Gallery (Inter/Annus Horribilis/Bloc Projects/chatsworth/Hillsborough College exhibition)

You are cordially invited to:

INTER – 2022

Fine Art 3rd Year Interim Show – Opening Afternoon

Thursday 3rd Feb – Open Afternoon 2-6pm

2-6 pm   HPO – Post Office Hall & other HPO venues 

3-6pm Pop up shop – Hallam Square – Repair Shop

4pm –  Pennine Lecture – Howard 5225 – Future Past 22

5pm – Void Lecture theatre – Owen 123 – Screenings

The 2022 BA Fine Art Interim Show

31 January-11 February

Each year in January, our final year BA Fine Art students install an ‘interim’ exhibition, a chance to test and experiment in the run up to their final degree exhibition in the summer. It’s a pause on a journey as they build their practices drawing on what they have learned and their ambitions for the future. 

Calling 2022’s exhibition an ‘interim’ show, is however perhaps a little misleading. The restrictions around Covid-19 mean that this is less a wayside stop than a notable landmark in itself. For many students, this is the first physical exhibition they have put on (although they all have a number of digital exhibitions to their credit) and opportunity to both show their work and create work to show to a wider public. Our title, Inter- seems fitting, a prefix, meaning ‘between’ (interim – between time) but also ‘among’ – and this year, our students have occupied a series of spaces around the university – here, in our gallery, but also elsewhere in the Head Post Office building, as well as projects in the Pop Up Shop on Hallam Square, a screening programme in The Void film theatre and a performance in the Pennine Lecture Theatre.

In doing so, they are performing a (symbolic) re-occupation of the campus. Having spent so long working off-site or in hybrid modes where once the studio and campus would have been the sole focus, these students’ relationship to their learning space is different to their predecessors. Siting a performance in the institutional theatre of the lecture hall rubs up not just against the limitations of university audiovisual kit and timetable availability, but against the expectations of the lecture as the focus of learning, against a hierarchy of teaching and learning, where raked seating points all eyes towards the professorial voice. Borrowing a film theatre – with its notions of connoisseurship – for films by emerging artists is a similar re-occupation. Likewise, taking a prime spot on Hallam Square for projects interrogating notions of repair, reuse and sustainability, students foreground concerns perhaps not unrelated to notions of ‘building back better’ as we emerge from the pandemic. Even the ‘safe’ space of gallery and studio are approached as unfamiliar spaces – things are up for grabs as work is translated from the private and semi-private of the covid-secure studio or student accommodation and students challenged to reconsider notions of what their work and its public might be. 

Exhibitions generally are moments in time. They are the point when ‘work-in-progress’ becomes ‘work’, when a verb becomes a noun. They also exist in space, the gallery or specific site. But to exist ‘among’? That, this year, is something very precious. 

Inter- continues around the HPO building, in  The Pop-Up Shop, Hallam Square (opening hours vary) and as an afternoon of exhibition, performance and screenings 2-6pm 4 February 2022, Post Hall, HPO building, Pop-Up Shop, The Void and Pennine Lecture Theatre. -Tim Machin

I wasn’t confident of using the work I had done for my Manic Street Preachers research so I decided to use my pastel rendition of Taxi Driver which I think showcases my talents considerably.
Since this was my first physical exhibition since I have started University I felt I wanted something that I was confident and represented my love for cultural references.

The scene between Travis and Iris played by Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster concerns itself with an insomniac veteran who is trying to deter an underage prostitute from her life of exploitation over waffles in a cafe.

Annus horribilis exhibition 2021


An update on the process behind all the galleries in 2021. Powerpoint presentation.
Gallery 2021.pptx

My essay on decolonisation 2021 Word document.
https://1drv.ms/w/s!AttmY2KpRMHxl3RdxanbRpR_gnmi?e=qTcbBC


Is there anybody out there?

Poles apart

A collage: printouts of Twitterfeeds, Printscreens of YouTube, personal drawings, abstract digital and traditional painting. Clickbait. 
 
Scrolling through negative feeds, watching the same old anxiety inducing news whilst channel hopping. 

Headlines of Covid hysteria; ninth clap for the NHS and a 1% payrise. Vaccine Passport apartheid. 

Gender ideology versus biological reality, images of violence against women as relevant as it ever was with women tweeting #MeToo against their oppressor. 

The horrible concerns for health you find in women’s magazines and the objectification therein. Bad breath, cellulite and top tips for losing weight. 
 
Hypocritical Papparazzi steering your princess into certain death. 
Be kind to those who have the same viewpoint. 

The BLM movement taking off with debate and dialogue being created and a dismantling of systemic racism. Kneejerk reactions, looking in the mirror, white denial, guilt and privilege. 
Protecting statues as fragile as whiteness. 
 
Forget martyrs remember victims. 
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. 

A schism of the mind and the body, vomiting, insomnia, overthinking. 
A schism of society, Isms, Racism, Sexism.  
Oppressed vs the oppressor. 

An explosion of the mind onto the canvas, unfiltered; a catharsis of the mind like the remnants of a fever dream made conscious. 

Bloc Projects exhibition 2021
https://www.blocprojects.co.uk/exhibitions-events/2021/turbulent-times

Chatsworth catalogue 2020

In 2020 our art group was asked to contribute art at Chatsworth estate I began to be interested in the garden maze and I did some drawings but then the pandemic happened and the exhibition never happened.
A catalogue was made instead and our contributions were printed:

This is what the article says:

I was inspired by the maze in the garden at Chatsworth and used this to incorporate ideas regarding the human condition and the obstacles that can be brought up within that context.

I am drawn towards the idea that conception is a deadly maze with only one winner and that reflects on our nature to be competitive towards one goal; some of us don’t stand a chance such as the two headed sperm which gets lost in the dead end, whilst others cheat and climb over the hedges in an attempt to be victorious at all costs.
250 million sperm start the race and only one sperm will win.

Videogames employ this idea of adversity over any costs against the odds, one of the earliest protagonists of such challenges was Pac-Man, a notoriously difficult maze game. In early gaming mazes were extremely popular as they were easy to program because of their simplicity and the protagonist was placed in a maze and had to overcome adversaries and obstacles to achieve their goals and advance; you can easily replace Pac-Man with a fox and the ghost as hunters with saboteurs being a help or an hindrance depending on which team you have decided to join.

I would like to explore these dynamics further within the context of a maze which in many ways can be a metaphor for how we navigate throughout our life and the choices that we face.
Obstacles are something we face whether in our personal lives or in the literature we read, films we watch and can even be fun such as the maze in Chatsworth.

Exhibition for Hillsborough College 2019

My exhibition was based on my love of comics which I did an essay for.
I drew a cartoon strip of Dennis the menace who after bullying his effete friend Walter and losing his dog Gnasher grows up to be unemployed, alcoholic and unable to deal with his temper.
Despite receiving counselling from his childhood friend Walter who has grown up to be a well rounded individual and a counsellor he still gets upset over the missing dog.

I drew an homage to all the comics that have influenced me throughout my life from an early age.