Robin Tarbet
We are excited to feature artist, Robin Tarbet, whose practice involves the exploration of industrial waste grounds and littoral zones, collecting, casting, and transforming their transitory deposits. Tarbet, born 1981, in Somerset UK, studied at the Royal College of Art and Norwich School of Art & Design and is based in South London. He describes himself as a collector of everyday stuff” who uses ad-hoc casting processes and printing techniques to make work that features transformations of recognisable things in unfamiliar situations. The act of walking, finding, and discovering source materials is a big part of how he engages with the world around him. His practice often incorporates a performative ‘working in the field’ approach and he has a speculative lure for failed, obsolete, or perishable subject matter. Robin’s recent projects have included plaster-casting dead jellyfish washed up on a beach and making moulds inside a nuclear power station.
In March 2024 Robin won the Eilean Shona Residency awarded by the Royal Society of Sculptors, and kindly supported by Vanessa Branson. He spent a month alone on a wilderness island situated just off the West Coast of Scotland. On winning the award Robin said “Being selected for the Eilean Shona Residency will have a huge impact on me as an artist. I’m looking forward to a month of breathing fresh air and talking to myself while getting lost exploring the remote island where I’ll secretly be pretending I’ve been shipwrecked”.
We have presented Robin's 'story ', of the residency accompanied by his beautiful photographs that record and reflect on his experiences and working processes.
Lizzie Perrotte from SolasArts also visited his studio in London and has written a response to her visit in a short essay called; Afterlife: Time traveling with Robin Tarbet
Peter Kennard
Andy Hughes and Lizzie Perrotte from SolasArt visited British artist and political and environmental activist, Peter Kennard in his studio, summer 2021. It was such a great pleasure to share conversation with Peter and experience his preparation for a series of photomontage works for the exhibition, CODE RED, just launched at Out of The Blue Arts and Education Trust, Glasgow, to coincide with the COP 26, UN Climate Change Conference. We were inspired by Peter's ongoing commitment to art's creative and critical agency in contexts of urgent social and environmental need.
Statement by Peter Kennard for his exhibition CODE RED.
Trongate 103, Glasgow 30th 0ct-19th Dec and at the Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh 5th Nov-26th Nov.
(a Street Level Photoworks exhibition to coincide with COP26).
In August this year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their report. Their findings, prepared by 234 scientists from 66 countries, warn that human activity has warmed the climate to a point that is unparalleled by anything in the last 2,000 years and that by 2019 atmospheric CO2 concentrations were higher than at anytime in at least 2 million years. The United Nations Secretary – General Antonio Guterres said the IPCC report was the ‘code red for humanity, the alarm bells are deafening and the evidence is irrefutable’. Hence the title for this installation which I’ve made specifically for the public space of Trongate 103 where the entrance to Street Level Photoworks is located.
The empty words issuing from the mouths of government leaders worldwide on the climate crisis continue to be backed up and supported by corporate profit for the good of share prices rather than human beings. The military-industrial complex is eating up the earth, spitting out the poorest people and waging war on them. The countries from which refugees flock have often been destroyed by the rapacious policies and weaponry of the very same countries that are refusing them entry.
Through photomontage I’m trying to turn my outrage into image. In Code Red a recurring image I use and abuse is the beautiful photo of the whole earth taken by the Apollo astronauts in 1972. I cut it up, tear it, pummel it, add industrial chimneys, oil refineries exploding, polluted dust, gas masks, parched earth and floods. But I also show a montage of the earth surrounded by a clock, symbolising climate/nuclear destruction, its hands being pulled back from midnight by climate protesters. There is also an image of planet earth transformed into a seed sprouting a tree. Photos can become entwined through photomontage so that the increasing destruction of the natural world can be envisaged and revealed not as inevitable but the result of human activity. The resulting montage can then be used a visual arm of the struggle for climate justice.
In a photomontage two clicks of the camera shutter can be brought together to reveal a third meaning. What is shown in Code Red is that oil is still flowing freely out of the ground, the chimneys are still belching out their pollutants and luxury yachts are growing longer by the day. E.M Forster’s dictum ‘only connect’ applies equally to making montages connecting the catastrophe that is climate destruction and its relationship to military power. They are both existentially and physically deeply connected. The U.S military is the largest single consumer of petroleum in the world.
We’re living in a time of absolute emergency. We’re tottering through the rubble of the rampant free market. It’s a time in which images can open up a critical space that can jolt assumptions and break through denial. The poet Shelley wrote that ‘we must imagine what we know’. By picturing the result of extracting wealth out of the ground by every means possible I’m trying to picture what we know will happen if we don’t stop this plunder.
CODE RED is presented by Peace & Justice (Scotland) in partnership with Street Level Photoworks to coincide with COP26 –. Supported by National Lottery Community Fund, Jackarts and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland.
Peggy Atherton
Peggy’s practice interrogates ways social practices are entangled with nature’s cycles of life and decay. Resurrecting road kill animals has been a central part of her work, responding to them through different materials and colours, developing their forms through performative gestures, rituals, speculative and mysterious narratives. Peggy has referred to her sculptural casts of dead animals as ‘Sleeping Beauties’ indicating the strange poetic of the work and her fascination with cultural imaginaries of mortality.
Her sustained involvement with the processes of sculpture generates a diverse mix of sculptural responses ranging through traditional casting and playful bricolage. Found objects and entropic materials are frequently embedded in individual works and uncanny installation scenarios. Peggy uses strategies of surprise through juxtaposition and dislocation to explore complex emotional and cultural responses to mortality – imaginative longing, hope and humour. A recent work brings together some found rabbits and a discarded Nike rucksack which have been cast together in a range of colours and materials. These poetic and uncanny objects bring vitality to dead matter; they are haunted with memories from an unknown past and bristle with potential for new story-telling/ Stories which become ever more intense and resonant in emerging contexts of cultural anxiety, environmental change and catastrophe.
For the launch of SolasArts, November 2021, Peggy will be collaborating with artist Andy Hughes to present an installation of sculpture, photography and film in the historic Porthmeor studios St Ives. These studios were once used by modern British artists such as Ben Nicholson, Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon who used strategies of abstraction to represent their complex experiences of the Cornish environment. Peggy and Andy have been working in the wooded environment of Frenchman’s Creek on the Helford River responding to this haunting environment of mud, ruin and regrowth. There is a programme of talks, a workshop and related 'pilgrimage' tour associated with this project (See Events/News).
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