Flock Together

It’s the last day of our show at Brixton Village Gallery today so we hope you can make it along. We are open 11-5 and several of the 11 artists showing will be here today, including Andrew Cooper who is bringing Ron and Stewart to their new home at 38 Second Avenue at 3pm today for a  special one-off performance http://bit.ly/9j7FSs

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Flock Together is a group show by artists renting studios from the Artist Studios Company in Brixton, along with a few invited guest artists. The show is now on at the Brixton Village Gallery until Saturday 27th March 2010 and we are open Thursdays Fridays and Saturdays 11am-5pm.

Flock Together at the Brixton Village Gallery

Evening shadow as we lock up the gallery

The show has an avian theme, with works in sculpture, photography, painting, textiles, and drawing.

Artists showing work are Christopher “Kit” Boyd, Amanda Bracken, Andrew Cooper, Fabia Claris, Lesley Osbiston, Debbie Perks, Eva Rudlinger, Guy Shoham, Juliet Walker, Andrea Carr and Angelica Fernando.

 

Amanda Bracken Shuttlecock

Amanda Bracken: Originating from the auditory sense, Words were selected from listening to sounds in my locality as well as the repetitive statements from the radio, as subject for drawing. The three chosen for ‘Flock’ are bird related. Through the drawing process and the study of, ‘how to do Handwriting for school children’-I became interested in the tangibility, possible weight and value of each word.
Previous projects have included the construction of fragile structures from found objects such as china Tea cups, which then became the subject of subtle illusionistic drawings and photography.
Unifying themes include lightness & weight, movement & stillness & colour (although absent here).
Educated at Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths College, Amanda Bracken lives and works in London.
Prices start at £90 framed

 

Guy Shoham Two Birds

Damaged goods. The shimmer of once precious, now discarded artifacts radiates with a kitsch that entices as much as it may repel. Guy Shoham’s paintings are confusingly almost three-dimensional, just like the porcelain figurines that serve as his inspiration.

Reminiscent of works from the early 20th century, Shoham blends a decorative design with a glistening surface, both of which are alluring to the viewers’ eyes. Yet Shoham’s oeuvre remains true to principles of composition. Several of Shoham’s scenes are set up as if in a shoebox diorama; invoking the influence of Joseph Cornell’s assemblages of found objects. He stages his compositions theatrically and preserves a certain element of melodrama in the mundane. What evolves is something that is even more incongruous once it is translated to the canvas; Shoham elevates pretentious cast-offs to a bonafide art form.

Shoham’s take on the still-life is a contemporary expression of the age-old tradition of copying statues, a technique which dates back to the ancients. He breathes life to the inanimate, but his universe is filled with detachment and even tribulation. The silence in his compositions, while palpable, is also shrieking with ambiguity. His inorganic subjects are anything but still. They literally burst through the surface, and in doing so, enter our world. They peep out, mocking our disjointedness. The damage is conspicuous and analogous to all the mutilation in our world. Shoham makes a violent yet fanciful statement about our incoherent existence, about our own fragile nature as damaged goods. – Audrey Levy

 

Lesley Osbiston Pelicans

Lesley Osbiston is a textile artist whose work encompasses both design & fine art outcomes. Since graduating from the RCA in 1994 she has created hand-felted fashion accessories for the Japanese market, as well as working within diverse communities and schools to make collaborative pieces including large-scale drawings, felted tents and decorative wall-hangings for public display.

Recent work has focused upon line drawing – seeking to capture and record fleeting moments (people talking, plants blowing in the wind…) in a manner that questions the distinction between abstract and recognisable imagery. Through this form of mark-making Lesley is striving to highlight the beauty inherent in everyday occurrences that we often don’t have time to notice.

For this exhibition Lesley has chosen to illustrate birds in the zoo: distinctive, extrovert & cartoon-like, and has sought to capture almost stereotypical representations of these creatures that at the same time can be viewed as abstract marks. Stitch and fabric have been used to further enhance these qualities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Angelica Fernando - Tsuru

Angelica Fernando’s Tsuru installation comes to us in condensed form from a forest in Kent. Get your binoculars out for a spot of ornithological video and origami watching in Brixton Village.

 

Fabia Claris Cokatoo

Fabia Claris – I trained at Central School of Art and Design, Wimbledon School of Art, the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and the Prince’s School of Drawing. I am primarily a sculptor but my practice also involves drawing.

My work is essentially figurative, although there is an underlying conceptual dimension to it. I am particularly interested in structure rather than surface appearance as a fundamental means of conveying meaning and the materials I use to build up my pieces are therefore very important

The Cockatoo is designed to project a sense of self-importance, and is constructed consistently from the inside out to emphasise its bluff, blustering, puffed up exterior. The underlying structure is left deliberately visible in places and particularly from underneath to remind the viewer of the worthless nature of the materials from which it is made.

I use mainly found materials and although I sometimes use materials as I find them, my method is generally to break them down into their component parts and then reassemble these to create a new raw material of my own. Most of my recent pieces have incorporated discarded, broken umbrellas as a key element as well as other found materials.

 

Eva Rudlinger Collaborator (series no 1 of 4)

Eva Rudlinger’s Collaborator originated as a video recording of a wild bird’s performance in response to a set of raisins. The ensuing sequence of stills depicts some elusive moments of its movements, dramatised in inverted visual form. The piece echoes a persisting human trait to bond with an animal and recognise manifestations of individuality.

The transformation of elemental conditions, constructs and places into distilled microcosmic concepts forms the source of recent work. Using primary means such as light, temperature, silences, space and scale as a catalyst to explore perceptions of time and the temporal, thoughts and feelings. The elastic nature of the art works can be understood as visually interlinking explorations most often expressed in film, photography, sculpture and installation.

 

Debbie Perks The Tower (detail)

Deborah Perks -  I am currently a trained interior designer and work in the commercial sector with particular experience in the retail and office environments. I studied at Farnham College of Art and graduated from Leicester Polytechnic (now the De Montford University).

In the last two years I have taken the decision to go back to my fine art roots and study painting and drawing, in particular to pursue my love of watercolour.  My work is watercolour based combined with the use of other art media, with an emphasis on my passion for architecture and other cultures. I am at present exploring my love of the architectural form in a world landscape using the medium of watercolour in a very positive large-scale form. Drawing upon this framework this particular piece ‘Tower’ was produced specifically for this show – ‘Flock Together’ – putting together one of my favourite buildings in London and its iconic bird of residence.

Juliet Walker Magpie

Since graduating from the Slade School of Art in 2006, Juliet has been obsessing about magpies.    Wandering in the woods, sniffing out fairytale and myth, she has been sculpting these ominous birds.

Loved and loathed in equal measure, magpies stir deep memories.  We hear their chattering in our dark woody ancestral hearts.

Juliet always counts them, rarely salutes, and never spits. For Flock Together, she has conjured her own glad tidings, ‘Four for a Boy’.

Andrea Carr Blue Raven screenprint

Andrea Carr – I am a visual artist, theatre, fashion designer, public artist with a passion for drawing and painting from life, especially in the wilds of Cornwall.

I have worked across a wide spectrum of art and design and am now developing my work into different mediums and producing my own performances

I am pleased to present ‘Birds”‘ which is an ongoing collection of limited edition silk screen prints.

Energetic and direct they are created from original drawings, done in situ to capture the power, restless presence and innate nobility of the subject.

I am also interested in the fusion and cross fertilization of different art forms. 2010 sees the development of paintings into fashion textiles and vice versa, pieces i have worked on in my fashion label 21 Things I Love www.21thingsiove.com growing into a dance piece STRETCH and the creation of ROOMS, a site specific performance both in the market.

I have also began a years project in Cornwalls much loved bird sanctuary Paradise Park.

I live up the road and also in Cornwall, my work can be seen at my B&B and in- house gallery in St Ives www.organicpanda.co.uk.

Kit Boyd Flock Together Birds

Chris Boyd –   Birds populate a large number of my paintings, and are increasingly a central and essential element of the landscape compositions I create. When humans aren’t around, it is often birds that inhabit the land and sky around us; before we get up in the morning we hear them heralding and claiming the day and when we are absent from a scene, birds quickly appear to claim it back. I have an ongoing series of pictures called Domains where the land is owned by the bird and is an integral part of the landscape, where it possesses and controls the scene and any figure that may enter into it. 

I studied Visual Art at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and moved back from London to the Welsh borders in 2006. I returned to London in 2009 and have a studio in Brixton Village.

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Cooper - Gallery Birds

Andrew Cooper’s work uses sculpture, drawing, animated film and performance to create spaces where the subjective personal world of myth is valued and its social and political dimensions are explored. He uses craft techniques such as woodcarving and carpet fitting on materials that have a history that he finds in skips, charity shops and refuge areas. There is a fascination for the uncanny quality of life that clings to these objects.

The bird table legs were started three years ago when they were found lying by a dumped mattress in Bethnal Green. The bird legs, although they can be seen separately, form part of an assemblage that conjures a room from ornaments and fittings without the bricks and mortar, like a memory of a place that no longer is.