ROOM 19

Ineffectual Barriers, (2015 – 2020) is an ongoing series of photographs that document and capture chance encounters with temporary structures/barriers that don’t seem to have the desired effect or in fact to be doing a very good job. Ordinarily, barriers are employed to control flow, preventing people from moving easily from one area to another, usually in an effort to keep them safe, away from danger. The images enable us to revel in the beauty of uselessness. In capturing what I consider to be ‘found sculptures’ encountered within the urban environment, the series of photographs expand on my research and inform my sculptural practice.

DREAM OPERATOR was an experimental performance project made during an international residency with Rogers Art Loft, Las Vegas, providing a freephone telephone service to the American public during the last 12 hours of voting in the 2020 USA Presidential Election. DREAM OPERATOR’s purpose was to present its callers with time tested affirmations to contrast the contemporary culture of misinformation and divisive rhetoric. The service was advertised to the American public across national social media and featured on multiple billboards in the US. DREAM OPERATOR received hundreds of calls, a sample of which is represented within the video work.

Kelly + Jones explore the cultural inflections of writing, including the materiality of writing and the politics of writing a subject into being. They position themselves as active agents within inter-related geographical and cultural sites that cohere around the scene of writing. They approach writing as a lived encounter and a locus of resistance with gestures that comment on and undercut the production of text. Attention is paid to the physical qualities of the artefacts that they produce, the scroll of the photographic image, the grain of the projected gesture, the dustings and fraying edges of material.

This work was initiated towards the end of February 2020, when the impact of COVID19 was making itself felt across the world. A clockwork cine camera was trained on a single bud on an old apple tree in my garden. Filming ended when the ovary heads unexpectedly dropped in May. A combination of continuous filming is interspersed with stopped frames to disrupt the conventionally smooth representation of the flow of time and impose a sense of trauma to the natural process. The edited footage was projected and digitally filmed in my garden during the second period of lockdown in the UK, at the start of 2021.

You Listen You Repeat You Understand continues the collaborative practice of Stephanie Rushton and Mally Mallinson which fuses the sculptural with the photographic in a series of work that explores critical discourses in Posthuman study challenging established paradigms of human supremacy. The triptych includes bunker-like constructions reminiscent of modernist architecture, based on fire control towers of the Atlantic Wall; a recurring motif in the series symbolising increasing levels of border control occurring both nationally in the post Brexit landscape and beyond. The still life landscape images depict humankind’s attempt to control nature and nature’s retaliation as a recurring Sisyphean nightmare. The landscapes are intersected by a memento mori text piece referencing the paintings of Christopher Wool and the Agitprop/Antifascist works of John Heartfield and Peter Kennard. http://doyleandmallinson.co.uk/text https://stephanierushton.format.com/

In Jenna Eady’s ‘A James House’ gender constructions are critiqued through a presentation of a “families” watching ‘xXx’. The families are formed by Jenna’s personal network, each family member performed as James; a character created by Jenna, challenging the construction and ambiguity in masculinity. FORMAT Graduate Award Winner

Rosie Lawrence’s ‘The Pink Cottage’ derived from the artist finding a hidden archive of photographs at a property that belongs to her parents in Suffolk, offering a gateway into someone else’s life and equally questioning the value of these personal photographs and why they were left behind. FORMAT Graduate Award Winner

Sited between the rapidly expanding Chinese urban centres of Baoding, Tanjin and Beijing and enclosing the wetland communities of Baiyang Lake, Xiong’an (New Area) is destined to become the world’s largest economic development zone and new model city. This major legacy project, personally initiated by President Xi Jinping in 2017, provides the blueprint for China’s future ‘inland metropolitan areas’ These photographs are part of a series reflecting on the transformation of that urban landscape coupled with the simultaneous reclaiming of the surrounding rural spaces as cultural and leisure playgrounds. Reflecting the ethos of the Xiong’an project and underlying all of this work, are references to a society that is very much contained and controlled. Always in the background but nevertheless ever present - an aspect which permeates every part of Chinese social order.

In ‘I need a tutorial’, we see a performance unfold that focuses on demonstrating body language and non-verbal communication used to replace words in conversation. These gestures reflect the weight of world-less exchanges, further expressed by the ropes used that indicate when words get tangled within a conversation. FORMAT Graduate Award Winner

A personal essay and sensory experience of joy and happiness under Corona.

A short video of a student’s garden.

A personal essay/film, made by an award winning journalist.

A short video of a student’s garden.

A short essay, describing the happiness of spending time observing nature.

A short movie, filmed during a casual evening stroll.

Informal conversations between learners and tutors for the ESOL project.

Informal conversations between learners and tutors for the ESOL project.

A personal essay about the love of creativity.

A photo essay describing activities undertaken during lockdown.

Informal conversations between learners and tutors for the ESOL project

Informal conversations between learners and tutors for the ESOL project

This room features work from new members of the Derbyshire community. The artwork was produced following a series of online classes, during which we learned English as a second language, as part of the Creative ESOL Project

Thank you for visiting this exhibition. We very much hope you enjoyed it. As part of our project evaluation, we would appreciate if you could complete this form so that we have an understanding of the types of people attending this exhibition. As this is a screen based exhibition, there may be multiple people viewing with you. Please include all those viewing the exhibition where possible. This form is anonymous.

Iranian Kofteh Making video created by project participant Mohammad Reza.