‘In Real Life’: Graduate Exhibition

Hauser & Wirth Somerset are delighted to host the inaugural student-led graduate exhibition, 'In Real Life', this Summer. Taking place at The Maltings in Bruton, Somerset the show features the work of ten recent BA (Hons) graduates from four regional universities in the South West including: Arts University Bournemouth, Bath Schools of Art & Design, Falmouth University and the University of the West of England. Contributing artists include: Melody Addo, Betsy Bond, Samantha Davies, Kamila Dowgiert, Juliet Duckworth, Louise Hall, Lauren Horrell, Lilith Piper, Madeline Rolt and Connor Vickery-Gearty. With a number of university presentations postponed or cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, 'In Real Life' is an opportunity for recent graduates to show their work during this challenging period. This international initiative continues at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles in the Autumn, partnering with Cal State LA to feature the work of selected MFA graduate students of the class of 2020 within the Book and Printed Matter Lab. Learn more here. 'In Real Life' is on show at The Maltings, West End, Bruton BA10 0BB. The exhibition runs from Wednesday 29 July – Sunday 2 August, 11 am – 4 pm. Entry is free, and no booking is required. We ask that visitors continue to follow all government guidance onsite by maintaining social distancing and wearing a face mask that covers the nose and mouth whilst in the buildings.   About the artists: Melody Addo BA (Hons) Fine Art, Bath Schools of Art & Design Melody Addo's practice belongs to the existentialist plane, focused on personal experiences. The artist channels her emotions through art, using it as a means to interpret the self and works in photography, video, installation, performance and sculpture.  Addressing the uneasy coexistence of the mind and the body, Addo chooses not to limit her creative output. The artist takes a holistic and natural approach to sourcing objects and her creative output: letting concepts flow and be expressed how they need to be, without forcing them to be narrowed into a particular physical format. Addo utilises common objects and utilities - like toilet paper, wool and a bidet – to rarer or more carefully selected (or topic-targeting) materials – like Ghanaian traditional fabrics and fake blood – in different ways.Betsy Bond BA (Hons) Contemporary Arts Practice, Bath Schools of Art & Design Betsy Bond’s work reflects on domestic spaces and the objects we choose to represent ourselves and our ideals. Focusing on the display of artworks, she investigates relationships between gallery spaces and the art exhibited, concentrating on the impact of temporal and spatial contexts in exhibitions and their influence on the accessibility of and responses to art. A result of these explorations is the design and construction of miniature gallery spaces, which also allow for the impact of scale on art to be explored. The miniature gallery manifests different ways for Bond to explore her work, the creative process and the art world. Samantha Davies BA (Hons) Fine Art, Bath Schools of Art & Design Samantha Davies is a multimedia artist who works with sound and sculptural space.  Attracted towards the otherworldly and spiritual: E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Star Wars fuelled the artists imagination as a child.  The theme of alienation resonated deeply with Davies, sparking a life-long obsession to understand the self and consciousness. Curious about how an awareness of sound, and sustained practice of listening, can transform consciousness through receptive insight. The artists' sound installations have evolved through experimentation in listening to found sounds and field recordings, resulting in natural and synthetic soundscapes delivered to an audience in the form of interactive sculptures and spaces to inhabit.  The sculptures bring about a heightened awareness of the listener’s body, signposting toward an interdependent relationship between the material and immaterial, the ordinary and otherworldly.  Kamila Dowgiert BA (Hons) Fine Art, Arts University Bournemouth Kamila Dowgiert’s work has always revolved around finding a way to reflect on her own experiences with buildings and relationship with space and place, as well as exploring the themes of movement, displacement, and loss through migration. The transitory nature of bread is a metaphor for a constant change of houses in the artist’s life despite her young age. Through this installation, Dowgiert is inviting the audience to join the melancholy journey of exploring her roots and sense of belonging, allowing others to reflect on their own relationship with heritage, home, and space.   Juliet Duckworth BA (Hons) Fine Art, Bath Schools of Art & Design Juliet Duckworth shows concern with temporality and topography of the earth’s surface. Her practice deals with materiality, scale and physical process. Artworks are often constructed using natural materials and found objects which when transformed into sculptural forms are often ephemeral. The liminal space just above and just below the surface is a source of inspiration. The ordinary and often unnoticed surfaces under our feet are a continuing source of material. Using organic materials, there is a relinquishing of control by the artist over the end result. The physical processes involved demonstrate where the point of control on the surface is between artist and the hidden. After the initial decision of material and location, the material is left for space and nature to sculpt. Influenced by the Anti-Form sculptors, Duckworth works from the principles that form should be derived from the inherent qualities of material. Louise Hall BA (Hons) Fine Art, Arts University Bournemouth A UK-based multidisciplinary artist that focuses on performance, printmaking and sculpture, Louise Hall explores conversations on postcolonial ideas around the Black British experience and the diaspora. Through the materiality of fabric and language, the artists' work investigates social issues within the UK and the BAME experience, challenging concerns of colonial narrative and history, and the impact within education and many other aspects of society. The use of non-violent imagery within the works represent violent traumatic events with ties to plantations, colonial history and transatlantic slave trade. Lauren Horrell BA (Hons) Fine Art, University of the West of England Lauren Horrell's practice incorporates domestic materials, a presence of materialistic goods, and an un-cluttering of belongings. Assemblages of over-consumption from mass-produced possessions are turned into a labour of love: hand sewn to create something new. A feminine touch that weaves and sews putting life into these objects, as they stand there and grow. The artist uses crafts as a source of recovery, a psychological release, and a way to recover from the future, that we have yet the chance to change. Lilith Piper BA (Hons) Fine Art, Falmouth University Lilith Piper works in painting, textile, print, drawing and performance. Her works draw on a rich history of folkloric, magical and mythological imagery which she employs not as mere representation but as an active reimagining and evocation of collective archetypes. Drawing on a repressed but powerful history of feminine sexuality, ritual, wisdom and practice – one in which women were routinely cast as abject and feminine pleasure as a kind of terror or poison – she redeploys and reimagines various cultural stories, histories and myths, recovering them from fairy-tales and folklore in order to reanimate them for the contemporary world. Her works operate as powerful, poetic images and objects, flowing and flickering into existence like the formless, fluid sounds of a song – reclaimed from a repressive patriarchy to which they were both subject and object, a journey out of Eden retold by a new Eve.* Madeline Rolt BA (Hons) Fine Art, Falmouth University Madeline Rolt's sculptures play with flatness and form, surface and depth, and languages of painting, drawing, illustration and animation to conjure enigmatic but highly affecting image-objects that are like sketches from a story, stumbling into space. There's a charming and at times unsettling awkwardness, which emphasises these objects operation as approximations, imaginings, pictures made poem, made sculpture, made prop. Shapes are cut and folded, collaged and formed into ‘things’, at once fleeting and uncertain, like an idea or a thought, but weighted with meaning, with a history of pictures played out and performed.* Connor Vickery-Gearty BA (Hons) Fine Art, Falmouth University Connor Vickery-Gearty’s material is not just the industrial objects, machinery and detritus he employs in his sculptures and prints, but the forces of gravity, of weight, of substance and stuff, that exert their influence on and across his work. Using industrial objects to print and make marks, he also employs them directly, producing a taught poetics of matter: tightening, flattening, stretching, pushing. Objects are brought into a highly charged relation with each other – opened out, pressed together. Released now from any former function or ‘use’ they are free instead to enter into new configurations, new operations – charging the space with a tangible tension, a haptic language of force made visible, made physical.*   Also open on Bruton High Street, 'Realising Form' continues at Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset. The exhibition invites a dialogue between six makers from across the British Isles and Ireland, each who share a rigorous and intuitive approach to unearthing objects and vessels, handcrafted in clay, iron, concrete, glass and Jesmonite. Make is open Wednesday to Saturday, 10 am – 1 pm and 2 pm – 4pm at 13 High Street Bruton,  BA10 0AB. This project is part of #artforbetter, and reflects Hauser & Wirth’s longstanding philanthropic framework with plans to extend university partnerships and graduate exhibitions in further locations. Among its current charitable initiatives, the gallery is donating 10% of gross profits from all of its online exhibitions to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization.

* Texts written by Martin Clark, Director of Camden Arts Centre, London.