LIVING STONES
31st January - 7th February 2025
Borlase Smart Rooms, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall
Oliver Raymond Barker, Jonathan Michael Ray,
Andy Hughes, Louise McClary
This gathering of artworks by four contemporary artists based in Cornwall explores animisms of rock and other lively geophysical forces. The works have emerged from the artists’ travels and ‘field research’ involving walking, climbing, and on-site experimentation with materials in different environments. Whilst the environmental references and artists’ aesthetics vary, these works transmit the vibrant life of geophysical matter through processes that trouble taxonomies. The multivalent works disturb borders separating life and non-life; human and non-human; deep pasts turbulent presents and speculative futures. In this way, they answer calls from eco-critical thinkers for artists and animists to help us reorientate perception to embrace more-than-human modes of being and imagine the world ‘otherwise’.
Our exhibition is timed to coincide with the launch of the retrospective exhibition; Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds at Tate St Ives. We wish to celebrate Colquhoun’s relevance and invite fresh dialogues between her work and contemporary art.
Lizzie Perrotte (exhibition curator).
Oliver Raymond Barker
Anatomy of Stone, 12 x 16 inches, chemigram, 2021.
In this era of environmental predicament often referred to as the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, there has been an upsurge of popular interest in geological matters. This manifests in the desire to think at scale; to embrace time and existence beyond familiar human dimensions; and to assimilate the real possibility of another Earth cycle of mass extinction.
Our Living Stones exhibition takes its title from an 'animist guide book' to Cornwall published in 1957 by artist Ithell Colquhoun. Colquhoun provides a touchstone for this show of work by four contemporary artists that responds to the vitalism of geological forces. Works in different media have emerged from the artists’ travels and ‘field research’ involving walking, climbing, and on-site experimentation with materials in different environments. Our exhibition is timed to coincide with the launch of Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds at Tate St Ives (Jan 2025) to celebrate Colquhoun’s current relevance and invite fresh dialogues with contemporary art.
SEA FEVER 2
21st - 28th October 2023
Captain Banplastic, Mandy Bloomfield, Andy Hughes, Ben Cook,
Lizzie Perrotte.
Borlase Smart Rooms, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall
Four surfers, (three visual artists and a writer) join together at Porthmeor studios, overlooking the beach to co-curate a reflective and speculative exhibition/event. The project gathers and entangles rich and strange flotsam and jetsam of visual forms, salvaged poetry, and sound. The creative thinking of the project has risen through the sharing of surfing sensoria and ecocriticism (environmental concerns) and flows through the exhibition to conjure future visions of the ocean.
Sea Fever was originally a surf art exhibition event at Tate St Ives for its launch programme in 1993 with the participation of Surfers Against Sewage who were founded that year. Our project reflects back to that time of heightened consciousness and environmental activism but brings a current spirit of the abyssal fantastic to this site on Porthmeor Beach.
In conversation with surfing superhero Captain BanPlastic, Mandy Bloomfield, Andy Hughes and Ben Cook contribute drawings, photographs, video and sound work. We are delighted that Captain Ban Plastic has agreed to collaborate, loaning a series of their large-scale drawings which capture their heroic moves through a toxic ocean to save the Planet!
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RED CREEK
4th - 7th November 2021
Peggy Atherton & Andy Hughes
Borlase Smart Rooms, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall
A collaborative exhibition of photographic and sculptural installation in response to the material entanglements at Frenchman's Creek, Lizard, Cornwall. Red Creek is a ‘pop-up’ show of work engaged with environmental politics and poetics. Haunting photographic work by artist/environmentalist, Andy Hughes, comes together with a mysterious sculptural installation by Peggy Atherton in response to the site of Frenchman’s Creek, Cornwall; its complex entanglements: ecologies, histories and fantasies. Both artists explore the poetics of waste matter, themes of ruin and entropy, weaving together fairy-tale elements with contemporary critique and wry humour.
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