Blank Media Collective

Freedom From Selection | BLANKSPACE

25 February - 6 March 2011, BLANKSPACE, Manchester

FREEDOM FROM SELECTION PUBLIC PREVIEW: Thursday 24 February 2011, 6-9pm
EXHIBITION CONTINUES: Friday 25 February - Sunday 6 March 2011
BLANKSPACE, Manchester

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
David McNab | Eileen O’Rourke | Hannah Ainsworth | Helen McGhie | Sarah Nicholson

EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS:
Freedom From Selection is an exhibition exploring human biology - clinical psychiatry, the make-up of the nervous system, genetics and health; each translated into absorbing works in varying media - sometimes shocking, sometimes humourous - forming an artistic investigation into these areas from a group of five contemporary artists.

How does an individual act of ‘making’ relate to the extensive research and trial and error that lead scientists to uncover new and often radical theories, cures and discoveries?

The relationship between art and science has been an ongoing experimental search for answers. From the detailed works of Leonardo da Vinci to the groundbreaking exhibition ‘Body Worlds’ by Dr Gunther von Hagens, artists and scientists have forayed into the unknown to develop new understandings and stimulate their prospective audiences. Freedom From Selection is a new take on this evolving relationship and the way in which a group of artists respond to human biology in their own personal and thought-provoking ways.

Selected works from Freedom From Selection are available for purchase from BlankMarket, Blank Media Collective’s online store.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

| OPENING TIMES:
Monday, Wednesday, Thursday & Friday 1-7pm | Tuesday 1-9pm | Saturday & Sunday 11am-4pm

WITH THANKS TO:
Ask Developments, Manchester | Fred Aldous, Manchester | Lazy Daisies, Stockport | Sandbar, Manchester | Barefoot Wine

Participating Artists

Hannah Ainsworth: Untitled

The processes when creating the artwork put stress on the human body and mind. Built using hand-held repetitive actions, Hannah Ainsworth’s work touches upon endurance and the lasting memory of intimate action. The material tires as the artist’s hands do and the final work becomes a product that is finished by repetitive strain injury. The tape catalogues the artist’s movement, with translucent traces of her fingerprint on each rolled piece of tape. The perceptual properties of the work confronts the body with a material it does not recognise. It’s state moves between mist, a gelatinous sludge and soft fur. Conceptually in-tune with phenomenology and embodiment, one becomes aware of our bodies when we view the work. One is aware of looking, judging and considering the artwork through the biological structures that instruct awareness in our bodies.
Eileen O'Rourke: Untitled

Eileen O’Rourke makes beautifully intricate and delicately executed drawings. Whilst differing in the methods and materials used, the works presented for her MA degree show achieve harmony not just through the influence of the artist’s earlier undergraduate degree in embroidery but by the visceral quality with which the works are charged.

For part one of her presentation, Untitled, human hairs collected and dyed into a variety of colours have been threaded through a series of ‘canvases’. Made from sections of bed sheet, these canvases are stretched across five circular embroidery frames of differing sizes.

Installed linearly on the wall, each work presents a visually complex mass of tangled lines that snake across the surface, producing images reminiscent of topographical maps. Whilst one of the works in particular is certainly suggestive of a human head in profile, a conversation with the artist at the preview clarifies that this is unintentional against its grain.

By producing images that allude to the fabric of our interior landscape, O’Rourke’s work makes us think about the body. Through her use of human hair, bed sheets and the ever present evidence of the piercing power of needles and pins, however, O’Rourke doesn’t just make us think about the body, she physically implicates it as well.
Helen McGhie: Serving Suggestions

“Femininity and the consumption of food are intimately connected and, in women, fatness is taken to signify both a loss of control and a failure of feminine identity.” - Rosemary Betterton

Serving Suggestions is an ironic project that appropriates existing visual codes involved within contemporary cookery programming in order to examine the current identity construction of the stereotypically ‘ideal’ Western female. Helen McGhie has chosen to use food as a metaphor as it unites woman’s ‘interior’ body (digestive system) with her ‘exterior’ image (fat/thin), and is vital to the maintaining of a socially acceptable ‘proper’ identity.

The artist’s intention was for the revolting ‘cookery’ videos (made up of ingredients including Menstrual Blood and Body Fat) to reference the concealing and revealing of ones own appearance. As many women actively disguise natural image with make-up products, ‘concealing’ has become a modern day feminine ritual. According to psychoanalytic discourse, the original “[..] state of the subject is disgust” (Hal Foster, The Politics of the Signifier II) and as women have a particular link with body liquidity, the representation of unpleasant ‘interior’ substances symbolise a more realistic female identity than the cosmetic façade that make up signifies.
David McNab: Ice Bloom

David McNab aims to produce work that is firmly materialistic and ‘immanent’, and which focuses on shifting intensities of energy, rhythm, and ‘in-between’ spaces. McNab frequently draws inspiration from popular science literature and broadcasts, as well as from poetry, film and sound. His work inevitably seems to reflect the artist’s background as a consultant in clinical psychiatry.

McNab’s methods include drawing, fabricating assemblages and installations, photography, video, performance, and writing. He often works with ‘found objects’.
Frequently the work is predicated on significant research.

David McNab is particularly interested in exploring the view of both organic and inorganic nature as autonomous continual processes of becoming, rather than fixed anthropocentric phenomena. A central metaphor is that of embryogenesis, where development is non-linear, with simultaneous accelerating and decelerating migration of multiple groups of cells. So, for example, thought can be viewed as a ‘larval’ process of shifting, flowing, pre-actualised consciousness.

The objects presented were predominantly picked up from the street. One could impose a scientific, classificatory linear treatment of these found objects, where their form might be understood according to their original packaging functions, referring them back to their design and manufacture. Equally valid, however, these discarded abject multiples are re-presented, re-defined en masse. We artistically refocus on the overlooked unstoppable autonomy of life’s processes, as John Lennon said ‘life is what happens when we are busy making other plans’.
Sarah Nicholson: Ganglion

Ganglia provide relay points and intermediary connections between different neurological structures in the body, such as the peripheral and central nervous systems. The term Ganglion usually refers to the peripheral nervous system and is associated with a variety of functions: motor control, cognition, emotions and learning. In vertebrates, a plexus is an area where nerves branch and rejoin. The electrical signals do not mix - rather, the fibers travel together with their electrical signals separate.

As a chronic migraine sufferer artist Sarah Nicholson is interested in exploring how the condition has affected both her creativity and her personal development. Nicholson is particularly interested in its effects on language, speech, interpretation, and creativity and in the perception of non-migraineurs of these phenomena. Nicholson has many different symptoms of migraine, most distressing being the loss of vocabulary; “that “tip of the tongue” moment where meaning is lost and people look at me as if I am stupid”.

All this has led to Nicholson’s fascination with the impossibility of communication; with the mystery of language which remains opaque and inadequate no matter how large one’s vocabulary. This recognition of the impossible exists in the work’s references to the body and its internal systems of pure communication, here rendered in that most domestic of accomplishments: knitting. The works’ pink, organic form suggests the interiority of the body and aims to provoke the irrational fear and disgust at the visceral.

Nicholson is interested in notions of women’s memory and identity, and how the social and personal rituals of recording or censoring effect the construction of personal histories. Her works’ primary concern is the historical position of women within society, and the role of memory in securing or weakening that place.

Female epistemology, in the form of gossip, old wives tales, and fairy tales is not a tradition respected in our society. The disruption of information between matrilineal generations is encouraged by this devaluation of experience and skills.

The value placed on women’s work is central to Nicholson’s works, with their focus on the processes of domestic magic and the links forged between the activities of the hands and the rituals of fairy tales that lull the work along.

Fairy tales spend so much time devaluing women’s work and yet insist that if you slave away in silence, like a good girl, then your handsome prince will someday come and rescue you from the drudgery of the kitchen. Yet without the bonds formed and the wisdom passed on, from mother to daughter during this time alone together, how ever would women’s escape from domestic confinement have been forged?

This process led work has taken Nicholson nearly a year to complete; first teaching herself how to knit on four needles and then processing the repetitive task. This is one skill that no female relative could impart.