contemporaryartinliverpool

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Covid Safe Art: The River of Light.

On the 23rd of March a new outdoor exhibition appeared on the famous Liverpool waterfront, the river of light showcases the work of leading local, national and international artists. It brings together 11 stunning audio and visual installations and is a visual representations of the impact that lockdown has had on Liverpool and its communities. The 11 artworks, although visible all hours of the day, light up from the hours of 6PM to 10:30PM. The magical spectacle has under gone intense planning to make sure that it adheres to the cover safe guidelines, currently in place within the UK. The spectacle all together is a pleasant 2KM walk and takes you around the city and waterfront and also parts that not necessarily many have seen before.

For me personally there are a number of stand out illuminations, my favourite being called “Futures”, created by Lucid Creates this piece is conceived by Chris Carr and Helen Swan of design studio, Lucid Creates. This piece is a comment and reaction to the wide ranging social, health and environmental issues of 2020. The piece aims to inspire the desire to ignite communal action and hope after a period where many have felt in the dark. The installation uses optical illusions, light and sound, this piece takes us to a place of calm and serenity and to a future we can envision what we want. The artists want us to focus on how we feel negative about our world when we are alone and that we feel that our individual actions won’t affect a positive change. By brining us together in a safe space, the piece allows us to be free of negativity and see that by taking positive action we can create a better future. According to visit Liverpool, the artists want us to imagine a future where:

“We have reached carbon neutrality.

Our economy is circular.

Resources are shared.

Inequality is a thing of the past.

People and the planet come before profit.”

Furthermore, they go on to ay that they want to aim for “The world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think and if, as individuals, we take small actions, together we can affect hugely positive change. By focusing on a vision of a better world, together we can create one.”(River Mersey, 2021)

Also on display there is a piece called “All in the Balance”, created by Lantern Company a UK based company, the piece focuses on the ways that the many people have appreciated the natural world amid the global pandemic. The installation notices how natures patterns and seasonal changes have brought new awareness to the precarious global balance our natural environment is in due to the unsustainable human activity across the world. Many have only noticed the damage due to the daily walks that we as a nations have been making because of the pandemic and stay at home measures brought in by the government. Furthermore, on visit Liverpool its says that “The kinetic illuminated installation of a gigantic Butterfly Mobile surrounded by giant wild grasses and flowers celebrates nature and the coming of spring. The work holds up a magnifying glass to the complexity of life-sustaining eco-systems while also being a call to action for the immediate Climate Emergency we face. ‘All in the Balance’ re-uses elements from previous artworks and is 100% recycled.” (River Mersey, 2021)

To conclude, the river of light is a literal light at the end of the tunnel at a time of the unknown and mass panic. As the country begins to reopen and start to get back to the new norm, the river of light is a barrier that can make people aware of other peoples stories amid the lockdown and pandemic. I have visited the installations a few times and intend to visit it again before the exhibition ends, for me its a place to meet friends that I haven’t seen in a long time and also a place to feel calm and safe.

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Sybil Andrews: Looked over women in Art.

Andrews was born in Suffolk England at the beginning of the 20th century, apart from working through two world wars and being at the forefront of the line and cut movement, little is actually wrote about her and her career.

Apart form working in line and cut, Andrews also looks at modernism and Canadian Indigenous art, this change came once she moved to Canada later on in her life. Her linocuts portray daily life and are influenced by English Vorticists like Wyndham Lewis, she did not rely on perspective to convey space, instead she overlaid forms and figures in action as shown in the work “Speedway” (1934).

Her career started as a welder’s apprentice constructing airplanes during world war one. Once the war was over she taught at the Portland school where she met Cyril power, who became a major influence and mentor to the artist. They collaborated for almost 20 years and coined the name “Andrew Power” and produced a series of posters for the Epsom Derby and also Wimbledon.

She then went on to study at Heatherleys school of art until she was 26 after this she went to teach at the Grosvenor school of art. During world war two she welded ships and later moved to Canada. It was in Canada that she gained wide spread acclimation and recognition for her use of bright colours and dynamic shapes and patterns.

As previously mentioned, she was part of the Linocut movement in Britain. The movement lasted 10 years, spanning from 1925-35. The movement was a world wide phenomena, however as world war two loomed the artists responsible for the movement disbanded and the movement was lost. The movement reflected the prosperity and wealth that was happening in most parts of Europe and America at the time, this is reflected in the bright colours and dynamic shapes present In the majority of the Linocuts.

Modern and contemporary in style and look, the linocuts were fashionable and reflected the time in which they were made. For me personally, Andrews prints were more contemporary than her peers partly due to the emphasis on colour and design. Within the prints there is barley any facial features. Her later work is much more contemporary and is mainly made up of patterns, pieces like “Peevies” (1962) is made up of strong diagonals in contrasting tones of red, green and white. Once again little is known about what the piece means and where the inspiration came from, like many of Andrews pieces. However after doing as much research on the piece as possible, I have found that there is a big pull for works by Andrews. Her pieces go on sale in auctions for a varied range of prices, from £500 to £2,000. Furthermore her work is rarely in exhibitions, instead her work is mostly shown in print rooms in major galleries like the Tate.

To conclude, Andrews has been pushed aside and forgotten by the art world due to her being female and specialising in an art form that was seen as more delicate and feminine. I personally believe that her works deserve an exhibition along side her peers work from the same era. She had a massive influence on arts and crafts within Britain and abroad and her pieces bring an air of wealth and prosperity due to them being made from the mid 20’s to mid 30’s, a time where for the most part, people were prosperous and creative.

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"The Prize at the forefront of modern art" The John Moores Painting Prize.

A few weeks ago we had a lecture form Katherine Lloyd, curator for the John Moores painting prize. The prize has been running since 1957 and was created in order to inspire a new generation of contemporary artists. The winners receive a funding of £2,500 and an exhibition space at the walker art gallery, and the gallery buying the work. This not only grows the collection of contemporary art of the Walker but also the career of the artist. There is a long history of success associated with the prize with works from the likes of David Hockney, he won the prize in 1967 with his work “peter getting out of nicks pool’ this piece is not only common for the pop art era but its also seen through the lens of LGBTQI+, which for the time is very revolutionary. Hockney became a cultural icon around this time due to his growing exploration of sex and gender and open attitude and the painting prize made him a known name in the art world in Britain and America. Another winner of the prize includes Stuart Sutcliffe, the first bassist of the Beatles. He studied at the art school that would become the John Lennon school of art and created very contemporary and figurative pieces. Although it is not specifically known what work won the prize a lot of his work around the time were very similar. The tones are dull with dark subject matter and don’t have any specific images or themes. however, due to Covid the prize has been changed massively in order to follow the Covid safe guidelines. This year, the final show is being held in the past prize winners gallery, which are rooms 12-15 within the gallery. There are over 3,000 entries with the jurors having to look at over 6,000 images. This is because artists can enter more than one image of their work, after this they have to pick only 300 works. Usually the bored and the jurors have a meeting within the gallery however this year they held a zoom call which lasted over 10 hours. The judging is very broad, with the jurors only given the image and name, they do not know the age sex or gender, to withdraw any bias from the decision. Once the decisions have been made on the 67 works selected, the artists are told how and where to deposit their work in order to get it to the gallery so that the panel can select the final works that will be on display. In order to be able to pick these works, this year the panel formed bubbles and would work within the gallery in these bubbles when starting to display the work in the halls.

This year the winners are Robbie Bushe, Michele Fletcher, Steph Goodger, Stephen Lee and Kathryn Maple. Bushe’s work is called “The Neanderthal Futures Infirmary” and was created in 2019. The work straddles the use of daydreams observation and pictorial reconstruction. Its a series of 4 paintings “imagines an old Victorian hospital with a Neanderthal DNA extraction and cloning facility within a complex network of underground bunkers.” (National Museums Liverpool, 2021).

To conclude, the guardian sums up the painting prize perfectly, they call it the “prize at the forefront of modern art”, the prize is a beacon of light within the world of contemporary, without it I personally believe that there would be little to no light on contemporary art within Britain.

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Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy

Throughout her pioneering career that lasted 70 years, Eileen Agar brought together the abstract qualities of cubism with the anarchic edge of surrealism. She worked in many medias including photography, collage, painting and sculpture. Furthermore, she also offered a commentary on society during a massive period of change. Agar was fascinated by classical art, ancient mythologies and the natural world, she took inspiration from these sources while creating her own biography of work and the content that fuelled her career.

Born in Argentina and raised in various boarding schools in London, Agar never forced a certain type of media, she went with a flow and chose formats and processes suited to her and the work of art. Although she lived through two world wars she still retained a happiness for life, this was reflected in her work as she was commonly using natural found objects, and also some of her work focuses on sexual pleasure there was also a theme of architecture and mythological aspects.

Agar lived a very fulfilling but at times traumatising life, when she was six years old she was sent from Argentina to London via boat by herself, a trip that would have taken two weeks. Her mother was an heiress and was dismayed by the idea of her daughter becoming an artist. Agar wanted more than what her parents expected of her. At one point she shaved her head in protest to her parents wanting her to get married. Her father was more accepting of her art career and when he died he left a small amount of money to help Agar keep afloat and also start a career in art. Agar’s career began at the age of 24, at this point she married a working class artist from The Slade school of art in London and moved to France. Although free of her parents grip, she was deeply unhappy until she met a Hungarian writer while in France. He encouraged her artistic style and lifted her out of her depressive state. In 1928, they moved to Paris where Agar took lessons in more modern forms of art to avoid the more conservative styles of British art. With surrealism she found sex and power and way to comment on social issues like patriarchy and the ever growing threat of fascism within Europe, at this point she is unmatched with her high standard of work in Britain.

Agar had a habit of painting over her work, hence why some of work has only been seen through photographs. However, some of her well known works include “Three Symbols” which represents themes like modernism and the patriarchy with images of roman pillars, the Notre Dam and a bridge which was designed by Barbier, Benard, et Turenne who also designed the Eiffel Tower. Furthermore, due to her habit of painting over works she only has one piece of cubist art remaining, this piece is called “Movement in Space” which is a painting made with darker earth tones and is made up of shapes, there is also a good use of lighting and tone with the top half of the canvas being much lighter than the rest. The use of lighting looks like a sun rise in the morning, with only a small corner of the canvas being touched by it.

Agar and her husband left France and moved back to London in the early thirties, once back in London Eileen and her husband created a journal that focused on pacifism in a growing world of Fascism and their disagreement with the Spanish civil war. Heavily feminist, Agar wrote how Europe was being dominated by overbearing masculine power. Agar’s work was very feminist, in 1933 she created “Autobiography of an Embryo” at two and a half metres long the work opposes the rhetoric and normality of linear life. This is one of her early masterpieces, instead of the seven stages of mans life, it focuses on the four stages of an embryo’s development. There are images of fossils and natural imagery, which became a central theme throughout Agar’s work later on.

In 1936, she met two curators who were creating an exhibition based on surrealism, this was the first watershed moment In her career, although a breakthrough moment in her career only 1/5 of the artists featured in the exhibition were women. Unfortunately there is little documentation of the event, but experts have decided that she definitely showed her piece called “Quadriga” this piece included imagery that foreshadowed the looming war in Europe and demonstrated Agar’s fears of such an event, her fears are represented by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The war had a huge effect on Agar and her work, she found it hard to focus and found very little inspiration due to the lack of travel and overall general mood of society at the time. She turned to collage as this was seen as a very political form of art, in certain collages Agar is almost dreaming of life before and after the war and this was seen as an outlet for her anxiety and feelings about the war.

Another seminal piece of work in Agar’s collection includes her 1936 “Angel of Anarchy and Mercy” this was another feminist comment on the fact that she was only seen as a muse and not as a serious artist. For example when she met Picasso, he didn’t appreciate her work and only looked at her and made comments on her looks. The sculpture is a cast of her husbands head, covered in brightly coloured fabrics the model is seen as a comment on the anxiety over the fact that he may of had to leave England due to the fact that he is Hungarian.

After the war, she traveled to Tenerife and this was the second watershed moment in her career. Free of the struggles of war her creativity flowed and she began to use brightly coloured paints depicting her new era of her life. Through the 1960’s she gained some recognition that resulted in her first retrospective in 1971. Agar moved to west London around this time which further abled her creative energy through the form of a larger studio enabling her to paint much larger canvases. However, sadly in 1975 her husband died and due to the shock she didn’t paint for four years, the piece “The Bride of the sea” is an homage to him. Some of the last pieces of work are brightly coloured paintings of the rocks she saw while on holiday with her husband in 1936, these can be seen as cyclical and makes viewers think that her career came full circle.

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Eve Chartrand, from fungi to the stigma of growing old.

Eve Chartrand is an installation and sculpture artist who also dabbles in the world of poetry within her work. Born in Montreal, now living in the united states Chartrand is deeply moved by desolate moments of beauty, which is heavily represented within her body of work. At the beginning of her talk Chartrand began with a ‘land acknowledgment’, expressing her status as an immigrant on which the land she works on and respecting the land owning to the Squamish People. I found this intriguing and made me more excited to listen to her when she was explaining her work and methods. When she began her research, the ideas of on the end of life was a base question in which she delved deeper into the meanings and also of the feelings towards it. Her research also focused on the stigma and societal disgust towards naturally ageing women’s bodies. The intersectionality within her work shows how different peoples characters are judged by the society that they reside in. Chartrand wanted to open up these different characters in a society to the ideas of dying, a subject In which people tend to push to the back of their head and not think about. Apart form looking at the societal view of naturally ageing bodies, she also looks at how unable bodies are objectified by a society. Through her work she aims to remove the stigma and the un-aesthetics from ageing, for example with studies of dentures and the bacteria in a 90 year old hair brush that used to belong to her grandma. She uses organic matter against medical goods to create a dichotomy of contrasting views of life and death, through the use of memories and heirlooms she aims to keep the memory of the person alive while still respecting the fact that they are deceased. Like fungi, decaying bodies change over a period of time, lingering and blooming as a way to proclaim their age. In the beginning stages of her practice, in her words, she “touches and feels objects, destroys them and waits for them to talk to her”. Her process comes in the form of six stages, in which the meaning of the work and the outcome develops and changes over a period of time. The first stage is called positioning, in which general fields of interest are considered. In Chartrand’s case this was the focus on ageing as she reaches middle age. Next comes the data collection in which she researched her “aesthetic wandering”. For this part of the creative process she went on a journey of reigniting past feelings by going shopping in vintage shops and antique malls, she was very emotional about this and later came to the realisation that she wanted to create family portraits, She uses objects like bed pans and urinals to represent her parents struggles later on in life and her own thoughts on her own ageing. Once she had finished this stage she began the data analysis stage in which she pushed her own mental boundaries through reading and in depth research of items and heirlooms she had acquired. By testing creative strategies in the creative data analysis sector of her practice Chartrand will begin to create pieces while considering all the knowledge she has acquired in the previous stages. Once she has experimented with a few techniques and mediums, Chartrand will finally exhibit to the public while collecting feedback from the general public. Once she has done this she will assess her own work and apply the skills she has learned onto the next creative idea. This talk from Chartrand provoked a deep emotional response form me, I was touched by the ideas of using this as a way to deal with grief and revisiting memories through matter. Furthermore, her work is extremely titillating and demands an emotional response due to the polarising extremities within her work. I especially love the use of both natural and man made objects within her work which creates a strong contrast of imagery. This technique personally makes me think of the ways in which people sometimes die, naturally and sometimes to the hand of man. Her work is both terrifying and also mesmerising, I find it extremely inspiring and

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What is contemporary art to me ?

For me, contemporary art is an expression of rebellion, mental health and the reflection of the society in which it was created. Personally, I view contemporary art as an expression of the problems that an artist faces in society, however I also view It as a joyful expression that deters from the struggle of everyday life. My first experience with ‘contemporary’ art came when I was 18 and on a family trip to new York, up till then I had had experiences with classical art in places like Venice and Paris, I had taken a trip to the met and in one of the large open white halls I was faced with the splattered canvas by Jackson pollock that was the product of one of many depressive out bursts that he was famed for having. Since then I have always had a satire view towards more older traditional forms of art, due to the overwhelming hidden pain faced by many of the artists and models. Contemporary art gave light to the struggles and joys that many creators face and overall it is an insight to their opinion on a certain society that the art was made in.

After watching a clip from the MOMA museum, in New York, I found out that contemporary art was not a term coined until the 1980’s and after thinking about this statement it brings in the questions of ‘what do we call art, previously called contemporary, from the 60’s and 70’s’. The answer is simple, contemporary art is an ever changing course and is a consistently forward moving movement. Meaning that in every art movement, there was a contemporary subculture below the surface. Furthermore, what is of the moment is what of the now and contemporary art is the present. Finally, art periods can extend as movements and years go on.

Another question raised by the MOMA was authorship of contemporary art work itself. This questions comes up in all forms of media of art. For a long time we only pay homage to the main artist themselves, for example Damian Hirst and the spot paintings, artists are helped with studio staff, they employ due to the huge demand for their work, they choose of they want to acknowledge the help. Figures around the artist have been written out of history however the role of the viewer even has a part to play in production. MOMA is helping to acknowledge the groups of people that have contributed to the role of the artist.

I have also been listening to a podcast called ‘the way I see it’, created by the BBC, and particularly liked the episode by curated by John waters on Lee Lozano’s piece ‘untitled’ made in 1963. Waters is an indie, punk film maker who challenged the Hetronormative view of cinema in the late 20th century with titles like ‘pink flamingoes’ released in 1972. The piece itself is a giant hammer stretched across an 8x8 ft canvas, painted in oils. Lozano is an American conceptual artist who was a radical feminist, however suffered from poor mental health that greatly depleted her art career. The piece itself has bendy rubber like qualities that makes it look like the hammer is trying to fit into the canvas. The hammer is barley contained, al we see is the handles and the head of the hammer, making it look like a bulls horns giving the piece animalistic qualities.

Lozano emerged in the 60’s and became part of the avant grade scene in the 1960’s, it was in the mid 60’s that she started to create frenzied paintings of tools like hammers and tools, the obvious sexual connotations that the piece has makes it an obvious piece of feminist art work. Lozano is obsessive about themes and exploited tools like hammers, screws and wrenches to be seen as overtly sexual then what the everyday viewer would see them as.

Finally contemporary art is an ever expanding movement that has no boundaries and is constantly testing the waters with new ideas, materials and media.