FREE*
*As places are limited there is a £1 deposit taken on booking, refunded on attendance.
We have two guest speakers for this month’s Creative Network, Juliet Duckworth and Alyson Minkley.
Juliet is a multi-media artist whose work shows concern with temporality, preservation and regeneration. Her practice deals with materiality, scale and physical process and shows interest in the topography of the earth’s surface. Artworks are constructed using organic, indigenous materials which when transformed into sculptural forms are often ephemeral. Her immediate surroundings supply a wealth of material and inspiration and her work is deeply rooted in a sense of place. Often humble unnoticed materials are scavenged and regenerated into artworks which are fragile, precarious and on the edge of material presence.
In Urban Rookery salvaged rooks’ nests are presented on scaffolding posts. The organic interacts with the manmade – the outside is brought in and reference is made between the complex construction of the nests and the mechanical scaffolding structure. Moving lights highlight the nests’ shapes and activate coloured shadows on the walls and ceilings. With the birds’ cawing voices on a looped sound track an immersive multi-sensory artwork is achieved.
Alongside Alyson Minkley’s ‘Synapse’ and Lou Baker’s knitted sculptures, Urban Rookery is part of a touring collective, Social Scaffolding, which occupies empty shop premises and encourages passers-by to socially engage in interactive ways with the artworks.
Alyson Minkley is a socially engaged artist working cross-discipline and often in collaboration with other artists and researchers.
As one-third of Social Scaffolding, Alyson’s most recent work Synapse was in Taunton for Somerset Arts Week 2022. A soft-sculpture suspended cocoon-like structure, Synapse is big enough to get into, as a place to hold space for contemplation. The surface of the sculpture has undergone a transformation through co-creative stitch, embodying shared moments of connection and conversation in embroidery while all interactions are recorded with timelapse surveillance cameras.
The juxtaposition of traditional materials and processes with creative digital interventions is a common theme within Alyson’s art which has explored dancing to draw and interrogate concepts of personal space, performances defined by data analysis, and the cataloging of artificial social anthropology.
Exhibiting in London and the SouthWest, Alyson won the Bath Open Artprize 2021, was longlisted for UK New Artist, and was highly commended in the Black Swan Artprize 2022.
Juliet & Alyson have been touring their work together as the Social Scaffolding Collective and will join us at Somerset Ignite together for an “in conversation” focused on collaboration and the integration of technology in their art. They will bring the beginnings of a new VR research project for an exploratory interactive session for those who wish to participate.