strong> eye observes, sending a signal to the<br />
brain and down through the body into<br />
the hand which makes marks on the paper<br />
in an attempt to describe what the eye<br />
sees - setting up a continual loop between<br />
the interior and the exterior. Physical<br />
engagement with material reality is an<br />
act of extended cognition - of thinking<br />
out into the world. <strong>The</strong> idea of extended<br />
cognition centres around the way thinking<br />
is something that happens in relationship<br />
with material reality - a network of<br />
processes that radiate back and forth from<br />
the wetware of the brain through the<br />
physiology of the sensorial body and into<br />
the world of animate and inanimate form in<br />
a complex web of reciprocity. <strong>The</strong> evolution<br />
of our hands has facilitated an evolution of<br />
our minds. <strong>The</strong> hand enables the mind to<br />
manifest on the three-dimensional plane<br />
and has led us to where we are now.<br />
<strong>The</strong> work of British artist Mat Chivers looks<br />
at some of the fundamental phenomena<br />
that drive our thoughts and actions. He<br />
explores ideas relating to perception,<br />
evolutionary process, ecology and ethics by<br />
bringing traditional analogue approaches<br />
to making into counterpoint with state of<br />
the art digital technologies. Chivers has<br />
works in numerous private and public<br />
collections including Oxford University<br />
Mathematical Institute, UK and Fondazione<br />
Henraux, Italy. Solo exhibitions include<br />
‘Migrations’ at Arsenal Art Contemporain<br />
Montréal, Canada and Musée d’art de<br />
Joliette, Canada; ‘Harmonic Distortion’<br />
at PM/AM, London, UK, ‘Altered State’s<br />
at Hallmark House, Johannesburg, South<br />
Africa and ‘Syzygy’ at Anima Mundi. Group<br />
exhibitions include <strong>The</strong> New States of Being<br />
at Centre d’Exposition de l’Université de<br />
Montréal, Canada; A Place In Time at Nirox,<br />
Johannesburg, South Africa; Glasstress:<br />
White Light/White Heat at Pallazzo<br />
Cavalli Franchetti for the 55th Venice<br />
Biennale, Italy and <strong>The</strong> Knowledge at <strong>The</strong><br />
Gervasuti Foundation for the 54th Venice<br />
Biennale, Italy.<br />
‘Carbon Mirror’<br />
carbon on paper, 75 x 55 cm each<br />
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Jim Carter (b. 1967)<br />
In these two territorial boundary markers,<br />
the right hand is closed and mute, suggesting<br />
secrecy, the unknown and arcane. <strong>The</strong> left<br />
hand is raised so as to challenge unjust and<br />
oppressive action, both forbidding trespass<br />
into hallowed terrain.<br />
“In the forest, as in the skull, there are levels<br />
of consciousness much less supervised by<br />
rational control, and from this legitimate<br />
dark, a cry will appear as more or less<br />
unimpeded emotion. In the Hebrew language<br />
it is known as the hôy, a term associated with<br />
lamentation for the dead, that yet lends itself<br />
to complex utterances. If I think of this work<br />
as an agent for the cause of the subjugated<br />
animal, then the hôy-word crystalises as a<br />
reflex sourced from anger, grief and pain.<br />
It is a cry that secures the boundary and<br />
resists the transgressor, or one which makes<br />
pronouncements that tend towards vengeance<br />
and punishment (though the root is always in<br />
grief and suffering). Of course, if we ally this<br />
sound to a gesture of the hand, then meanings<br />
become more numerous as well as emphatic.<br />
<strong>The</strong> right hand is here closed and mute, and<br />
into this we can read ideas of secrecy and the<br />
occluded animal. <strong>The</strong> power and dominion<br />
of its hermetic silence is not denied the<br />
other hand, it is just of a different order.<br />
<strong>The</strong> left has occasion for sound, whereas<br />
the right does not, if it ever needed it.<br />
What are we to make of these hands at the<br />
threshold that in form suggest the man<br />
but which are countered against him? Are<br />
they not a man’s instrument with which to<br />
conquer, emblematic of his sovereignty and<br />
kingship? But the sign is raised more so to<br />
challenge his unjust and oppressive action<br />
than to accent his differentiating image. It<br />
expresses, moreover, the spirit of the animal<br />
in opposition which, as far as this work is<br />
concerned, forbids trespass into hallowed<br />
terrain. <strong>The</strong> left hand, its fingers extended,<br />
denotes command and invocation; the right<br />
is equally raised in a prohibitive gesture, and<br />
one which comes with a hex of judgement and<br />
attendant calamity (I imagine the intruder<br />
who crosses this threshold into the grove of<br />
the satyr subject to all the repercussions of a<br />
curse).” Jim Carter 2021.<br />
Jim Carter was born in Worcestershire<br />
in 1967. He received an MA with<br />
distinction in Art and Environment from<br />
Falmouth University and an MSc Award<br />
in Ecopsychology, Centre For Human<br />
Ecology. Carter’s work has appeared in<br />
<strong>The</strong> Dark Mountain, About Place Journal,<br />
Unpsychology and Earthlines magazine.<br />
‘<strong>The</strong>re Are Tongues, <strong>The</strong>y Will Be Ceased’ & ‘He Gathered <strong>The</strong> Wind in His Fist’<br />
fox, cow and sheep bone, clay. fox fur, poplar leaf, hazel wood,170 cm (H)<br />
cow teeth, wood, clay. poplar leaf, soil, ash, 150 cm (H)<br />
19
Massimo Angei (b. 1962)<br />
Massimo Angèi’s elemental, tempestuous<br />
yet ethereal oil paintings reflect varied<br />
emotional states whilst remaining open to<br />
physical and metaphysical interpretation.<br />
Tableaus and forms are suggested but<br />
never fully established, perhaps evoking<br />
landscape, weather patterns, natural<br />
systems, inner psychology or spiritual<br />
connectedness. Voluptuous cloud-like<br />
billows intersperse with delicate spiralling<br />
marks forming an ecstatic unity reminiscent<br />
of both renaissance grandeur and primitive<br />
automatic drawing.<br />
Massimo Angèi was born in La Spezia, Italy,<br />
he currently lives and works in Sarzana,<br />
near the borderline between Liguria<br />
and Tuscany. Following art school, he<br />
collaborated with various institutions and<br />
museums exhibiting early representational<br />
depictions of flora and fauna. After finishing<br />
his degree at the Fine Arts Academy in<br />
Carrara/Painting (Accademia di Belle<br />
Arti\Pittura), he participated in his first<br />
exhibitions, and the creation of the Idioma<br />
group along with Marco Casentini, Fabio<br />
Linari, Jacopo Bruno, Andrea Geremia.<br />
He then began to work as an independent<br />
freelance photographer working for photo<br />
agencies including Grazia Neri of Milan,<br />
and Bilderberg of Hamburg, publishing his<br />
images in both Italian and international<br />
magazines. A vivid dream in the spring of<br />
2006 made him realise that his destiny was<br />
as a painter, and he vowed to never again<br />
abandon it.<br />
‘Abissi di morbida luce (Abyss of Soft Light)’<br />
oil on canvas, 70 x 140 cm<br />
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Tim Shaw (b. 1964)<br />
Tim Shaw RA’s sculpture is often dualistic,<br />
incorporating current affairs, societal<br />
complexity and human conflict with<br />
ancient, mythical, metaphysical and primal<br />
concerns. Shaw’s powerful oeuvre connects<br />
these elements to create wider, timeless<br />
portraits of humanity. <strong>The</strong> tension between<br />
ancient past and a prosaic presence,<br />
between solidity and breakdown, becomes<br />
an organic part of his worldview, whether<br />
he’s looking at human transgression or the<br />
enlightenment of primitive ritual.<br />
Shaw is a British artist, born in Belfast, he<br />
currently lives in Cornwall. He was elected<br />
an Academician at <strong>The</strong> Royal Academy<br />
in 2013 and made a Fellow of <strong>The</strong> Royal<br />
British Society of Sculptors and a Fellow<br />
of Falmouth University the same year.<br />
Shaw has had a number of significant solo<br />
shows throughout the UK, Ireland and<br />
internationally. Most recently the major<br />
public solo exhibitions ‘What Remains’<br />
and ‘Something is Not Quite Right’ a<br />
collaboration between <strong>The</strong> Exchange and<br />
Anima-Mundi, ‘Mother the Air is Blue,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Air is Dangerous’ was held in the F.E<br />
McWilliam Gallery in Northern Ireland,<br />
‘Black Smoke Rising’ toured from Mac<br />
Birmingham to Aberystwyth Arts Centre<br />
and Back From the Front presents: Shock<br />
and Awe – Contemporary Artists at War<br />
and Peace at the Royal West of England<br />
Academy. He has undertaken a number of<br />
public commissions including ‘<strong>The</strong> Rites<br />
of Dionysus’ for <strong>The</strong> Eden Project, ‘<strong>The</strong><br />
Minotaur’ for <strong>The</strong> Royal Opera House and<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> Drummer’ for Lemon Quay, Truro.<br />
A more political side to his work became<br />
evident in a number of sculptures responding<br />
to the issues of terrorism and <strong>The</strong> Iraq War.<br />
‘Tank on Fire’ was awarded the selectors<br />
prize at the inaugural Threadneedle Prize<br />
in 2008 and the installation ‘Casting a<br />
Dark Democracy’ was reviewed in 2008<br />
by Jackie Wullschlager of <strong>The</strong> Financial<br />
Times as ‘<strong>The</strong> most politically charged<br />
yet poetically resonant new work on show<br />
in London’. Shaw has been supported by<br />
the Kappatos Athens Art Residency, <strong>The</strong><br />
Kenneth Armitage Foundation, <strong>The</strong> British<br />
School of Athens,<strong>The</strong> Delfina Studio Trust<br />
through residencies in Greece, Spain and a<br />
fellowship in London. Most recently as an<br />
Artist Fellow at the Kate Hamburger Centre<br />
for Advance Study in the Humanities of<br />
‘Law and Culture’ In Bonn, Germany where<br />
he began work on ’<strong>The</strong> Birth of Breakdown<br />
Clown’ an existential sculptural work<br />
utilising sculpture, robotics and AI.<br />
‘Hallucinatory Figure 1, 2 & 3’<br />
bronze (edition of 8), 20 cm, 19 cm & 15 cm (H)<br />
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Gabrielle K Brown (b. 1994)<br />
Embodying a natural and intuitive,<br />
seemingly naive, yet extremely complex<br />
aesthetic, Gabrielle K Brown is a multifaceted,<br />
multi-media artist who eagerly and<br />
energetically seeks new ways to tell stories<br />
through her artworks. Her pieces retain an<br />
object, often shrine-like quality, utilising<br />
materials including wood, various paints,<br />
resin, fabrics and even hair - nothing<br />
is beyond limits. <strong>The</strong> works dissect the<br />
relationship we have with ourselves, our<br />
companions, our society and our past with<br />
an awe and celebration of nature and<br />
the divine, shedding light on how we<br />
grow and how we suffer as human beings.<br />
Confrontational imagery is often contrasted<br />
with uplifting symbolism, actions and<br />
words - emphasising the extremes of the<br />
human condition and experience, and<br />
yearning within the energetic and fraught<br />
times that we live in.<br />
Born in 1994 on the east coast of Canada in<br />
New Brunswick, Brown grew up along the<br />
riverside and mountains which is where she<br />
connected to art and began painting and<br />
sculpting. She has spent much of her life<br />
traveling the world and moving throughout<br />
Canada which has always reflected in her<br />
work, but has recently moved back home to<br />
St John, the oldest city in Canada.Work has<br />
been exhibited at Art Basel Miami, as well<br />
as Montreal and New York and LA in the<br />
United States.<br />
‘Eat <strong>The</strong> Soup Live <strong>The</strong> Dream Live Die Repeat’<br />
acrylic, pencil crayon, wood, resin, fabric, horse hair, 185 x 160 cm<br />
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David Cooper (b. 1972)<br />
David Cooper’s work deals with disorder,<br />
taking fragments of found, disregarded<br />
objects and exploring them inside out,<br />
and outside in, through a series of<br />
unpremeditated and intuitive processes<br />
in three dimensional form. <strong>The</strong> works<br />
inquire into a humanity that feels, fears and<br />
confronts restriction and control; a state of<br />
being often conducive to an abominable<br />
sense of desolation and fettered anxiety.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se unknown (and unknowable) aspects of<br />
the human condition, driven by momentary<br />
absences of restraint, structure and control<br />
are embodied. Broken happenings, motivated<br />
by instinct, assemblage techniques and<br />
random thoughts, naivety and energy are<br />
exploited to sculpt the identity of these<br />
unfathomable aspects of human experience.<br />
His intriguing and expressive portraits, are<br />
perhaps deliberately destined to remain<br />
curious and incomplete.<br />
David Cooper was born in Wakefield, West<br />
Yorkshire in 1972. He currently lives and<br />
works in Suffolk. Cooper studied Fashion<br />
at John Moores University followed by an<br />
MA in Fashion Design at Central Saint<br />
Martins where he went on to become lead<br />
designer and head of menswear at Alexander<br />
McQueen. More recently Cooper attended<br />
Fine Art summer school at the Slade School<br />
of Fine Art in 2008. Works have been<br />
exhibited extensively in the UK including<br />
<strong>The</strong> Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2014 and most<br />
recently as part of Anima Mundi’s ‘Protected<br />
by Alarms’ & Ode to a Nightingale’.<br />
‘Mutta Dictator’<br />
jesmonite, 40 x 22 x 19 cm<br />
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Andrew Litten (b. 1970)<br />
Andrew Litten’s dynamic and gestural<br />
figurative paintings express a strong<br />
interest in the universal complexity of<br />
everyday existence. Dealing with humanistic<br />
themes such as love, sensuality, fear,<br />
anger, loss, nostalgia, mundanity, personal<br />
growth and perceived identity normality<br />
or disturbance. Works are created with an<br />
unguarded, empathetic attitude, like so<br />
many expressionistic artists, a rawness of<br />
approach combined with an often viscous<br />
application of paint is also key to the extreme<br />
experience felt from the work. Gesture and<br />
nuance inspire extreme emotive reading,<br />
perhaps subversive, tender, passionate,<br />
ambivalent, malevolent or compassionate,<br />
our response becomes one of allure<br />
or repulsion.<br />
Andrew Litten is a British artist, born in<br />
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1970. He<br />
currently works from his studio in Fowey,<br />
Cornwall. He is a self-taught artist leaving<br />
art college as a teenager having found<br />
it to be too restrictive to his aspired<br />
method of working. For a decade he created<br />
mostly small-scale works using humble<br />
domestic or found materials (including<br />
envelopes and assembled furniture parts).<br />
<strong>The</strong> work made at this time deliberately<br />
challenged ideas of art elitism and art as<br />
commodity. He then moved to Cornwall<br />
in 2001 and chose to begin exhibiting.<br />
Early success came when his work was<br />
included in an exhibition titled ‘Nudes’ in<br />
New York City, (along with Jacob Epstein<br />
and Pierre-Auguste Renoir), where his<br />
work was highlighted and reviewed by the<br />
New York Times. Shortly after he had four<br />
consecutive solo exhibitions at Goldifsh<br />
Fine Arts in Penzance, Cornwall. Other<br />
notable exhibitions included ‘Move’ at Vyner<br />
Street, London, during Frieze Art Week<br />
2007, where his work ‘Dog Breeder’, created<br />
as a twisted and emphatic anti-art statement,<br />
was exhibited. He was also included in ‘No<br />
Soul For Sale’ at Tate Modern Turbine Hall,<br />
London in 2010. In 2012 he held a major<br />
solo exhibition at Millennium in St Ives,<br />
Cornwall and that year was given a guest<br />
solo exhibition at L13 Light Industrial<br />
Workshop, London. He has also held largescale<br />
solo exhibitions at Spike Island and<br />
Motorcade FlashParade in Bristol. ‘Ordinary<br />
Bodies, Ordinary Bones’ was conceived with<br />
support from <strong>The</strong> Arts Council, UK and<br />
was exhibited at Anima Mundi in 2018.<br />
Works have been included in numerous<br />
international curated mixed exhibitions<br />
in Berlin, Dublin, Siena, Milwaukee and<br />
New York City and in Venice during the<br />
54th Biennale. Most recently paintings have<br />
been exhibited in four major museums in<br />
China. Andrew Litten paintings feature<br />
in numerous international private and<br />
public collections.<br />
‘Liminal Stage’<br />
oil on canvas, 130 x 200 cm<br />
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William Arnold (b. 1983)<br />
Living Places: ‘<strong>The</strong> pleasures of life do not<br />
fill time but leave it empty. <strong>The</strong> human mind<br />
however, feels detestation and discomfort<br />
in the presence of empty time. Present time<br />
can admittedly seem to us to be full, but in<br />
our own memory it nevertheless appears to<br />
empty, for when time is full of diversions<br />
and the like, it only feels full when it is<br />
contemporaneous - in the memory it is<br />
empty. If one has not done anything in<br />
one’s life but simply waste one’s time, and<br />
then looks back at one’s life, one will be<br />
unable to understand how it could come to<br />
an end so swiftly.’ - Emmanual Kant<br />
Through use of an adapted paper negative<br />
process, ‘Living Places’ takes a wry look at<br />
the present era of ubiquitous surveillance<br />
and social networking by literally recording<br />
everything that has happened within the<br />
participant’s living space for periods of<br />
a week or more in a single photographic<br />
frame. Subjects were sought and chosen<br />
through an open-call online, collaborating<br />
in the installation of the camera in their<br />
chosen personal space, which was then left,<br />
shutter open over an extended timeframe.<br />
<strong>The</strong> resulting images give cause to<br />
reflect on the need to record our lives in<br />
comprehensive detail and the corresponding<br />
trend of making this record of banal, yet<br />
often highly personal information available<br />
for wider consumption. <strong>The</strong>se photographs<br />
seek, in abstracted form to document and<br />
to an extent subvert this confessional<br />
trend, in which the public and private<br />
are increasingly entangled; the intimate<br />
commonplace.<br />
William Arnold is an experimental,<br />
conceptual and documentary photographer,<br />
interested in the layers of human and<br />
natural history that comprise the making<br />
of the landscape, and the role played<br />
by the photograph in documenting time<br />
and change—the subjective and objective<br />
politics of places and their histories. His<br />
first monograph Suburban Herbarium was<br />
published by Uniformbooks (2020) with his<br />
work showcased in various publications<br />
and periodicals including: <strong>The</strong> Guardian,<br />
New Scientist, De Standaard, Source and<br />
Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine. He lives<br />
and works in West Cornwall, UK<br />
‘Luke’s Home Office, December 18th to January 3rd (Continuous exposure from paper negative)’<br />
archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle photorag 308gsm, 43 x 56 cm<br />
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‘William’s Room, February 17th to 24th (Continuous exposure from paper negative)’<br />
archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle photorag 308gsm, 43 x 56 cm<br />
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‘Silje’s Bedroom, June 6th to 21st (Continuous exposure from paper negative)’<br />
archival inkjet print on hahnemuhle photorag 308gsm, 43 x 56 cm<br />
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Joy Wolfenden Brown (b. 1961)<br />
Joy Wolfenden Brown’s intimate oil<br />
paintings feel hauntingly familiar<br />
possessing a raw, emotional, honesty. She<br />
captures fleeting fragments of memory,<br />
moments in time where the inherent<br />
vulnerability of the figures depicted, often<br />
in isolation, is palpable. <strong>The</strong>se are lovingly<br />
yet spontaneously executed reflections<br />
on the human condition, which have an<br />
unnervingly, yet simultaneously comforting,<br />
unguarded quality.<br />
Joy Wolfenden Brown is a British artist born<br />
in Stamford, Lincolnshire. She currently<br />
lives in Bude, North Cornwall. She graduated<br />
from Leeds University then completed a<br />
post-graduate diploma in Art <strong>The</strong>rapy at<br />
Hertfordshire College of Art & Design<br />
which she worked as an for ten years before<br />
moving to Cornwall in 1999. Since then<br />
she has had numerous solo exhibitions and<br />
was the First Prize Winner in <strong>The</strong> National<br />
Open Art Competition, 2012. She was also<br />
awarded the Somerville Gallery painting<br />
prize in 2003 and first prize winner at the<br />
Sherborne Open in 2007 and the Revolver<br />
Pricze at <strong>The</strong> RWA in 2019. Works were<br />
acquired by the Anthony Pettullo Outsider<br />
Art Collection in Milwaukee with further<br />
works held in collections worldwide.<br />
‘Evanescent Light’<br />
oil on paper, 62 x 51 cm<br />
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Laura Ford (b. 1961)<br />
Laura Ford’s sculptures are faithful<br />
representations of fantasy, often with<br />
bittersweet and menacing qualities mixed<br />
with tenderness, providing us with acutely<br />
graphic renditions of human emotion,<br />
mental and physical. She utilises an acute<br />
observation of the human condition to<br />
engage with personal narrative and wider<br />
social and political issues. Her imagery<br />
is all about remembering and giving that<br />
memory clarity.<br />
Born in Cardiff and currently living near<br />
Chichester, UK, Ford studied at Bath<br />
Academy of Art from 1978-82 and at<br />
Chelsea School of Art from 1982-83. She<br />
was included in the British Art Show 5,<br />
2000 and represented Wales in the 51st<br />
Venice Biennale in 2005. She has had<br />
numerous solo and group shows around the<br />
world including 2012 ‘Days of Judgment’,<br />
Kulturzentrum Englische Kirche , Galerie<br />
Scheffel, Bad Homburg and at <strong>The</strong> New Art<br />
Centre, Roche Court, 2011 Frederik Meijer<br />
Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids,<br />
USA, 2007, ‘Rag and Bone’, Turner<br />
Contemporary, Margate, 2006 ‘Armour<br />
Boys’, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh,<br />
2005, Venice Biennale for Wales, 2004,<br />
‘Wreckers’, Beaconsfield, 2004 ‘Into<br />
My World: Recent British Sculpture’,<br />
Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art<br />
in Connecticut, USA, London, 2003,<br />
‘Headthinkers’, Houldsworth Gallery,<br />
Cork Street, 2002, ‘<strong>The</strong> Great Indoors’,<br />
Salamanca Centre of Contemporary Art,<br />
Spain, 1998, Camden Arts Centre, London.<br />
Her work is represented in many public<br />
collections including; Tate, <strong>The</strong> Victoria<br />
and Albert Museum, Government Art<br />
Collection, Potteries Museum, National<br />
Museums and Gallery of Wales; Museum<br />
of Modern Art, University of Iowa; Arts<br />
Council of Great Britain; Contemporary<br />
Art Society; Unilever plc; Penguin Books;<br />
Oldham Art Gallery, <strong>The</strong> New Art Gallery<br />
Walsall, <strong>The</strong> Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, <strong>The</strong><br />
Meijier Gardens, Grand Rapids USA and<br />
<strong>The</strong> Gateway Foundation, St. Louis, as well<br />
as numerous private collections.<br />
‘Pale Fat Ghosts’<br />
jesmonite, steel, fabric, mixed media, 120 (H) x 60 (W) x 30 (D) cm<br />
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David Kim Whittaker (b. 1964)<br />
Most of David Kim Whittaker’s paintings are<br />
based upon a metaphysical interpretation<br />
of the human head. <strong>The</strong>se portrait portals,<br />
are often ambiguous, with the aim of<br />
representing the totality of the human<br />
condition - both the universal and the<br />
empathetic alongside personal experience.<br />
<strong>The</strong> works often juggle dual states of inner<br />
and outer calm and conflict, offering a glimpse<br />
of simultaneous strength and fragility,<br />
conscious and subconscious, masculine and<br />
feminine. <strong>The</strong> paintings express Whittaker’s<br />
constant focus on an attempt to express<br />
something far greater than oneself. Recent<br />
works depict the artists deep sensitivity<br />
and increasing unease when confronted<br />
with the compounding global tensions of<br />
this particlar moment. A dual reflection of<br />
hope and warning stares back at us from<br />
the frame.<br />
Whittaker is a British artist born in<br />
Cornwall where he still resides. Exhibitions<br />
have been held internationally, notably<br />
including a major solo exhibition at<br />
the prestigious Fondazione Mudima in<br />
Milan in 2017. Works are in numerous<br />
museum collections, art foundations and<br />
international private collections. Whittaker<br />
was further acknowledged in 2011 as the<br />
recipient of the Towry Award (First Prize) at<br />
the National Open Art Competition.<br />
‘Lockdown Portrait : <strong>The</strong> Lamb’<br />
oil on acrylic on panel, 76 x 76 cm<br />
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Roger Thorp (b. 1955)<br />
Roger Thorp’s interest in the poetic<br />
use of word and image, to evoke a deep<br />
emotional response, are key to his creative<br />
process. His artworks are unapologetically<br />
infused with a nostalgic romanticism,<br />
transmitting an enormous sensitivity<br />
towards the earth, humanity and a universal<br />
inter-connectedness between matter and<br />
all living things. Primarily consisting of<br />
video work and multi-media installation,<br />
his work is informed by a deeply-felt<br />
belief that as a society, and as individuals,<br />
we need to come home, to remember a<br />
less rapacious and frenetic way of living,<br />
more connected on an emotional level<br />
to each other, and to the rest of the<br />
natural world. If his work offers up an<br />
urgent protest, it remains an optimistic and<br />
tender one.<br />
Thorp is a British artist born in Derbyshire.<br />
He currently lives and works in Cornwall.<br />
He previously worked as a producer on<br />
music videos before directing / producing<br />
programmes for NGO’s such as WWF, ILO,<br />
Greenpeace and the Red Cross, working<br />
in Australia, Mongolia and the USA. He<br />
has also made two feature films. Other<br />
work by Thorp as a writer / director<br />
has been screened in Rome, Barcelona,<br />
Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen, Istanbul, USA,<br />
Cornwall and London. In 2015 he founded<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> Olive Network’ a sophisticated web<br />
platform built to foster tolerance and<br />
understanding throughout diverse global<br />
communities by focusing on the positive<br />
long-term contributions of charity, the arts<br />
and humanities. Thorp’s artwork has been<br />
exhibited extensively.<br />
‘Tide of Love’<br />
single channel video<br />
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Arthur Lanyon (b. 1985)<br />
Arthur Lanyon paintings combine intuitive<br />
figurative motifs with an emotive, gestural,<br />
abstracted language. His energetic works<br />
are sited on a physical and metaphysical<br />
cross roads, like a belay between numerous<br />
visual and emotional pinnacles. <strong>The</strong>y offer<br />
a progressive link between the outside<br />
world, the inner architecture of the<br />
brain, altered states of consciousness,<br />
memory and the unencumbered essence of<br />
child’s drawing.<br />
Arthur Lanyon is a British artist born<br />
in Leicester, England in 1985. He lives<br />
and works from a studio near Penzance,<br />
Cornwall. Born in to an artistic family, his<br />
father was the painter Matthew Lanyon and<br />
his grandfather the celebrated, influential<br />
and world renowned modernist painter<br />
Peter Lanyon. He won the Hans Brinker<br />
Painting Award in Amsterdam in 2007 and<br />
gained a first class degree in Fine Art<br />
from Cardiff University in 2008. Upon<br />
graduating he was featured in Saatchi’s<br />
‘New Sensations’ exhibition. In 2014, his<br />
work was in the long-list for the Aesthetica<br />
Art Prize and was included in the award’s<br />
published anthology. His debut Anima<br />
Mundi solo exhibition ‘Return to Whale’<br />
opened in 2016, which was followed by<br />
‘White Chalk Lines in 2018. His latest<br />
exhibition ‘Arcade Laundry’ opened<br />
in 2020. Works have been exhibited<br />
extensively, notably including Untitled Art<br />
Fair in Miami; Zona Maco, Mexico City;<br />
the Saatchi Gallery London; <strong>The</strong> House of<br />
St Barnabas, London; CGK, Copenhagen;<br />
Tat Art, Barcelona and Herrick Gallery,<br />
Mayfair. Arthur Lanyon paintings are held<br />
in private collections worldwide.<br />
‘Gordian Ghost’<br />
mixed media on canvas, 160 x 120 cm<br />
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Evelyn Williams (1929-2012)<br />
Evelyn Williams was born in 1929 and died<br />
in 2012. Her tender, intimate and emotional<br />
paintings are concerned with the subtleties<br />
and complexities of relationships and the<br />
human predicament. Dealing with the<br />
intimate connection and profound solitude<br />
of existence, taking the viewer on a profound<br />
journey from womb to tomb.<br />
Williams trained at St Martin’s School of Art<br />
from the age of 15 and then the Royal College of<br />
Art working alongside the older, largely male<br />
students, many of them soldiers returning<br />
from service in the Second World War.<br />
Despite failing health she continued<br />
painting right up to her death at the age<br />
of 83. Williams proved difficult for some<br />
to categorise during her life time, but is<br />
regarded, along with friends such as Paula<br />
Rego, as having forged a path for female<br />
artists. She later founded a trust in her<br />
name which has done modest but important<br />
work to support artists, particularly women,<br />
and the practice of drawing. As Huon<br />
Mallalieu stated “Her work deserves to be as<br />
well-known as those of her fellow 1961 John<br />
Moores prize-winners, Blake, Blow, Hockney,<br />
Kitaj, Kossoff, McWilliam and Uglow.”<br />
‘Mother Singing I & 2’<br />
oil on canvas, 36 x 46 cm each<br />
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Carlos Zapata (b. 1963)<br />
Carlos Zapata predominately makes<br />
idiosyncratic carved and painted wooden<br />
sculpture alongside mixed media<br />
installation. His work deals with many<br />
challenging and potent humanist themes<br />
including poverty, conflict, religion<br />
and race, yet perhaps paradoxically, the<br />
overriding characteristics of the work are of<br />
emotive empathy and compassion. Zapata’s<br />
work belongs to and takes inspiration from<br />
folk and tribal artforms from all over the<br />
world but specifically from South America,<br />
from its indigenous populace and the<br />
trade routes and traditions that have fed it<br />
over the centuries. Many of his sculptures<br />
have evolved from personal experience of<br />
living in a foreign land and from his home<br />
country where civil issues continue to<br />
trouble its people.<br />
Carlos Zapata is a Colombian artist who<br />
currently lives and works near Falmouth in<br />
Cornwall, UK. He has exhibited extensively<br />
internationally with works held in numerous<br />
private and museum collections around<br />
the world.<br />
‘Cede‘<br />
polychromed carved wood, 37 (H) x 50 (L) x 31 (W) cm<br />
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Rebecca Harper (b. 1989)<br />
Much of Rebecca Harper’s work has revealed<br />
itself through a diasporic consciousness<br />
which can often involve a multiplicity of<br />
belonging and a sense of difference, often<br />
one of ‘otherness’ and displacement. <strong>The</strong><br />
identity of the displaced positioning is a<br />
paradox between location and dislocation,<br />
out of place everywhere and not completely<br />
anywhere. Generally, the work frames<br />
expressions of ‘being’ and manifests itself<br />
within an unfolding, wondering, allegoric<br />
commentary on the locations that she<br />
inhabits and those which inhabit her.<br />
Recent work explores a cast of reoccurring<br />
characters that rotate around the outskirts<br />
of the house that she grew up in, where<br />
she also found herself locked down during<br />
Covid. This work is a part of a body of work<br />
that acknowledges the human and worldly<br />
capacity to live at the edge of the precipice.<br />
<strong>The</strong> characters are never seen as portraits<br />
as such, more like actors that play a role,<br />
filling in for particular people, as they fill<br />
a stage. As Rebecca says of the figure who<br />
resembles herself; “It feels like perhaps this<br />
woman, has almost become a guiding spirit<br />
of myself, one of vulnerability and strength<br />
in the dealings of uncertainty, instability<br />
loss, and grief. She shows up reliably again<br />
and again during terrible turbulence.”<br />
Harper was born in London in 1989,<br />
where she continues to live and work. She<br />
studied at UWE Bristol then <strong>The</strong> Royal<br />
Drawing School and Turps Art School<br />
(Postgraduate’s). Rebecca was Artist in<br />
Residence at <strong>The</strong> Santozium Museum,<br />
Santorini, in summer 2019, and Artist in<br />
Residence for the Ryder Project Space at<br />
A.P.T Studios, Deptford in 2018-19 before<br />
becoming a studio and committee Member<br />
in 2019. She was winner of the ACS Studio<br />
Prize in 2018. Chameleon, her debut solo<br />
show at Anima Mundi met with great<br />
acclaim including a review in the FT by<br />
Jackie Wullshlager. Most recently Rebecca<br />
was selected for <strong>The</strong> John Moore’s Painting<br />
Prize 2021, and previously selected for<br />
Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2018 at<br />
South London Gallery, Other curated shows<br />
include Huxley Parlour, Public Gallery, <strong>The</strong><br />
Royal Academy Summer Show, Christies<br />
London and NYC, Flowers Gallery’, Paul<br />
Stolper Gallery, Turps Art Gallery and<br />
Arusha Gallery. Her work is on long term<br />
display in the Albright Collection at<br />
Maddox Street Club in London curated<br />
by Beth Greenacre and at the Santozeum<br />
Museum in Santorini. Harper is represented<br />
in many public and private collections<br />
internationally including the Ullens and<br />
the Royal Collections.<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> Watch Tower’<br />
acrylic on canvas, 180 x 150 cm<br />
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Andy Harper (b. 1971)<br />
Andy Harper’s intricate oil paintings deal<br />
with the fruits of labour in the shadow of<br />
uncertainty. On one side they are concerned<br />
with the immediate process of painting, the<br />
mechanical, almost automated act of laying<br />
down mark after mark on a wet surface. On<br />
the other hand, they are subject to longterm<br />
strategy, each mark developed over<br />
time and embedded into a composition that<br />
provides an architectural structure for the<br />
work. While this framework may be logically<br />
ordered, the marks themselves are organic<br />
entities, forming a broad visual library that<br />
has taken on a life its own, growing through<br />
repetition and recombination in each new<br />
work. <strong>The</strong> paintings act like a Petri-dish for<br />
the culturing of this visual language, and a<br />
greenhouse for its cultivation. <strong>The</strong> forms may<br />
seem organic, but upon closer inspection<br />
they are not specific to anything the natural<br />
world has to offer. Rather they appear<br />
as a synthetic form of nature, generated<br />
from compulsive repetition and subjective<br />
reinterpretation, a world that has somehow<br />
evolved beyond the point of progeny to<br />
become its own independent alien entity.<br />
Andy Harper lives in St Just, the most<br />
westerly town in Cornwall and works from a<br />
studio at the renowned Porthmeor Studios<br />
in St Ives. He studied his BA in Fine<br />
Art: Painting & Printmaking at Brighton<br />
Polytechnic and then MA Fine Art: Painting<br />
at the Royal College of Art, London. In<br />
1996, with some peers from the RCA, Harper<br />
co-founded NotCut which ran a studio and<br />
photographic darkroom in London and<br />
curated ‘Lightness & Weight’ in Birmingham.<br />
During this time he also studied part time<br />
at Middlesex University for an MA in Visual<br />
Culture and had his first solo exhibition<br />
in London in 1998. After attending the<br />
Braziers International Artist Workshop in<br />
2000, Harper became a member of the<br />
organising committee until 2008. Harper<br />
has taught in many institutions nationally<br />
and internationally, and had teaching posts<br />
at Central St. Martins, <strong>The</strong> City Lit and<br />
is currently a Senior Lecturer on the<br />
MFA Fine Art programme at Goldsmiths,<br />
University of London. Harper has exhibited<br />
widely in Europe, North America and<br />
South Korea.<br />
‘Want Mistaken For Need’<br />
oil on linen, 30 x 25 cm<br />
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Shiri Mordechay (b. 1974)<br />
Shiri Mordechay’s extraordinary painted<br />
works have a cinematic quality, where<br />
expansive imagery seemingly passes<br />
through time and space, like fleeting scenes<br />
in a film or interconnected snippets of<br />
dream. Both 2D and 3D painted installation<br />
works are made piece by piece, where a<br />
narrative unfolds, like a trail of instinct.<br />
Imagery seems to arrive with fluidity,<br />
through the artist as conduit, moving<br />
within an unguarded realm, seemingly free<br />
of structured morality or logical confine,<br />
conjuring what Julia Kristeva calls an<br />
“oceanic feeling”. Mordechay’s form of<br />
ambiguous realism is revealed through an<br />
intuitive rendering of unmediated internal<br />
psychology or event, which through her<br />
translation offers up a wider metaphysical<br />
and perhaps spiritual context. She attains<br />
a preservation of the enigma of the<br />
unconscious, where constructed ego is<br />
eroded or absorbed into something more<br />
widely connected, not necessarily at one<br />
with beauty, yet seductive none the less,<br />
like a forbidden fruit promising to lure us<br />
towards darkness or light. As expressed by<br />
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mordechay paints an<br />
inner and outer world where nature is “red<br />
in tooth and claw”. Acclaimed American art<br />
critic Jerry Saltz wrote “Shiri Mordechay<br />
gives us a topsy-turvy world of mundane<br />
and mad images... It’s Charles Adams meets<br />
Edgar Allen Poe meets Animal Planet.<br />
Mordechay never allows us to look at any<br />
one thing; chaos and tumult reign.”<br />
Mordechay was born in Israel and raised<br />
in Nigeria. She received her BFA from<br />
the San Francisco Art Institute and an<br />
MFA from School of Visual Arts in New<br />
York, where she now lives and works.<br />
In 2013, he was named as one of “25<br />
Artists to Watch & Collect” by Artvoices<br />
Magazine. Solo exhibitions have occurred<br />
in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York<br />
and Italy.<br />
‘Untitled 1 & 2’<br />
watercolour on paper, 25 x 20 cm each<br />
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Barbara Neil (b. 1953)<br />
“I never paint with narrative in mind<br />
(although that may not be obvious).<br />
Developments in the painting occur along<br />
the way, through working, when it works,<br />
which it doesn’t always. Often I paint out<br />
and overpaint time and time again. I see<br />
the bottom of this painting as a defiance of<br />
death and when looked at from that position<br />
or perspective, I see the life - our human<br />
lives - taking place above the ground. <strong>The</strong>re<br />
is the overground and the underground<br />
struggle in this one. Well, you’ve probably<br />
guessed I dislike interpreting my work…<br />
I mean, if words were going to be enough<br />
why would I paint it at all? My work is an<br />
attempt to snag the worm in me (thank you<br />
Herman Hesse), to delight my eyes and<br />
befuddle my brain. Clarity is a fearsome<br />
thing, hard to find, but worth seeking I<br />
think.” Barbara Neil, 2021.<br />
Barbara Neill was born in Sydney, Australia<br />
in 1953 and has spent most of her adult life<br />
living and working in relative obscurity in<br />
Barcelona, Spain. She describes herself as<br />
an art school dropout, university dropout<br />
and self taught. Anima Mundi are delighted<br />
to present her work in this exhibition.<br />
‘Cold‘<br />
oil on canvas, 162 x 130 cm<br />
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Simon Hitchens (b. 1967)<br />
Simon Hitchens’ work explores the<br />
interconnectedness between the human<br />
and the non-human, as a means to<br />
learning about Mankind’s relationship with<br />
impermanence. <strong>The</strong> material backbone of<br />
his work is rock in its raw and natural<br />
state. This is not carved and polished<br />
but plucked from the rock face or quarry<br />
floor. He remains acutely aware of the<br />
historical significance that stone has as the<br />
prime material to make sculpture, and as<br />
a sculptor is challenged to make art that<br />
contributes to this debate. As a climber<br />
he maintains an intimate relationship with<br />
rock, and is acutely aware that geologically<br />
it is the very material that supports us upon<br />
the planet. In the age of the Anthropogenic<br />
it seems pertinent to question how we<br />
comprehend the geological and human<br />
worlds as united, interconnected even.<br />
Hitchens believes there is increasingly<br />
a disconnect between these two worlds.<br />
which is harmful not only to the planet but<br />
also our psyche. Consequently, rock is the<br />
conceptual focus of his work and typically<br />
the material backbone within it. His work<br />
questions differences between animate and<br />
inanimate, more specifically rock and flesh,<br />
mountain and body; exploring themes of<br />
transience and transcendence. He makes<br />
post-human hybrid forms that negotiate a<br />
numinous space somewhere between rock<br />
and flesh: a line of inquiry into the nature<br />
of being.<br />
Simon Hitchens graduated in Fine Art<br />
from the University of the West of England<br />
in 1990 and his work has been exhibited<br />
around the world since then. He frequently<br />
exhibits in solo and group exhibitions,<br />
undertaking private commissions and<br />
numerous largescale public commissions.<br />
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society<br />
of Sculptors in 1998, is an RWA Academician<br />
and is the fourth generation of artists in<br />
his family.<br />
‘More Than Human’<br />
rock, wax, resin, , 25 (H) x 34 (W) x 38 (D) cm<br />
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Gabriel Tendai Choto (b. 1995)<br />
Gabriel Tendai Choto’s artwork combines<br />
the twin disciplines of printmaking and<br />
painting. Through his singular technique<br />
Choto seeks new pathways into the painted<br />
image by taking cues from the surface quality<br />
produced by the printmaking process. His<br />
evolving, experimental practice involves<br />
layering painted areas of naturalism over<br />
the delicate compositional architecture<br />
of etching, resulting in paintings where<br />
physical presence and absence imply a<br />
metaphoric liminal state. Sensitive and<br />
intimate, these images include close family<br />
members, depicting quiet moments of<br />
contemplation or affectionate domestic<br />
scenes taken from old photographs,<br />
increasingly progressing in to self portraits<br />
where through constructed situations the<br />
artist examines his own identity. Choto’s<br />
intimate paintings draw on themes of<br />
home, pride, identity diaspora, change<br />
and personal as well as cultural fragility.<br />
Choto was born in 1995 in Harare, Zimbabwe.<br />
He was raised in Bradford, Yorkshire and<br />
currently lives and works in London. After<br />
completing his Diploma in Art and Design<br />
at Leeds Arts University in 2012, Choto<br />
gained a BAFA in Drawing from Camberwell<br />
College of Art (UAL), London, in 2014<br />
and more recently has completed an MFA<br />
at Central St Martins, London. Selected<br />
group exhibitions include FBA Futures,<br />
Mall Galleries, London, UK (2018); Flock,<br />
GX Gallery, London, UK (2017); Blxckout<br />
Revolution: <strong>The</strong> Exhibition, 198 Gallery,<br />
London, UK (2017); BAME, Hotel Elephant<br />
Gallery, London, UK (2016); and Long Live<br />
the New Flesh, Tower Gallery, London, UK<br />
(2015). In 2018, Choto was selected for the<br />
Clyde & Co Art Award. Choto’s debut solo<br />
exhibition at Anima Mundi featured in 2021<br />
and most recently he has been personally<br />
invited by Yinka Shonibare to submit for<br />
the 2021 RA Summer Exhibition.<br />
‘Desolate’<br />
oil on paper, 73 x 48 cm<br />
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Kate Clark (b. 1972)<br />
Kate Clark’s sculptures invite the viewer to<br />
experience an instinctive and primal reaction,<br />
that encourages further examination of our<br />
own humanity. Stitched over a hand-sculpted<br />
human face, the material quality of her ethically<br />
sourced animal hide brings an authenticity to<br />
the final sculpture, through what the artist<br />
describes as a unique energy and presence.<br />
We identify with animals through both our<br />
connection with and separation from them.<br />
Recognising these contradictions, Clark’s<br />
fusion of human and animal suggests that our<br />
human condition is fully realised only when<br />
we acknowledge and reconcile our current<br />
state and our natural instincts, acknowledging<br />
the animalistic inheritance within the human<br />
condition. She achieves this through emphasis<br />
on the characteristics that differentiate us<br />
from the rest of the animal kingdom, and,<br />
importantly, the ones that unite us.<br />
Kate Clark lives and works in Brooklyn, New<br />
York. She attended Cornell University for her<br />
BFA and Cranbrook Academy of Art for her<br />
MFA and has been awarded fellowships from the<br />
Jentel Artists Residency in Wyoming, <strong>The</strong> Fine<br />
Arts Work Center Residency in Provincetown,<br />
MA, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio<br />
Program in New York. Clark was nominated<br />
for a USA Fellowship, a Louis Comfort Tiffany<br />
Award and an American Academy of Arts<br />
and Letters award. She was awarded a grant<br />
from <strong>The</strong> Virginia Groot Foundation in 2013<br />
and a New York Foundation For the Arts<br />
(NYFA) Fellowship Award in 2014. Clark has<br />
exhibited in solo museum exhibitions at the<br />
Mobile Museum of Art, <strong>The</strong> Newcomb Art<br />
Museum and the Hilliard Museum and in group<br />
museum exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of<br />
Contemporary Art, <strong>The</strong> Islip Art Museum, and<br />
<strong>The</strong> Bellevue Arts Museum, MOFA: Florida<br />
State University, Cranbrook Art Museum, Frist<br />
Center for the Visual Arts, <strong>The</strong> Winnepeg Art<br />
Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Musée de<br />
la Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, <strong>The</strong> Art Gallery at<br />
Cleveland State University, the Hudson Valley<br />
Center for Contemporary Art, the Nevada<br />
Museum of Art, the David Winton Bell Gallery<br />
at Brown University, the Bemis Center for<br />
Contemporary Arts, the Biggs Museum of<br />
American Art, the Royal Melbourne Institute<br />
of Technology, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.<br />
Her work is collected internationally and is in<br />
public collections such as the JP Morgan Chase<br />
Art Collection, the 21c Collection, the David<br />
Roberts Art Foundation and the C-Collection<br />
in Switzerland. Clark’s sculptures have been<br />
featured in the Wall Street Journal, New<br />
York Times, New York Magazine, Art21:Blog,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Village Voice, PAPERmag, <strong>The</strong> Atlantic,<br />
Hyperallergic, NYArts, Huffington Post, Hi<br />
Fructose, the BBC World News Brazil, Hey!<br />
Magazine, Time Out, ID Paris, Cool Hunting,<br />
Wallpaper, Creators Project/VICE, Sculpture<br />
Review and many other publications.<br />
In addition she was filmed by National<br />
Geographic in her studio over a 2 month<br />
period for a short documentary about her work.<br />
‘Twins’<br />
pronghorn & blesbok antelope, foam, clay, thread, pins, rubber eyes,<br />
91 (H) x 66 (W) x 30 (D) cm<br />
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John Robinson (b. 1981)<br />
John Robinson’s technical prowess could be<br />
seen to be shared with the great pantheon<br />
of masters of the 17th and 18th centuries<br />
including artists such as Diego Velazquez<br />
and Francisco Goya with a developing<br />
unguarded focus on self portraiture adopted<br />
by the likes of Rembrandt Van Rijn or more<br />
recently Frida Kahlo. However Robinson’s<br />
figurative works offer a contemporary<br />
subversion of the rich tradition of self<br />
portraiture. Somber protagonists dominate<br />
the canvas, usually presented in theatrical<br />
situations which barely mask a more<br />
prosaic ‘kitchen sink’ vulnerability. <strong>The</strong>y<br />
are often simultaneously absurdly comic<br />
and psychologically revealing. Robinson’s<br />
process often involves private performance,<br />
where his actions are then exquisitely<br />
rendered, in oil on canvas. For Robinson<br />
these paintings embrace personal concern,<br />
disclosure and catharsis, for the voyeur<br />
the experience appears both elaborately<br />
grandiose and awkwardly revealing.<br />
Robinson was born in Worcester, UK where<br />
he still resides. He studied Fine Art at<br />
Falmouth College of Arts, spending most<br />
of the time whilst there skipping tutorials<br />
to travel to Plymouth to be taught by the<br />
notorious and idiosyncratic painter Robert<br />
Lenkiewicz. Robinson was awarded the<br />
Richard Ford Scholarship by the Royal<br />
Academy of Arts and spent a summer as<br />
artist in residence at the Prado Museum<br />
Madrid absorbing the works of Velazquez<br />
and Goya. He stayed in Madrid for a<br />
further decade broken by a year at Central<br />
Saint Martins on a Masters degree in fine<br />
art. He later developed his duel use of<br />
‘the painting’ as revelation and disguise;<br />
‘self portrait as (other…)’. Robinson has<br />
exhibited internationally. He has won<br />
the Peter Spicer Award for Excellence<br />
in Creative Arts (First Place), Richard<br />
Ford Award for Painting, Royal Academy,<br />
London (First Place), South Square Trust<br />
Scholarship for MA study at Byam Shaw<br />
school of Art, Central Saint Martins,<br />
London, Alfa Romeo Award Art (‘Best of<br />
show nominee’) Madrid, Spain, Premio<br />
de Pintura Focus-Abengoa, Seville, Spain<br />
(Winner) and the Hauser and Wirth Prize,<br />
Hauser and Wirth Somerset UK, (First<br />
Prize). Works are held in notable collections<br />
including University of the Arts London<br />
permanent collection, London, UK, Nicolas<br />
& Maxinne Leslau collection, London,<br />
UK, Focus-Abengoa Foundation, Seville,<br />
Spain, Coldwell Banker, Madrid, Spain,<br />
Falmouth College of Arts Library, Falmouth<br />
UK, Museo del Ferrocarril, Madrid, Spain,<br />
Stedlijk Museum Amsterdam Netherlands,<br />
Wellcome Collection London UK, British<br />
Council Collection UK.<br />
‘I’m Doing Much Better Now’<br />
oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm<br />
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Henry Hussey (b. 1990)<br />
Henry Hussey’s artworks are often<br />
emotionally and physically raw, yet<br />
contrastingly beautiful and intricate, created<br />
with force through often paradoxically<br />
laboured mediums, including textile,<br />
glass, ceramic, paint and film. Whether<br />
through an expanding vocabulary of quasimythological<br />
symbols, or in embellished<br />
lines of text extracted from performative<br />
situations, Hussey explores personal and<br />
national identity in response to aggravating<br />
relationships and events. Recent<br />
experimentations reveal a deep concern<br />
with control and chaos and the sweet spot<br />
in between these two distinctive states.<br />
Henry Hussey is a British artist born in<br />
London in 1990 where he still resides.<br />
Hussey studied Textiles at Chelsea College<br />
of Art before completing an MA in Textiles<br />
at the Royal College of Art. His work is<br />
widely respected and has been exhibited<br />
in notable exhibitions including <strong>The</strong><br />
Textiel Biennale 2017 at Museum Rijswijk<br />
in the Hague, a solo presentation at Art<br />
Central in Hong Kong, the Bloomberg New<br />
Contemporaries in 2014 at the Institute of<br />
Contemporary Art in London, the Royal<br />
Academy London and Volta New York and<br />
the Young Talent Contemporary Prize at<br />
the Ingram Collection in 2016. Hussey has<br />
participated in residencies at La Vallonea,<br />
Tuscany, Italy in 2018 and participated<br />
in a residency at Palazzo Monti, Milan<br />
in 2020. His work is held in collections<br />
worldwide including Simmons & Simmons,<br />
Hogan Lovells, <strong>The</strong> Groucho Club and<br />
Soho House.<br />
‘Vessel (Anima Animus)’<br />
terracotta & endgobe, 22 (H) x 20 (W) x 11 (D) cm<br />
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Phoebe Cummings (b. 1981)<br />
Phoebe Cummings’ works predominantly<br />
using unfired clay to make poetic and<br />
performative sculptures and installations<br />
that emphasise materiality, fragility, time,<br />
creation, loss and decay. Her impressive<br />
interventions are often constructed directly<br />
on site, allowing an instinctive development<br />
of tensions between object and location.<br />
Cummings questions what we will carry<br />
forward into the future by producing<br />
intricate, hand made and exquisitely<br />
delicate sculptures based on ancient plants<br />
and primitive ritual, imbued with a sense<br />
of magic and mysticism. Drawing together<br />
elements of English Paganism as well as<br />
the aesthetic excess of Baroque and Rococo<br />
design, the resultant objects could be<br />
considered as dystopian ornaments of a<br />
future anthropology or fragile relics of an<br />
almost forgotten past.<br />
Cummings is a British artist born in<br />
Walsall, England and currently resides<br />
in Stafford. Cummings studied ceramics<br />
at Brighton University in 2002 before<br />
completing an MA in ceramics and glass<br />
at the Royal College of Art in 2005.<br />
She has undertaken a number of<br />
international artist residencies including a<br />
six month residency at the Victoria & Albert<br />
Museum in 2010. In 2017 she won first place<br />
at the inaugural Woman’s Hour Craft Prize<br />
with work exhibited at the V&A Museum,<br />
before touring to venues around the UK.<br />
Cummings was selected as the winner of<br />
the British Ceramics Biennial Award in<br />
2011 and awarded a ceramics fellowship at<br />
London’s Camden Arts Centre (2012–13).<br />
‘Supernatural’ was her first solo exhibition<br />
at Anima Mundi. In addition, Cummings’<br />
work has been featured in numerous group<br />
exhibitions, including ‘60|40 Starting<br />
Point Series’ at Siobhan Davies Studios,<br />
London, ‘Formed Thoughts’ at Jerwood<br />
Space, London; and ‘Swept Away: Dust,<br />
Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and<br />
Design’ at the Museum of Arts and Design,<br />
New York. In 2013, she had a solo show<br />
at the University of Hawaii Art Gallery in<br />
Honolulu and <strong>The</strong> Newlyn Art Gallery.<br />
‘Triumph of the Immaterial’<br />
single channel video<br />
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Roy Eastland (b. 1964)<br />
“‘Displaced Portrait (Woman from Brünn,<br />
1942)’ is one of an ongoing series of<br />
silverpoint drawings based on portrait<br />
photographs taken mostly in the 1930s and<br />
1940s, which have found their way into<br />
my hands via a second-hand shop in my<br />
home town of Margate. My drawings are<br />
a kind of meditation on these displaced<br />
traces of lived moments. This particular<br />
drawing is of a woman who, judging from<br />
the hand-writing on the back of the source<br />
photograph, was a German-speaker living<br />
in Brünn (now Brno) in 1942 in what is<br />
now the Czech Republic. At the end of the<br />
war the ethnically German population was<br />
expelled. <strong>The</strong> piece has been repeatedly<br />
drawn onto with points of silver wire,<br />
drawn into with needles, and scratchedaway<br />
with scalpel blades and sandpaper.<br />
<strong>The</strong> image goes through a continual process<br />
of repeated loss and re-finding. With each<br />
re-working, certain details change; but<br />
always the repeated point of reference is<br />
the original photographic image. Whatever<br />
it is that I’m trying to see seems always to<br />
be elusive. Each re-working points to the<br />
same thing but each re-working is also a<br />
different drawing adding something new.<br />
I draw in the hope of catching sight of<br />
something which I could not have foreseen<br />
but which feels somehow true. <strong>The</strong>se<br />
drawings are worked on over the course of<br />
many months and often years. Some never<br />
reach an end-point. Hand-made drawings<br />
remind us that there is always another way<br />
of seeing and that there is always another<br />
way to mark those moments of recognition.<br />
I wonder who it is that I have drawn here.” -<br />
Roy Eastland 2021<br />
Roy Eastland lives and works in Thanet,<br />
Kent. He graduated from Edinburgh College<br />
of Art in 1996. Works have been exhibited<br />
in numerous solo and group exhibition<br />
including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing<br />
Prize, <strong>The</strong> Jerwood Drawing Prize (on<br />
three occasions), <strong>The</strong> ING Discerning Eye<br />
Drawing Bursary, <strong>The</strong> Zoo Art Fair, Miami<br />
Art Fair, <strong>The</strong> London Art Fair, <strong>The</strong> BP<br />
Portrait Award, <strong>The</strong> British Art Fair, <strong>The</strong><br />
Hunting Art Prizes, Margate Rocks, the<br />
Turner Contemporary Open, among others.<br />
‘Displaced Portrait (Woman from Brünn, 1942)’<br />
silverpoint drawing on gesso on board, 21 x 15 cm<br />
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Youki Hirakawa (b. 1983)<br />
‘Untitled (Teardrops)’ is a video by Youki<br />
Hirakawa documenting a fallen tear drop<br />
on an iPhone. As time passes it shows<br />
the different phases of shape of tear as it<br />
dries. Through his still and installationbased<br />
video artwork, Hirakawa explores<br />
a mysterious and immeasurable sense of<br />
time, loss and longing. His monochromatic<br />
imagery is imbued with a melancholic<br />
quality, reconnecting a fragile past with<br />
a vivid present casting questions over<br />
the future. He creates a form of videopoetry<br />
which summons the voice of the<br />
lost. Hirakawa constructs his artworks as<br />
if to reveal hidden memories or narratives<br />
contained within the subject, resuscitating<br />
sensibilities that may have since been<br />
obscured, primarily through progressive<br />
human activity.<br />
Hirakawa is a Japanese contemporary artist<br />
born in Nagoya, Japan in 1983. He currently<br />
lives and works in Toyota, Japan, following<br />
a long residency in Berlin, Germany.<br />
He was invited to show at the ‘48th<br />
International Film Festival Rotterdam’ and<br />
‘65th International Short Film Festival<br />
Oberhausen’ in 2019 and has held solo<br />
exhibitions internationally, including Ando<br />
Gallery, Tokyo, Double Square Gallery,<br />
Taipei, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin,<br />
Kunstkraftwerk, Leipzig, Minokamo City<br />
Museum, Japan. Hirakawa has also been<br />
invited to exhibit in international art festivals<br />
including Digital Art Festival Taipei 2017,<br />
International Contemporary Art Festival<br />
Kaunas in 2016, Sapporo International Art<br />
Festival 2014 and Aichi Triennale 2013. His<br />
inaugural solo exhibition ‘Secret Fire’ at<br />
Anima Mundi was held in 2016 and his follow<br />
up ‘A River Under Water’ in 2018. In 2017 he<br />
was finalist of Sovereign Asian Art Prize.<br />
Works are held in numerous public and<br />
private collections.<br />
‘Untitled (Tears)’<br />
single channel video (12 min, 30 sec / 4K / silent)<br />
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Sax Impey (b. 1969)<br />
Sax Impey’s paintings and drawings<br />
are often large scale, immersive and<br />
elemental, incorporating intense detail and<br />
dexterity and an expressive, behavioural<br />
use of medium. Since 2005, Impey has<br />
produced works derived predominantly<br />
from experiences at sea. A qualified RYA<br />
Yachtmaster he has sailed many thousands<br />
of nautical miles around the world. <strong>The</strong>se<br />
extensive trips have had a profound impact<br />
and subsequent development as an artist.<br />
Reconnecting with nature through this<br />
powerful element has the almost inescapable<br />
effect of calling to question some of life’s<br />
existential questions. This epiphanic<br />
moment of realisation, of revelation, is<br />
at the core of Impey’s oeuvre. Reflecting<br />
on and capturing personal moments and<br />
making them universal, Impey’s work<br />
reaffirms the importance of introspection<br />
and confrontation, found specifically when<br />
surrounded by the natural world; “A mind<br />
can breathe, and observe, and reflect, away<br />
from the shrill desperation of a culture<br />
that, having forgotten that it is better to<br />
say nothing than something about nothing,<br />
invents ever new ways to fill every single<br />
space with less and less”.<br />
Impey is a British artist born in Penzance,<br />
Cornwall. He currently works from one<br />
of the prestigious Porthmeor Studios in<br />
St. Ives. From 2005, he has collaborated<br />
with the cross-cultural, environmental<br />
art group Red Earth in the creation of<br />
site-specific installations including a multi<br />
media performance at Trafalgar Square,<br />
London and Birling Gap in Sussex. In 2007<br />
Impey’s work was selected for the ‘Art Now<br />
Cornwall’ exhibition at Tate St Ives where<br />
he was placed on the cover of the associated<br />
publication. <strong>The</strong> same year he was heralded<br />
in <strong>The</strong> Times as one of the ‘New Faces of<br />
Cornish Art’. In 2010 he was featured in<br />
Owen Sheers’s BBC4 Documentary ‘Art<br />
of the Sea (In Pictures)’ alongside Anish<br />
Kapoor, J. M. W. Turner, Martin Parr and<br />
Maggi Hambling among others. His work was<br />
selected as a finalist the 2013 Threadneedle<br />
Prize and the year before was elected an<br />
Academician at the Royal West of England<br />
Academy. His paintings are in multiple<br />
collections including <strong>The</strong> Arts Council,<br />
Warwick University, the Connaught Hotel<br />
and the collections of Roman Abramovich<br />
and Lady Victoria Getty alongside other<br />
private collections worldwide.<br />
‘Squall Study 1’<br />
mixed media on paper, 30 x 60 cm<br />
73
‘Squall Study 1’<br />
mixed media on paper, 30 x 60 cm<br />
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Andrew Hardwick (b. 1961)<br />
Andrew Hardwick’s often large scale,<br />
sedimentary paintings display his captivation<br />
with ever decreasing wilderness zones; both<br />
natural and man-made. Playing with and<br />
subverting traditional notions of romantic<br />
landscape painting and the sublime. <strong>The</strong><br />
paintings often depict edge-land zones<br />
around big industrial conurbations or ports,<br />
such as large-scale car storage compounds,<br />
redundant factories and polluted waste<br />
lands. Other works draw inspiration from<br />
the more typically idyllic locations such as<br />
Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor. However, these<br />
landscapes are also filled with reminders<br />
of human interference. Roads criss-cross<br />
the moor in deeply scratched lines, a<br />
narrow road is etched into an otherwise<br />
massive moorland triptych, likewise a real<br />
car radiator sits in the surface of another<br />
painting as if decaying and buried by<br />
the earth. His medium of working is also<br />
atypical, paintings are heavily layered with<br />
different types of paint (often sourced<br />
from recycling centres), plaster, plastics,<br />
soils, pigments, roofing felt, hay and<br />
other unconventional materials. To this<br />
rich surface relevant artefacts are often<br />
added, creating reminders, triggering<br />
memories or reflecting fears intrinsic to<br />
a particular landscape. <strong>The</strong> concept of<br />
layering in the landscape arrived partly<br />
a result of the artist’s childhood, during<br />
which his family’s farm was first sliced<br />
in half by the M5 motorway and then<br />
again by the Royal Portbury Dock. <strong>The</strong><br />
land once filled with sheep has become a<br />
pure edge-land wilderness with detritus<br />
of continuous development now occupying<br />
and obliterating the land. Hardwick’s<br />
entire oeuvre makes reference to concepts<br />
of change, memory, history, emotion and<br />
transience. Ever redolent is the notion that<br />
we are but another layer in time.<br />
Andrew Hardwick is a British artist born<br />
in Bristol, England in 1961 where he still<br />
resides. He achieved an MA in Fine Art at<br />
the University of Wales. He is an elected<br />
Academician at the Royal West of England<br />
Academy. He has featured in four solo<br />
exhibitions at Anima Mundi. Works have<br />
been exhibited extensively including<br />
numerous public shows and have been<br />
collected worldwide.<br />
‘Estuary, Dark Sea and Iceberg’<br />
mixed media on panel, 90 x 155 cm<br />
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Peter Randall-Page (b .1954)<br />
During the past 25 years Peter Randall-<br />
Page has gained an international reputation<br />
through his monumental sculpture, drawings<br />
and prints which deal with the fundamental<br />
nature of existence. His practice remains<br />
informed and inspired by the study of natural<br />
phenomena and its subjective impact on<br />
our emotions. In recent years his work has<br />
become increasingly concerned with the<br />
underlying principles determining growth and<br />
the forms it produces. In his words “geometry<br />
is the theme on which nature plays her<br />
infinite variations, fundamental mathematical<br />
principle become a kind of pattern book from<br />
which nature constructs the most complex<br />
and sophisticated structures.<br />
Peter Randall-Page is a British artist born<br />
in Essex, England in 1954. He currently lives<br />
and works in Devon. Randall-Page studied<br />
sculpture at Bath Academy of Art from 1973-<br />
1977. In 1999, he was awarded an Honorary<br />
Doctorate of Arts from the University of<br />
Plymouth, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters<br />
from York St John University in 2009 and an<br />
Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Exeter<br />
University in 2010; from 2002 to 2005 he was<br />
an Associate Research Fellow at Dartington<br />
College of Arts. In 2015 he was made a Royal<br />
Academician. Recent commissions include<br />
‘Give and Take’ in Newcastle which won the<br />
2006 Marsh Award for Public Sculpture,<br />
‘Mind’s Eye’ a large ceramic wall mounted<br />
piece for the Department of Psychology at<br />
Cardiff University (2006) and a commemorative<br />
sculpture for a Mohegan Chief at Southwark<br />
Cathedral (2006). Recent projects include<br />
‘Green Fuse’ for the Jerwood Sculpture Park,<br />
Ragley Hall and a major one person exhibition<br />
in and around the Underground Gallery at the<br />
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, June 2009 - April<br />
2010. In 2015 he unveiled ‘<strong>The</strong> One and <strong>The</strong><br />
Many’ at Fitzroy place London, An 25 tonne<br />
boulder inscribes with origin stories from<br />
around the world in native dialect. Over the<br />
years he has undertaken numerous large scale<br />
commissions and exhibited widely across<br />
the globe. His work is held in numerous<br />
public and private collections throughout<br />
the world including Japan, South Korea,<br />
Australia, USA, Turkey, Eire, Germany and<br />
the Netherlands. A selection of his public<br />
sculptures can be found in many urban and<br />
rural locations throughout the UK including<br />
London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol,<br />
Oxford and Cambridge and his work is in<br />
the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery<br />
and the British Museum amongst others. As a<br />
member of the design team for the Education<br />
Resource Centre (<strong>The</strong> Core) at the Eden<br />
Project in Cornwall, Peter influenced the<br />
overall design of the building incorporating<br />
an enormous granite sculpture, ‘Seed’, at<br />
its heart.<br />
‘Stone Maquette’<br />
carved pebble, 15.5 (H) x 41 (W) x 19 (D) cm<br />
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Paul Benney (b. 1959)<br />
<strong>The</strong> semiotics of public and religious signage :<br />
“My specific interest in religious painting<br />
from the renaissance up until the withering<br />
of church patronage is concomitant with my<br />
interest in the symbolism of our age. <strong>The</strong><br />
dominant symbology of this past was firmly<br />
set within the Church’s iconography. <strong>The</strong><br />
stories told to us from that time through their<br />
imagery were presented with an aim to guide<br />
us towards a universally desired and morally<br />
respectable life. <strong>The</strong> dominant symbology<br />
of our age (if you consider the acreage of<br />
signage in our modern landscape) is quite<br />
literally overwhelming, but mostly overlooked<br />
in its ubiquity. With the decline in acceptance<br />
of convincing moral and ethical guidance<br />
from religious bodies we have allowed other<br />
authorities to fill the vacuum. <strong>The</strong> current<br />
proliferation of symbolic signage would not, I<br />
suggest, be understood by an ancestor as the<br />
iconography of socially benign guidance but<br />
evidence of a universal adherence to a cult<br />
centred on the car, transport and health and<br />
safety in the urban environment that has been<br />
foisted upon us by a omnipotent force that<br />
sees itself as responsible for our apparent well<br />
being, in much the same way that the clergy felt<br />
responsible for us in the days of the church’s<br />
hegemony. I aim to show the underlying<br />
connections and intentions between these<br />
different forms of iconography and hope to<br />
open up some discussion about how we allow<br />
ourselves to be manipulated and ‘guided’<br />
by the powers that be.” - Paul Benney, 2021<br />
Paul Benney was born in London and<br />
currently lives and works in Suffolk. He rose<br />
to international prominence as a member of<br />
the Soho and East Village Neo-Expressionist<br />
group, whilst living and working in New<br />
York City in the 1980s where he worked and<br />
exhibited alongside peers Marylyn Minter,<br />
Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarovicz<br />
among the many other others who made<br />
up the exploding NY art scene. Despite<br />
living and working in this extraordinary<br />
creative environment Benney’s painting<br />
maintained a uniquely English sensibility.<br />
Collections including the Metropolitan<br />
Museum of Art in New York, <strong>The</strong> Brooklyn<br />
Museum, <strong>The</strong> National Gallery of Australia<br />
and <strong>The</strong> National Portrait Gallery in London,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Royal Collection and <strong>The</strong> Eli Broad<br />
Foundation own works. He has exhibited in<br />
eight BP Portrait Award Exhibitions and twice<br />
won the BP Visitors’ Choice Award. Benney’s<br />
portrait subjects have included HM Queen<br />
Elizabeth II, Sir Mick Jagger, John Paul Getty<br />
III, 7th Marquess of Bath, <strong>The</strong> State Portrait<br />
for Israel, Lord Rothschild, as well as Ben<br />
Barnes for the portrait in the feature film ‘A<br />
Portrait of Dorian Grey’. Benney was invited to<br />
be resident artist at Somerset House in 2010.<br />
During his five year residency he held the<br />
exhibition ‘Night Paintings’ in 2012 and drew<br />
over 15,000 visitors. In 2017 his epic painting<br />
and holosonic sound installation ‘Speaking<br />
in Tongues’ was a prominent feature of the<br />
Venice Biennale.<br />
‘Pieta’<br />
oil on canvas, 220 x 250 cm<br />
81
Jonathan Michael Ray (b. 1984)<br />
Jonathan Michael Ray’s ‘mono no aware’<br />
artworks examine the multilayered<br />
histories, fictions and beliefs assigned<br />
to artefacts, materials and the places he<br />
encounters. A practice comprising of<br />
stained glass, photography, sculpture,<br />
print, drawing, video and installation,<br />
much of his work is deeply connected to<br />
his surroundings. He regularly uses found<br />
objects and images imbued with their<br />
own histories, as well as material direct<br />
from the landscape, appropriating their<br />
symbolism while creating a new context<br />
and meaning. By layering and combining<br />
material, he is interested in looking beyond<br />
the surface of a purely physical existence<br />
and breaking down the institutions by<br />
which we are taught to see and experience<br />
the world. His work alludes to the sublime<br />
power that inanimate material and objects<br />
can contain when we give them space, time<br />
and authority to do so.<br />
Jonathan Michael Ray was born in High<br />
Wycombe, UK and has been based in<br />
West Cornwall since 2018. He studied at<br />
Nottingham Trent in 2007 and at Slade<br />
School of Fine Art in 2016. Earlier this year<br />
Ray was selected to take part in Masterclass<br />
at Zabludowicz Collection, London, he<br />
and Verity Birt organised “Gathering” a<br />
group exhibition at Grays Wharf, Penryn,<br />
and has been shortlisted for the National<br />
Sculpture Prize which is currently on show<br />
at Broomhill Estate in Devon. His work will<br />
be subject of a two person presentation<br />
with Willeminha Barnes Graham at Tate St<br />
Ives in 2022.<br />
‘Holy Reunion’<br />
reclaimed antique stained glass, lead, oak and steel, 116 x 71 cm<br />
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Simon Averill (b. 1961)<br />
Albert Einstein’s ‘spooky action at a<br />
distance’ theory referred to the subject of<br />
‘quantum entanglement’. This principle<br />
has inspired this ongoing series of paired<br />
paintings by Simon Averill. Quantum<br />
entanglement is a physical phenomenon<br />
which occurs when pairs or groups of<br />
particles are generated, interact, or share<br />
spatial proximity in ways such that the<br />
quantum state of each particle cannot be<br />
described independently of the state of<br />
the other(s), even when the particles are<br />
separated by a large distance—instead, a<br />
quantum state must be described for the<br />
system as a whole. Physicist and feminist<br />
theorist Karen Barad coined the term<br />
‘intra-action’ to describe the concept of<br />
‘entanglement’, (not only of fundamental<br />
particles but of all material, matter, of nature<br />
and of meaning). <strong>The</strong>re is a distinction to be<br />
made between intra-action and interaction;<br />
when bodies interact they retain a degree<br />
of independence, each entity existed before<br />
the encounter. When intra-action occurs<br />
individuals materialise and agency emerges<br />
from within the relationship not outside of<br />
it. <strong>The</strong>se works further enhance Averill’s<br />
reputation for attempting to record elusive,<br />
transitory yet fundamental phenomena.<br />
Produced through a multi layered, process<br />
of glazing where methodical and repetitive<br />
series’ of motifs, are used to describe<br />
intangible potentials.<br />
Simon Averill is a British artist born in<br />
Brighton, England in 1961. He currently<br />
lives and works near Marazion in West<br />
Cornwall. Averill studied Fine Art<br />
at Brighton Polytechnic and graduated<br />
with Honours. In 1986 he established a<br />
Printmaking Workshop near Penzance,<br />
Cornwall, which he ran until 1990. He<br />
has been a member of the Newlyn Society<br />
of Artists since the late 1980s. Averill<br />
has exhibited widely with exhibitions in<br />
the UK, Europe and USA including the<br />
Royal Academy of Arts Summer Show,<br />
<strong>The</strong> Discerning Eye exhibition at the Mall<br />
Galleries, Royal West of England Academy<br />
in Bristol, Sherborne House, Plymouth<br />
Museum, Plymouth Arts Centre, Truro<br />
Museum, Falmouth Art Gallery, Newlyn Art<br />
Gallery and the Festival Hall in Chicago,<br />
USA. He has had 12 exhibitions and<br />
won the Wells Art Contempory painting<br />
prize in 2020.<br />
‘Entanglements’<br />
acrylic on panel, 40 x 80 cm<br />
85
Luke Hannam (b. 1966)<br />
Luke Hannam describes his work as the<br />
result of an ‘ordered chaos’ where poetic<br />
paintings are made ‘in the eye of the storm’,<br />
where creativity spins wildly, through bursts<br />
of impulse around a silent meditative deep<br />
well of meaning. Ideas emerge out of an<br />
energetic dedication to drawing and a<br />
relentless desire to explore images and<br />
motifs. His work is instantly recognisable<br />
through his strong punch of colour and<br />
definite use of line which weaves its way<br />
sensuously across the surface, denoting both<br />
the delicacy and strength of the form and<br />
spirit of the subject. Hannam’s paintings<br />
expressively offer a singular view on how<br />
what he sees, how he thinks and pivotally<br />
how he feels about the human condition and<br />
what lies beyond our materiality. His work<br />
could be seen to continue the Romantic<br />
tradition, embracing reality and mysticism<br />
with the wonder of experience.<br />
Luke Hannam was born in 1966 and currently<br />
lives in East Sussex, UK. He studied Fine<br />
Art in the 1980s and whilst others of his<br />
generation faithfully chanted the conceptual<br />
mantra of the time, Hannam focussed on<br />
perfecting his expressive drawing skills<br />
seeking inspiration from the earlier masters.<br />
Works have been exhibited and collected<br />
internationally, including the collections<br />
of Stefan Simchowitz and David Kowitz.<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> End’<br />
acrylic on unprimed canvas, 330 x 230 cm<br />
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“Unfortunately I am afraid, as always, of going on.<br />
For to go on means going from here, means finding me,<br />
losing me, vanishing and beginning again, a stranger<br />
first, then little by little the same as always, in another<br />
place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I<br />
shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving,<br />
thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite<br />
of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just<br />
enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always,<br />
the same which seems made for me and does not want<br />
me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your<br />
choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never<br />
know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant<br />
skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for<br />
tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head,<br />
my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old<br />
stories, my old story, as if it were the first time.”<br />
Samuel Beckett,‘<strong>The</strong> Unnamable’, 1953<br />
89
Published by Anima Mundi to coincide with ‘<strong>Thresholds</strong> (<strong>The</strong> <strong>Unnamed</strong>)’<br />
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