There are just a couple of days until art_house_life @ 35 Madeira Road opens its doors to the general public once again as part of Ventnor Fringe Festival.
The CURIOS exhibition will feature recent work from eleven local, national and international artists who produce mixed media and interactions that are enquiring and unpredictable.
Within this feature you can find out more about five of the exhibiting artists:
- Alicia French
- Teresa Grimaldi
- Dominique Leoni
- Ella Clocksin
- Maya Malfatti
- Izzy Kori
See part one of this feature published earlier in the week, when you can find out more about the other five exhibiting artists.
Alicia French
Instagram @french.alicia
Website: www.aliciafrench.co.uk/
Alicia French’s art practice lies within the uncanniness of everyday life and twisting things to rebirth something new; extracting the strangeness from the ordinary to investigate the known and unknown, comfort and discomfort, the familiar and the unfamiliar.
From exploring the uncomfortableness of trypophobia and arachnophobia, to abstracting and reinventing the natural world around us. Inspired by her surroundings, she collects natural materials from her encompassing landscape of local woodland and beaches, which go on to inspire her diverse practice of drawing, painting, sculpture, and film.
Teresa Grimaldi
Instagram @teresagrimaldiartist
‘The little story of right hand, left hand’ from Night of the Hunter
Over the years I have collected a series of suitcases of ‘stuff’, contained and labelled and packed away for a rainy day. I have intermittently experimented with impromptu performances and unpacking of these cases, labelled as kitchen kitsch, unfinished aliens, doll parts etc.
One of the cases that I have come back to for art- house -life is ‘Selection of glove puppets’ I have played with the idea of (un)animating the archive. In a former life, designing for the Puppet Theatre was not ultimately fulfilling. I often felt the need to release the puppet from its life on the stage, not wanting to be like the pushy parent of a child actor (surely not every puppet wants to act). Puppets released to perform more everyday, mundane actions and tasks such as doing the washing up. I have played with sculptural ‘copies’ of puppet forms set in plaster and completely unable to act. I am struggling to evoke a sense of helplessness – which somewhat mirrors personal feelings of life in present times.
I hope to perform several ‘actions’ within the installation space during the duration of the exhibition.
Dominique Leoni
Instagram: @dominiqueleonistudio
Dominique originally trained in ceramic design at Central Saint Martins and is a mixed media artist, predominantly producing works on paper. Her work explores the interrelationships between spontaneous, incidental and considered mark making.
Sumi ink brush strokes often initiate the process and determine the fundamental composition. Further development with pen and graphite, layers of colour and sometimes collage, affords a decorative and delicate quality to the works.
Ella Clocksin
Instagram: @ellaclocksin_artist_studio
Website: ellaclocksin.com
Ella is a contemporary British artist and freelance art tutor, based in Oxford. In recent years, her painting practice has evolved from abstracting the purely visual from observation, to making abstracts mostly of particular soundscapes. The two different projects shown in CURIOS are based on contrasting acoustic landscapes.
The Birdsong Perceptual Field series was made in ancient woodlands in the stillness and silence of the first lockdown in 2020. The extraordinary birdsong of that strange time is the primary subject matter, though other sounds of trees, leaves and animals are also sources for my moment-by-moment abstract notations. The project was supported by an Arts Council England grant for an ‘At Home’ residency, mediated by Jelly, Reading.
The Soundings series was made in June 2022 during an on-site residency at Jelly, a community arts charity based in the Broad Street Mall in Reading. The sounds of a busy shopping centre inform all the mark-making here. The muzak, the (usually) muffled voices, the footfall of security staff, cleaners, shoppers and wanderers, and the persistent hum of white noise and muffling effect of the echoes all find abstract forms here.
Ella works on paper in watercolour, gouache and drawing media because their material qualities allow for an immediacy of response to the flow of acoustic perception in real time. The limited colour palettes reflect her focus on giving visual form to abstract (non-semantic, wordless) sound, without introducing descriptive colour. That said, the blue in the Birdsongs does have something to do with the air or sky. And the indigo paint in the Soundings series somehow cross-references the indigo calligraphy on some Chinese bowls she’d been looking at just before the residency.
Maya Malfatti
Instagram: @malgraphy
Website: malgraphy.com/maya-malfatti-art.html
Often using organic material like petals or leaves in her sculptural work Maya is creating possible movements in time as it expresses change in shape, colour, texture and eventually existence.
So whenever you meet the object it is depicting the very moment and will have changed (as it had changed before), even slightly, after some time has passed. Noticed or unnoticed.
Processes slow down, when careful, curious observation of “what’s left” is crucial to perception.
We don’t know how these objects will change over time, nor do we have any idea how, if at all, they will continue to relate to each other, this speaks to the ways in which we all experience the future.
As a self-employed graphic designer Maya’s work is interwoven with the often three-dimensional, as well as illustrative approach seen in her commissioned contracts.
Izzy Kori
Instagram: @izzarts_
Isabelle Kori is a first year student at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University. She studied her Art Foundation year at the Island Innovation VI Form Campus, Isle of Wight.
Her work is multidisciplinary, currently in a carnivalesque style and explores our relationship with the inanimate, be this in the form of props, characters or animals.
She is showing ‘hello’ – a wall installation experimenting with puppet, shadow and movement.
She is concurrently showing ‘neigh 2’ a window installation at the ARCH Window Gallery, Ryde High Street 27th July – 15th August 2022.
Find out more
See the art_house_life Website for more information and listen to the podcast with co-founder, Jo Kori speaking to Jack Whitewood from Ventnor Fringe.
Ventnor Fringe Festival takes place between 22nd – 31st July 2022.
Check to Ventnor Fringe Website for full programme details. You can book tickets online or by calling into Ventnor Exchange, 11 Church Street, Ventnor PO38 1SW.
Our thanks to art_house-life for sponsoring this feature. They and other Fringe acts taking paid promotion enables you to continue reading OnTheWight for free.
