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FT

2017

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FLORENCE TRUST2017

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NICHOLAS CROMBACH – NICHOLASCROMBACH.COM

NADIA FRANCIS – NADIAFRANCIS.CO.UK

ELENA GILEVA – FLORENCETRUST.ORG/ARTIST/ELENA-GILEVA

REBECCA GLOVER – REBECCAGLOVER.CO.UK

CAROLINE JANE HARRIS – CAROLINEJANEHARRIS.COM

YOI KAWAKUBO – YOIKAWAKUBO.COM

SILVIA LERIN – SILVIALERIN.COM

WILLIAM MACKRELL – WILLIAMMACKRELL.COM

RACHEL MCRAE – REMCRAE.COM

ANASTASIA MINA – ANASTASIAMINA.COM

CLAIRE NICHOLS – CLAIRENICHOLS.INFO

KADIE SALMON – KADIESALMON.CO.UK

DIRECTOR’S INTRODUCTION

There is always a sense of endings and new beginnings when I come to write this text each year. Twelve artists have been living and working with each other, often in challenging circumstances. There are a dozen replacements eager to take their place when their year ends at the end of July. To add to this there are changes of personnel amongst staff and Trustees. It is a fragile ecosystem we exist in yet we are approaching the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Florence Trust’s one year programme.

Having said this, I am conscious that The Trust is facing renewed pressures. Storm damage has led to lengthy and costly repair work to the building and the Diocese of London, a supportive partner for three decades, have their own agenda to pursue regarding the long term future of the building. Our small size, a key ingredient to our success, makes us vulnerable in an economic climate where growth and merger has been the key to survival. As evidence points to a continuing exodus of artists from central London in search of lower living costs, we cannot simply look the other way and raise the rents of those artists who wish to remain. The irony is that our combination of targeted bespoke professional development programme, managed curatorial visits and peer critique does achieve results, making our artists better equipped to survive and thrive in their chosen field. This years artists have responded very positively to the challenges that they have faced and bonded into a tight knit supportive group. I would like to take this opportunity to thank two people in particular amongst the collective effort needed to deliver this publication. Ashlee Conery, our curator in residence, has produced insightful texts for each of the artists whilst in the process of moving halfway across the world to take on a new job at Vancouver Art Gallery. She also found time in April to escort the artists on a visit to Documenta 14 in Athens. Alex Wilk, has designed the catalogue once again with her trademark skill and patience. I must also mention that our Studio Manager Neil Jefferies has also moved on this year. He has been a hardworking, multitasking asset to the Trust for four years and I came to rely on him as a trusted confidant in that position. I will miss him. I will, of course, also miss all twelve of this years resident artists for their dedication, talent and good humour.

PAUL BAYLEYJune 2017

46. CLAIRE NICHOLS42. ANASTASA MINA

30. SILVIA LERIN

22. CAROLINE JANE HARRIS

10.NADIA FRANCIS6. NICHOLAS CROMBACH

50. KADIE SALMON

38. RACHEL MCRAE34. WILLIAM MACKRELL

18 . REBECCA GLOVER

26. YOI KAWAKUBO

14. ELENA GILEVA

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NICHOLAS CROMBACH

At first glance Crombach appears to be stepping into the style and motifs of previous decades. His skill and pace with clay and casting is reminiscent of artists with years of atelier training. However, he quickly interrupts a nostalgic reading of his work with the addition of unexpected symbols or gestures. These contemporary comments on cultural traditions are manifests in the form of a rocking horse collapsed over its rails, or a man tucked into his sleeping bag clutching the mounted head of a stag, a maple leaf swinging from his rucksack. What’s exposed is our relationship to trophies or symbols which, displayed, embody no less than the supremacy of one mammal over another.

Simultaneously, his works undermine the decorous character of national identities tied to environmental fictions. His figures, which are representations of a phase of life, a tradition or a country, are left holding, resting or standing beside other dimensions of their identity. Crombach employs the subjects of art history to tell another story. He evokes the primacy of ‘civilisation’ in our relations with the animal world, using a level of realism that makes his works impossible to disassociate from – and just as we reach out in awe of our own reflection, we notice the broken bow or the suction cups at the end of each arrow. Playing with ideas of age, virility and futility, purpose and value, he folds these discourses into histories formerly focused on power and dominance.

While at the Florence Trust, Crombach has developed his interest in certain British traditions surrounding hunting and artful subterfuge. This has brought about a series of decoys – birds from the UK, Europe and Canada normally slated for target practice. Replacing traditional taxidermy with dupes, he re-configures their plastic carcasses into ornament, fixture or raw matter, mimicking our instrumental approach to the natural material with which we feed our consumer culture.

Picturing Animals in Britain, Diana Donald, Paul Mellon Centre BA: 2007

DECOY 2017 plastic hunting decoys, screws, found table, wood157 x 60 x 36 cm (left)

END OF THE CHASE 2017 polyester resin, fibreglass, wood, paint, synthetic hair46 x 139 x 40 cm (overleaf)

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INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE 2017 (installation view)oil paint on canvas, shredded canvasdimensions variable

NADIA FRANCIS

Clogged sinks, broken windows and the hoarding of refuse is to many an indication of someone’s mental condition. Nadia Francis begins from the ‘extimate’ space described by Jacques Lacan – a hybrid environment, that is simultaneously psychological and physical. Her work explores the psychoanalytic processes with which we understand internal structures, which she conceives as a form of architecture. Objects are not the characters of an internal narrative; they are metaphors for internal frameworks. Looking to examples like Ida Applebroog and Zhang Enli, her installations remain a single oeuvre intended to push the limitations of painting.

The surfaces of Francis’ canvases are for exploring, re-arranging or disintegrating the schemas that build as a result of our external experiences. Piecing together elements of our environment that may speak to or imitate states of mind, her paint moves over the canvas and onto the wall, furniture and other selected objects. She compartmentalises in the manner we all do, which is not easily understood by outsiders. Employing the soft grey/blues of a sanatorium with yellowy browns, she captures an aesthetic of the subconscious. Shredded canvases depicting boxes, ripple from only minor disturbances in their surroundings; they sway like curtains to reveal only more slashed images behind them. Manifesting the sensation of moving through memories you cannot grasp, she causes us to reflect while concealing the subject of our reflection.

Unconsciously perhaps, the clean parameters she paints in grey to contain clusters of works recall folders on a desktop. By rendering her furniture the same colour as her paintings, the connection between internal and external states is visualised. As a body veils the complexities of the mind behind a homogeneous biological front, Francis’ installations glean complexities under a uniform palette. Her work offers an exploration of our psychology without the initial distinctions of identity - a tracing of our universal affair with memory.

Construction of torus (upper row) and Klein bottle (lower row)’

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INTERNAL ARCHITECTURE 2017 (detail)oil paint on canvas, shredded canvasdimensions variable(right & bottom)

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ELENA GILEVA

Exploring the multiplicity within traditional Russian literature, theatre and ornamentation, Elena Gileva sets a site of cultural connotations, symbols and forms. She pastels the stark tones of the Russian Modernists introducing the multitude of ornamental and decorative folk iconography largely left out of the dominant discourse on 20th century Russian art.

Interested in narrative tools, Gileva adopts the fantastical aesthetic of fairy tales as a model for staging. She produces backdrops for the performance of misplaced or misunderstood icons, which she gathers from various periods in history. Her composition of objects and fabrics, which oscillate between altar and alternate universe, suggest a narrative of time travel. One of her many conceptual references for considering these spaces of confluence is the work of Victor Pelevin, entitled The Clay Machine-Gun, which proposes that the ‘past is just another place’.

As is characteristic of a fairy tale, Gileva creates both her reality and an alternate version of our world. For the Florence Trust summer exhibition, she manifests her desire to create auxiliary environments by separating her sculptures from her installation. Implying hypothetical interiors both inside and outside the church, she instigates a procession between these spaces. The work lives in the totality of static and moving pieces, completed by the ritualistic or transformative migration from one to the other. In her words ‘by producing only segments of a story, disconnecting events, the miraculous and wondrous become possible.’

Among the symbols she recreates in forms and on surfaces, are those stemming from the Abramtsevo commune. Purchased by Sava Morsov in 1870, it hosted a colony of artists endeavouring to reignite Russian folk art traditions. Later, it became the site of theatrical and operatic performances on Russian folklore with sets produced by artists such as Vasnetsov and Mikhail Vrubel. This period, and Abramtsevo’s previous life under founder Sergei Aksakov, sought to eradicate Russian art of the European influences brought about by historical intersections with figures like Peter the Great. Gileva’s complex mixture of symbols, metaphors and movements endeavours a similar re-consideration of Russian iconography. However, her interest is in exemplifying the diversity of forms and meanings available as a result of Russia’s cultural diversity. The theatricality of her work recalls Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, for its exchange of natural or architectural backdrops for conceptual landscapes of colour, font and form.

ASGARDIA (HAND OF FATIMA) 2017ceramics25 x 13 x 4 cm(left)

RITUALISTIC OBJECTS (CHALICE) 2017ceramics, textiledimensions variable(overleaf, left)

RITUALISTIC OBJECTS (MIDAS) 2017ceramics, textiledimensions variable(overleaf, right)

The Colour of Pomegranates, 1969, film still, written and directed by Sergei Parajanov.

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REBECCA GLOVER

“This is my band – SLABS”

Like Arthur Russell, John Cage and Aphex Twin before her, Rebecca Glover approaches her “instruments” not just as musical tools, but collaborators, capable of evolution and surprise. The relationship is nuanced and upon finally reaching the stage, her intention is a concert rather than a performance. The relationships built between Rebecca and her “instruments” is nuanced. From the tactile creation of these collaborative bandmates to their public presentation, the art is in the improvised, primal communication with the creative process itself.

Glover is among artists discovering and creating a multitude of natural and accidental ‘sonic objects’. She closes the distance between musician and instrument by chewing sections of paper as a part of her process of pulp making. Winding this organic material into multi-orifice vessels, she activates them with amplifiers, feedback loops and vocalists. The sound bearing similar surprises to the early days of free jazz, there is a continuous breakdown and discovery of melodies that resembles a chain of disrupted conversations, and evades any rhythmic satisfaction.

The confluence of sounds coming from the continuously varied group of activators makes the music equal parts primary, protest, call and response. Interested in ideas like Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening, Glover champions dissonance as the sound of alternative thinking. Her desire to negotiate or discover relationships between voices, is a search for harmony. However, through that process she continually discovers discord. It is as if the interaction between the human voices and the voices of the objects, mirrors the conflicts that surface in any relationship; what organically arises as a result, is control structures, behavioural patterns, disruptive habits and so forth. This musical dissonance or friction, therefore necessitates constant renegotiation which excites her as it reflects ways of responding to or being with others.

Glover’s work belongs to the quieter forms of political action that ask how we determine music from noise or the expected from the relevant. Where classical protest pushes away, this conversely invites the multitudes in. Active, totally present, playful and live, if globalism had a sound, this might be it.

SLABS release their debut EP July 1, 2017 which can be heard online @ http://rebeccaglover.co.uk/slabs

Space Odyssey 2001, 1968, film still, written and directed by Stanley Kubrick

SLABS: QUARTET 2017paper mache, feedback, speakers, amp, microphonesdimensions & duration variable(left)

SLABS: TRIO 2017paper mache, wood, rubber, feedback, speakers, microphone, amp.dimensions variable(overleaf)

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CAROLINE JANE HARRIS

The idea of a paper screen may evoke images of an opaque surface over which lines pass. Its opacity contradicting contemporary connot-ations born of the hard, transparent veil under which images move through our computer. Yet, principally our perception in both cases slices through a material border, which obscures and directs our vision. Caroline Jane Harris inverts the speed and dimensionality of binary representations by implementing an analogue approach toward processing her digital images. She lays a bitmap print-out of a JPEG over the original photograph, using a scalpel to slowly cut away individual pixels. The absent squares function as a veil and a counter-point to the printed image, slowing visual perception to heighten the viewer’s attention. The contrast between the intuitive snapshot of dappled light through a curtain and its digital reduction into gridded planes, creates a discourse on the ways of seeing and engaging with the world through various technologies over time. Harris does not only manually reproduce the digital eye through cutting; she also creates lateral rubbings that make visible the red, green and blue channels through which software reads images. These processes experiment with a photograph’s ability to show not only what our eye perceives, but the qualities of its digital composition. Her practice is essentially an endless cycle of time-consuming routines that indirectly address cultural preconceptions of value. Her personal reference is to the customs of elders in the Fujian Province of China who apply a layer of paint to their coffin each year of their life; or the monks of La Trappe who dig one spade of their grave each day. It is a measurement of time that increases awareness of its value and its passing. Likewise, the slow carving away of pixels accentuates the efficiency of the machine that creates them. An unexpected and unusual humility toward technology emerges as her work acknowledges the difference in effort and output between her and it, as they evidently operate on different planes of space-time. Her work Every second wounds, the last kills, refers to a quote by horologist John B McLemore. It documents her accumulated hours on a given work by the scalpel blades used. The sensitivity of her materials to time is suggested by the resulting fragility of what remains after her time consuming process. Despite entropy, the composition or subject of the images she dissects is never completely cut from view; various angles and optical illusions reveal glimpses of the original. Corresponding to ‘punchcards’ of ‘unit record equipment’, her cut pieces both provide and deny access to layers of perception over time. Like pulling at threads, Harris creates objects of Winformation or code that simultaneously veil and expose the complexity of what has been woven together.

MONOLITH 2017 pencil on archival pigment print, on Kozo paper102 x 60 cm(left)

SEEING THE LIGHT 2017 (detail)hand-cut archival pigment print on matte paper90 x 120 x 3 cm(overleaf)

Jacquard Loom, invented in 1801 Joseph MarieJacquard. photographer unknown

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STELLA MARIS SITTING ON COLUMBUS’ STAND 2016paper, wooden frame, found postcard from the Bermudas, British gin, Pierre Ferrand Curacao, lemon, lime, angostura bitters, martini glass, acrilyc paint, sanded wooden plynth.dimensions variable

YOI KAWAKUBO

Yoi Kawakubo adopts a phenomenological approach to research, time and history. He turned to an artistic practice after receiving his degree in neuroscience and subsequently working as a financial trader for several years.

Having come across a quote by Jorge Luis Borges on Rudolf Steiner’s blackboard drawings, Kawakubo was struck by Borges’ questioning of whether Steiner had dreamt their intuitively colourful composition. Steiner saw scientific observation, as did his mentor Goethe, as a form of observation inseparable from the subject, perception and intuition. Shifting his own perspective, Kawakubo began to consider intuitive responses as a way through mathematical reasoning, and later on vice versa. His working methodology stems from his belief that logical concepts depend on our separation from intuitive assumptions and that, within that process, imagination is needed. With a practice that includes photography, film, perfume, cocktails, wall polishing and more, he means to deliver a paradoxical and ungraspable experience to the viewer. Moving between intuitive and counterintuitive thinking, he systemically aims for a level of abstraction beyond that which may be found within our immediate physical world.

Firmly grounded in his research on personal history, geography, identity, language and dreams, his work builds from specific contexts. Material decisions are made based on their appropriateness to a given subject matter; therefore what arises has a practical or mannerist relationship to particular aesthetics.

The overall subject of his works steadily aligns with concerns of ownership and value. This includes the futility of authorship, contracts and all things that make us able to communicate or deal with the daily activity of setting a price on land, artwork or life. For a recent work entitled The Wreck of the Sea Venture (2016), Kawakubo worked via Skype with artist Yumi Nishimura who identifies as a painter – unlike himself, as he has neither studied nor practiced with this medium. Providing her with a theme for the work he was then instructed how to paint her vision using oil on canvas. The resulting image challenges aesthetic and artistic expectations, understandings of authorship and market evaluation. He produced this in parallel with a series of excavations entitled To dig a hole, in which he attempts to remove earth equal to the weight of his grandfather from common land in the UK and unrecognised territory in Japan.

Subtly, To Dig a Hole (ongoing) gestures at the impossibility of owning oneself completely, and therefore anything that we produce. Exploring speculative value systems, for his recent exhibitions Stella Maris was a Name I Found in a Dream (2016) at the Daiwa Foundation, London and Fall (2016) at Shiseido Gallery in Tokyo, he sanded graphs into the walls that forecast the economic future of the Yen vs the US Dollar and the British Pound vs the German Mark.

By weaving personal history into global occurrences and vice versa, Kawakubo displays the passing of otherwise invisible connections, turning chronologies into webs.

“Dashi” a Japanese parade float, moving down the streets of Hakata in Southern Japan, 1871, photographer unknown

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IF THE RADIANCE OF A THOUSAND SUNS WERE TO BURST AT ONCE IN THE SKIES 2016(installation view of triptych) archival pigment print from a scanned photographic film buried in a place where the radiation is 34μSV/h for 6 months, dimensions variable

ICARUS FALLS 2016(installation view)walls sanded and polished with the shape of an economic graphic chart of the forecast of the price Yen vs the US dollar for the next 20 years by a hedge fund trader.dimensions variable

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SILVIA LERÍN

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality. – Barnett Newman

Silvia Lerin’s practice stems from her present condition, exploring the limitations of material impersonation. Her refined minimalism pins down the difference between what it is to experience a thing versus being that thing. Her series An English Garden (2016) reduced the fundamental character of an iris or poppy to forms and colours that maintained the familiarity of a flower. Their bold colours and confident geometry secure our reading of them without falling into concrete realism. Playing with Baudrillard’s third simulacra her works manifest the liminal space of becoming. Reversing Magritte’s premise This is not a pipe, Lerin aspires to the edge of our imagination, where the unreal becomes reality.

A Metal Flower is a Dead Flower (2017), marked the end of her engagement with the organic world and the beginning of an exchange with structural materials. Endeavouring to manifest on canvas the impermeable and unimpressionable elements employed in our built environment.

Having abandoned the mimesis of reality early on in her career, she has worked across and beyond the canvas, in many cases producing architectural interventions. Lerin is among contemporary painters continuing to question the limitations of painting. Her exchange with materials is one of direct and immediate action and reaction. Yet a sense of control pervades, distinguishing her works as formal objects rather than emotional impressions. Recalling early conceptual painters, Lerin questions our understanding or identification of our surroundings, and art’s position within that dialogue.

Image credit: Sherwin McGehee, Getty Images

F-IRIS I 2016 acrylic on canvas and acrylic and oil on wood196 x 93 x 4.5 cm(left)

A METAL FLOWER IS A DEAD FLOWER 2017 acrylic on canvas, wood, polyester resin and fibreglass 152 x 247 x 15 cm(overleaf)

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INTERRUPTION (SOLO) 2017(installation view, The RYDER, London)performance, steel, wood, plexiglass and fluorescent light fixture20 x 180 x 60 cmphoto credit: Agnese Sanvito(top)

INTERRUPTION & DECEMBER 4TH 2017(installation view, Krinzinger Projekte, Vienna)photo credit: Jasha Greenberg(right)

WILLIAM MACKRELL

The refuse of commercial and technological developments marks accelerated periods of economic growth, and conversely its re-use can signal a decline. William Mackrell began gathering the discarded bulbs of obsolete fluorescent lighting in 2010 to assemble temporary installations that spoke of the fragile and unstable character of urban renewal. Specifically how live and work space exist under the constant threat of increasing commercial development. Flickering in irregular rhythms, the bulbs produce an anthropomorphic pulse. Describing the phenomenon, Mackrell has used the metaphor of a wounded animal. Their aggressive bursts of light, though forcing distance between them and their audience, captivates their undivided attention.

In 2016-17 this material has extended into two new works. For exhibitions directed at their political and social context, Mackrell used faulty bulbs to produce the flags of Austria December 4th (2016) and England Convulsive Repulse (2016). Those that flickered into extinction during the course of the exhibitions were replaced, and stacked in the corner like cadavers or relics, their accumulation paralleling the human condition within nations. For Mackrell, anthropomorphising their behaviour in the space directly refers to the production lines and distribution networks they pass through. Where, Mackrell points out, they are imprinted with the traces of human error that determine the unique behaviour we only witness at their death.

Interruption (2017), incorporates singers who lay still on floating vitrines in which a single faulty florescent pulsates. Producing a hum under their bodies, they respond with vocal tones that converge into a haphazard duet, a kind of fractured symbiosis.

Mackrell’s interest in the traces of human interaction with technologies also surfaces in his on-going etching over photographs. He re-inscribes the human subject through manual mark making. Referencing the Surrealists’ use of photography to reconfigure the body – to make architectural or animal – Makrell’s on-going ‘hair’ pieces disjoint the body from their clustering locks by methodically scratching them out. A purple hue emits from the photograph around where he has marked it. This discoloration is a remnant of the computer’s inability to entirely convert a colour photograph into grayscale. His manual intervention on the surface therefore exposes his digital process. Though Mackrell’s composition references works like Le Cou by Man Ray, his digital manipulation of the image confounds his attempts at achieving an identical aesthetic. This inauthenticity which gestures at nostalgic desires is as important to the work as repositioning himself, the artist’s hand, on its surface – reflecting further the human choices in what we see. For Cover Up (2016), Mackrell works over pages collected from Western art magazines that have been censored by border control in the UAE. Using black ink, any exposed body parts in reproductions of photographic art works are censored upon entry into the country. Mackrell preserves these marks, veiling the image further with a pattern of repetitive scratches over the entirety of their surface. Paralleling the nervous condition that imbues much of his work, Mackrell confronts the uneasiness of today through the material of our disposable cultures.

Le Cou, 1930, photograph, by Man Ray

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PIT SLIP 2016 c-type print etching75 x 50 cmGoldsmiths College Collection(top)

COVER UP (STRIPPER WITH BARE BREASTS) 2016 magazine image mounted on aluminium22 x 15 cmcourtesy of The RYDER, London(left)

GULP 2016c-type print etching89 x 71 cmAlbright-Knox Art Gallery Collection

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PILTDOWNPOSSIBLE_01 - PILTDOWNPOSSIBLE_07 2016 – ongoingurethane resin, pigment, marble powder, dust from old sculptureseach approx. 45 x 30 x 3 cm

RACHEL MCRAE

“Last night I had a dream that I was reading late Lacan online when suddenly the computer programme became sentient, expanding outward, beyond the confines of the hardware itself. It realised that all matter is data and began to hack and infect everything within surrounding space. The world became the computer, the hardware, and the sentient program conceptualising all things in zeros and ones, manipulating them accordingly. The ground began to crumble beneath my feet and I had to use intuitive magic to stop it.” - Rachel McRae

What will future archaeology look like? Today we mine data, distil information, capture screenshots, encrypt video and watch neural networks learn. If, decades from now, there is something to dig up, with which a picture of life now may be constructed, will it be tangible? Perhaps Google Translate’s third language will have written a history of the digital world which, only after being run through multiple algorithms, will reveal a sub-strata of relations and exchanges managing our physical experiences. Romantic as it is, we may imagine future archaeologists sitting like hackers in the dark sets of The Matrix enveloped in the matter of former computer technology.

Rachel McRae implements, at times superficially, the tools of present day excavators in her process of manifesting digital material which is otherwise ephemeral, compressed or compartmentalised. Her work formalises the layers involved in knowledge production, highlighting the collapse of linear thinking in technology’s evolution toward intuitive archiving. Integrating her findings from mudlarking along the Thames, her current work bridges between physical detritus from as early as 4500 BC, and sculpted memes of matter pulled from cyberspace. Her studio is a haven for the pastel, the occult and the ersatz.

While Post-Internet Art tends to linger on screens, grasping for concrete aesthetics within our fluid condition, McRae extracts its plasticity and sludge, smearing it across the floor to poke at with ranging poles.

Snap-shot from Rachel McRae’s studio wall at the Florence Trust, 2017

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UNTITLED 2017epoxy, jesmonite, pigment, marble powder, dust from old sculptureseach approx. 65 x 65 x 60 cm(top)

DIGITAL&DEAD 2017(detail)target for an augmented reality work (digitalanddead.com), urethane resin, marble dust, pigment, by Rachel McRae & Sarah Deratdimensions variable(right)

UNTITLED 2017ranging poles, hair extensions, modular elastic snap-on/clip-on system, hag stones, oyster shells with unknown origins/use mudlarked from the banks of the Thamesdimensions variable

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YET, SHE PERSISTED 2017 giclee print on paper 70 x 70 cm

ANASTASIA MINA

Observing the ways in which posterity is embedded in our cultural routines, how it manifests in notes on the back of photographs carefully wrapped in tissue, and so forth, Anastasia Mina layers, magnifies, prints, embellishes and marks these elements into ambiguity. A method of personal historicising that explores her intuitive attraction to the particulars of figures within an image; having previously worked with found photographs, over the last year she has begun a study of her own family’s photographic archives. Working over these images with pencil and charcoal her process follows an internal logic resembling that of a checklist. As elements are fully ‘understood’ they disappear into obscurity. A complete inversion of knowledge production, Mina does not desire or imagine that it’s possible to reveal cultural truths buried within a snapshot; what she hides behind the opacity of her pencil marks is her own truth. Growing-up in Cyprus, a politicised geography over which the iconography of one group has often been razed for the resurrection of another, understanding and erasing are mentally coupled. Simultaneously precious and pragmatic, religious and cultural symbols are therefore psychologically deconsecrated by their continuous destruction and regeneration. Mina believes that archival photographs are in this context an excuse to talk about cultural belonging. After re-printing the images, monumentalising or minimising their scale, she desecrates or fragments their surface, an act inseparable from her hereditary tenuousness with cultural objects. Mina’s works may be read first as an antithesis to preciousness, however, her rapport with paper involves a deep respect. For Untitled vii (2017), she digitally layered the pattern, on the material she found protecting the original photograph, over its composition of figures before reprinting the mélange on 152 x 310 cm Somerset enhanced paper. Conflating these two narratives, the event and its guardian, subtly comments on what gestures of care say about an object, as well as a society.

For Mina, images function as a material trigger of cultural sensibilities that she adopts or rejects throughout her process of deconstructing them. Her uncertainty about the actual context of these images within her own family history, lost with the memories of their subjects, allows her this immediate relationship with their content. By making choices about what to obscure, she endeavours to create her own cultural framework of interpretation, independent of her inherited perspective. A process she hopes causes an awareness within the viewer about the decisions involved in perception, which make fixed meaning impossible.

Over the last two years, Mina has begun working with artist Helen Michael under the collective title miprojects. Similar to her independent practice, they collect correspondence about personal, cultural and political conditions, between friends in Greece and London. These exchanges have become a platform for discussing global politics and states of instability, which have manifested in performances of live translations and video works.

Photo taken by Anastasia Mina in Cyprus

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UNTITLED I 2017 pigment print on sandpaper29.7 x 21 cm

UNTITLED II 2017 pigment print on sandpaper29.7 x 21 cm

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THE ENCLAVE VARIATIONS2017performance with Nadav Brand and Luca Somigli: an evolving composition with found materials, drums and guitar at Enclave, London

CLAIRE NICHOLS

The cycle of making, collapsing and exhibiting forms the core of Claire Nichols’ practice. Interested in the designed sites of studio and gallery spaces, she begins with existing material from these physical, temporal and hypothetical environments. During her residency at Despina, in Rio de Janeiro, Nichols began to consider her position within this short-lived space of production and display. Inhabiting the city and residency as an observer attuned to the rhythms of transitory materials, off-cuts or refuse, her work began to engage with temporality and ‘thingness’, contradicting methodologically the expected outcomes or ‘use of space’ within such an environment. An exercise she has continued at the Florence Trust, Nichols began by taking down the walls of her studio, gathering the discarded matter of its past and present inhabitants. Over the course of these two occupancies, her exploration of ‘thingness’ has involved exchanges with estranged bits of glass and fabric, as well as overlooked masonry patterns in a public square. They become notes or gestures read by dancers and musicians whom Nichols invites to engage with them as they would sheet music or stage direction. As her ‘inviting’ and ‘borrowing’ becomes routine to her fellow residents, things appear within her space that she did not select, but which are thought to belong with her. Without diminishing her unilateral position within the composition, she gives agency to the objects within her environment by inviting this constellation of actants. Periodically Nichols takes down, removes or paints sections, accepting the outcome of intersections along the way. Describing the work as an organism, rather than a sculpture or installation, she poignantly evades a clear ending. Living and developing, the precarious balances erected and exchanged within the space seem to mirror the delicate ecosystem of the residency. The work is, as the artist, in constant evolution. Existing beyond brief performances or fixed bodies, within unexpected and ongoing collaborations with other artists, materials or geographies, that grow organically. Small books of drawings that behave more like dialogue than document, between her and her assemblages, sit quietly at the border. A site for articulating and exploring her ideas around improvisation, she treats the space of the book as an echo of her interventions, each folio a chamber reverberating and riffing on traces of the marks made on the previous pages.

Tournament Edros vs Oides (Open City, June 1979). Photograph courtesy of Archivo Histórico José Vial Armstrong, Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseño, PUCV.

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oH 2017artist book, acrylic and marker pen on paper 19 x 13 x 1.3 cm(below)

THE FT VARIATIONS 2016-17 (detail)evolving composition with found materials at the Florence Trustdimensions variable(bottom)

THE FT VARIATIONS 2016-17 (installation view)evolving composition with found materials at the Florence Trustdimensions variable(top)

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KADIE SALMON

With references going back as far as Jean-Honore Fragonard and Douglas Sirk, Kadie Salmon’s interest in the exaggerated fantasy world of nineteen-fifties’ melodramas centres on the romantic language they developed for portraying the ideals of the time. Salmon mines their erotic vocabulary, which she believes is obscured by our desensitised relationship with contemporary sexual content.

The conditions that vintage erotica conforms to, prescribe stages for fulfilling certain desires. They involve prolonging a sense of restraint, with a sequential set of reveals that promise a climax. Salmon balances these expectations with 20th century cinema’s other invention, the anti-narrative or anti-climax; this is a format that evades a clear beginning, middle and end, employing similar methods of seduction to the former, only this time leaving the viewer with a sense of incompletion.

Her photographic works pull elements from film, art history and literature that have become regularly employed as archetypes of desire and melancholy – such as a picket fence in front of a white washed church or wooden lighthouse. Hand-tinting each image, she produces multiples in which black and white become tools for cutting through the seductiveness of colour. One of every two reproductions is commonly crumpled into a three-dimensional form, occupying space in the present and complicating the image’s content. This action means to acknowledge the fragility of its narrative; as flimsy and ephemeral as the paper it’s printed on the picture is incapable of being that which it contains. These forms are supported by crude off-cuts of wood that are hand-coloured with pencil. Their simplified and desperate character gives them a childlike aesthetic, which Salmon likes for its association with attempts at becoming an unabashed failure.

Her works extend through their framing; spare mantles pin photographs to the wall, continuing like limbs beyond the edge of the paper to support smaller, auxiliary works. Usually site-specific, their mise en scène is carefully considered through a series of preparatory maquettes. Drawing the viewer through the space, she relishes in attempting to prolong viewership. Placing small zenith’s throughout her installations she provokes her viewers attention with the fear of missing out.

All That Heaven Allows, 1955, film still, Directed by Douglas Sirk

BLUE GREY (CHURCH II) 2016 (detail)hand coloured photograph120 x 128 cm(left)

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BLUE GREY (LIGHTHOUSE II) 2017mixed media sculpture145 x 85 x 78 cm (top, left)

BLUE GREY (LIGHTHOUSE III) 2017mixed media sculpture173 x 132 x 60 cm(top, right)

BLUE GREY (LIGHTHOUSE I) 2017mixed media sculpture142 x 123 x 44 cm(right)

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