Past

Campbell is a visual artist who makes voiceworks. Her intimate understanding of the structure of music is explored, referred to and adopted in her approach as a visual artist.
As an experienced chorister, Campbell posits herself on a platform where investigation and experimentation can take place.

“When performing people experience my pitched voice, that is how I appear as a visual artist. My voice is a locator, discerns space, unites, divides, and is a thing capable of huge descriptive qualities, with a range of accuracy.”

The framing of Campbell’s performances, and the importance of their subsequent presentation through video, is indicative of her position between visual art and experimental music.

Richard Birkett, ICA

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In her artistic practice Agnes Nedregard researches the language of the body, the availability of knowledge and memory in the body's physicality and everyday movements. Through a dialogue between space, movement and psychologically charged imagery she investigates the absurd, irrational and contradictory aspects of human life that the more logically inclined cerebral consciousness might struggle to name, and that speak to our whole register of perception, emotions and experiences.

Her work - whether it be live performance, video, sound, animation, sculpture or drawing – always has its starting point in a bodily perception of the world. In essence, each piece explores approaches to performance as an artistic medium. She says: "I find performance art as a medium extremely difficult. For me, being able to capture the moment of the meeting between the performer and the audience is the crux of performance art – to obtain the feeling of a shared, unpredictable moment – while utilising the tools of the medium to its maximum. Everyone has a body – and so using the body as a tool of communication transgresses the barriers of language, culture and class."

Nedregard utilises improvisation and play to explore and respond to specific spaces and situations. She makes use of costume, props and the framing possibilities of the camera as well as a language of movement, drawing on a bodily memory of physical and mental experiences. Space, costume, props, the camera and/or her audience makes her "partners" which with whom to interact. Through frequently focusing on raw close up imagery, she is bringing the tactile connection between body and surroundings to the forefront - and also the concrete and real presence of the body in the physical world.

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Catherine Street’s practice stems from drawing but includes writing, performance, installation and video. Much of the work depends upon the relationships between different elements presented together, whether they be drawings; found or original texts; videos or live actions. The work often focuses on the tension between language-based and visceral elements, and is underpinned by the themes of disaster and illusion. Interpretations are left open whilst the objects remain highly suggestive and it is often the comparative level of meaning that words, objects or actions may seem to carry that is exploited.

Drawing and writing are developed in tandem and often overlap with each other so that writing becomes part of the practice of drawing and vice versa. Live performance often takes the form of ‘tableaux vivant’ where the artist’s body becomes another element used to build up an environment whilst recent video work has taken the boundary between ‘performed’ and ‘incidental’ action as its starting point. Other points of reference for the work include science fiction, documentary reportage, astronomy, true crime, horror and men’s magazines.

Image Credit; Taken by Marta Tycinska

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‘Comic and cartoon violence accustoms us to the viewing years ahead. Away from the fictions of animated slap-stick to the equally absurd legislated violence that post-colonial states sanction and economically encourage. The reactions through the familiarity of semi-incomprehension are even the same. A wallpaper of everyday death a step removed by geography, language, religion, infrastructures and skin. The ‘Other’, as with Wile E Coyote’s landscape, is foreign, physically and mentally removed, allowing the blood, as Godard said, to simply be ’Red’.’ - Ross Downes

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To describe a system is basically to construct a new one. ~in the fields attempt to condense specific moments into inventions of autonomous, cocooned systems. Their work is based on research into natural phenomena and poetic moments – the growth of plants, the metamorphosis of creatures and ecological issues. Over the last three years the main focus of their research has been the phenomenon of the persistence of vision.

~in the fields realise interactive and/or sensitive computer-supported installations & objects. They are also interested in re-using old media & mechanical principles and using renewable energy. Their working method is interdisciplinary, combining art with science and philosophy with poetry.

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