WHY PATTERNS?

No 20 Arts, London, 2018

Artists: Biggs & Collings, Noel Forster, Michael Kidner, Richard Kirwan, Anna Mossman, Márton Nemes, Sachiyo Nishimura, Brigitte Parusel, Charley Peters, Michal Raz, Martyn Simpson, Caroline Streck, Daniel Sturgis and David R Watson

The exhibition (co-curated with David R Watson) explores pattern as a persistent theme in current practice across painting, photography, drawing and sculpture. Taking its title from a seminal work by American composer Morton Feldman, it posits the continued relevance and allure of pattern as both methodology and content in contemporary Art and Design. Pattern is treated as something optically, haptically and psychologically rich, but also resonant as a non-hierarchical way of constructing and ordering visual experience.

CARTS AND RAFTS - NEW ARTISANS IN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE

Centenary Gallery, Camberwell College of Arts, London, 2001

Artists: Grayson Perry, Simon Perriton, Charlotte von Poehl, Jane Wilbraham, ArtLab, Kathrin Boehm, Jonathan Callan, DJ Simpson, Martyn Simpson, Gavin Wade

Carts and Rafts explores the re-emergence of the handmade artefact in current practice. It showcases artists whose methods involve extended periods of laborious production and hand-building skills. This is not necessarily about craft, however; there were no long periods of training acquiring rarefied skills or traditional techniques under the tutelage of ‘masters’.Instead, what defines this work is the artists’ investment in self-evolved, idiosyncratic methods of production. Often the commitment of time in developing and executing these methods is excessive and un-economic by normal measures. The artist can be imagined fashioning objects on the kitchen table, in the back room or the shed. Frequently the artefacts appear rough-hewn or ‘DIY’. The processes are transparent, self-evident and democratic. The materials and processes are accessible and familiar - more hobbyist than high art - but the effects are optically exciting, tactile and involving. Underpinning all of these artists’ methodologies is a declaration of faith in the act of making and crafting an artwork, not as a protest against what has become the over-conceptualised, dematerialised orthodoxy of contemporary practice, but as a means of complicating the conceptual story with hints of the ‘pleasure principle’, excess and a more evasive, non-verbal experience.

PERFIDY - SURVIVING MODERNISM

Couvent de La Tourette, Lyon & Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, 2000/2001

Artists: David Batchelor, Jonathan Callan, Sally Cox, Thomas Demand, Ana Genovese, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Peter Halley, Gerard Hemsworth, John Plowman, Charlotte von Poehl, Ruth Root, Eva Rothschild, Martyn Simpson, Johnny Spencer, Daniel Sturgis, Shizuka Yokomizo 

The exhibition originated as an intervention at Le Corbusier's Convent, Sainte Marie de La Tourette. It was the first such show in the building's history. Taking as its starting point the architect's entreaty to the Dominican's for whom it was built "to refuse any gift in the form of... images [or] statues", the exhibition investigated the ideas of living with the legacy of modernism. and of the faith inherent in it; faith in the ideas of progress and originality, and faith in the purity of abstraction, the monochrome and minimalism.

The artists selected all wrestle with these modernist tropes while perfidiously contaminating them with ideas which, arguably, led to the end of the modernist project - the readymade, pop culture, decoration, parody. By entertaining contradictory impulses and aesthetics, they acknowledge the flaws in that project while declaring an allegiance to an impure version of its ideals.