ARTICLES
EXIT REVIEW

Liverpool Hope University College


D'OA ABBAS

A set of concentric wire ovals and cones hang, or rather protrude from the wall and cascade, in a taught spiders web like manner to the floor. The sculptures themselves are made of short, straight pieces of wire which are joined together in a crazy paving like manner. Abbas' sculptures have an interesting delicacy which tends to make the viewer engage with then as if they were physical spatial drawings. There is something Kapoor about their funnel like shapes. One is aware of both their internal, as well as external surface and volume. However, their relatively small scale takes away from this. Although financial and other concerns would prevent the use of scale that Kapoor has recently experimented with, the small scale of Abbas' work tends to encourage the viewer not to consider them as intimate, but rather to view them as somehow 'manageable'. Good ideas for more ambitious work.

John Byrne


Sculptural drawings inhabiting a corner. The installation is clear and
simple. Good to see such focus. Echos of the drawings of Henry Moore - a
structure of lines to describe what reads as an abstracted natural form.
Resonances of organic structures, plant stems, extraskeletal creatures,
which I found worked most effectively when the piece is least gestural and
where it succeeds in addressing and relating to the space. One section
trails suggestively out of the window like the tendril of a plant; a more
narrative language which is somehow less resonant than the parts which
resist interpretation - could this part have been conceived less as a
'tendril' and more as an 'extension'? Another section starts just a foot
from the floor and rises to above the top of the wall; it addresses the
limits of its site whilst literally and figuratively going beyond them. This
relationship with site needs to be developed much further - the work is by
necessity physically attached to the surfaces of the space yet seems in this
installation more an accessory to it than an intervention in it - and it
would have been a relief to see some work making a clear critical relation
with these degree show 'pigeonholes'.

Imogen Stidworthy


Abbas's creeping, sprawling, slender wire frame steel structures are the geometric antithesis of the computer generated 'wire frame'. Computer wire frame - the mathematically structured and three dimensional rendering of an unseen form in order to work out the structural properties, surface areas, internal and external factor dimensions.
Abbas's wire frames remind me of a different geometry. One of intuition. We may ask ourselves are these constructs finished, or are they indeed in a state of construction, waiting to receive a further layer to cover the frames - for frames are constructed to receive something - to complete the job.
As we debate whether or not Abbas's objects are finished or unfinished, their current state recognises that thing we call 'a minimalist quality'. The question of whether or not the work goes beyond the slenderness of the 3mm fine steel wire frame - held together by braised horizontal, diagonal and vertical junctions - is as resolved as the pieces themselves.
Does the work contain, or did the process of 'making' contain some powerful ideas about life or architecture or are they just pretty ornaments that look good when they stand in the way of light to form beautiful shadows?

Paul Sullivan

What seems at first a attractive proposition loses by a half-hearted enagement with space. The open-closed forms are not brought to their logical conclusion and the painstaking welding is not activated in the connections between form and surface. The protrusions coming out of the window are contrived and make me long for the olfactory route Ernesto Neto follows within his self-created confines. Nevertheless the installation evokes a certain compassion with this wormlike network of wire amoebas and I would be curious to see the project significantly enlarged in a dedicated space where we perhaps begin to sense the aspect of a 3-D material drawing.

Paul Domelar

KAREN ARMSTRONG

Armstrong's work consists of a simple, though reasonably effective installation of rubber casts of garments. A litany of them appear hung on a set of rail hangers. Shirts, Socks, Underwear. There are folded jackets on available window ledges. The colours of this personal rubber wardrobe appear to be the muted pastel colours fashionable in this years season of graduate work. There is potential in this work. The strange, almost creepy collection of garments are obviously intended to act as an indexes of some other conceptual referent. Quite what that is I'm unsure of. As with many of the other artists exhibiting in the Hope show, Armstrong has identified a set of materials and techniques that could now be deployed in interesting, challenging and evocative ways. As yet the ideas and the subject matter do not appear to caught up quite yet.

John Byrne

The installation in the main hall does not stand a chance prodded up against the red brick wall. The grid laid over is suffocated by visual clutter around the work - in order for it to work the installation needs to be brought into a more neutral space as the latex casts are downstairs in the studio. Here the verdict remains undecided which in part seems the intention of the work. However the dysfunctional stillness of the casts is not activated between archive and collection. It is not clear what status the two pieces on the floor and the one in the window have and the work could benefit from conceptual rigour.

Paul Domelar

FRANCHESCA BELL

Barbie dolls immersed in plaster, torsos on the road, portraits like cameo broaches, shards of faces - sounds interesting doesn't it. Bell's work has potential in terms of its eclectic references and use of the 'found object' installation. Many of these pieces could, with more consideration, become unnerving contemporary engagements with our common culture - but they have a long way to go. Six small canvases give intriguing views of Liverpool landmarks. They seem to have been transferred from photocopy, another popular trick this season, though the images themselves are, in a haunting, de - populated 'Sunday morning' kind of way, quite interesting. But not enough. At least, though, there appear to be some ideas here which could engage with contemporary issues. Which leads me to another contemporary concern with this years graduate offering - what's with the current trend in 'floor installations'. The 'Barbie' pieces are 'laid out', as many pieces seem to be, due to lack of space more than anything else. For god's sake people, after the assessors have been, re-hang properly.

John Byrne


Bell's installation shows a series of masks on the wall and a series of dolls in plaster cast moulds on the floor. I call this an installation but as with many of the other 'installations', there is a lack of coherence in that it looks like the show is put together to communicate to a tutor or an external examiner, and therefore seems to gather a clutter of previous works which are added to the 'latest work', thus blurring the edges of the now.
"I was made to feel insecure"…..an extract from Bell's statement, her experience of living in Liverpool. What degree of legitimacy do we tolerate from the accompanying texts? Well, when they are so serious we have to look closer. Bell's text is personal (more than most). It therefore informs the way in which we see the work (although I had already looked at the work - formed some opinions - before reading the text….I needed to look again, the text was therefore a revisionist device) and made me question why a series of face masks hung arbitrarily on the wall (each one broken to some degree) which had previously been ambiguous, now took on new meaning - after the text - I wondered what had happened to Bell in Liverpool?
Masks on the wall, dolls on the floor. Two items of constructed anthropomorphism. One to wear, one to play with….before Bell. The 'doll on floor' series shows six Barbie dolls (or was it Cindy), laying naked in timber boxes, face up, the first being positioned in plaster - still showing most of Barbie - the last in the sequence showing Barbie totally submerged apart from her head which peeks through the plaster. What had happened to make Bell feel so insecure?
The problem with Bell's work is that if it's printmaking it doesn't look like printmaking (not necessarily a bad thing), but if its 'installation art' or a three dimensional walk in experience of multiple readings and perspectives, it still doesn't make it without the aforementioned text which gives it another layer without having the ability of making it any more visually exciting.

The assumptions above are based on the reading of the combination of the text (the artist's statement) and the work (the artist's statement). The text therefore is seen by many artists as a way of explaining the work without them being present. The question is, should the work do that in the first place - do we abandon the text - and as we have seen with other works, is it not the case that the text can also be used as a subterfuge or a statement of misinformation. I suppose it's up to the viewer if they want to read the text… and I did.

JOANNE COLLINS

A chair, covered in pens, a reference to the activity of writing, a link to the unfinished crossword and the worn shoes. Like another chair, covered in Walnut Whip wrappers and a torso of Polo mints Collins' work evokes the memory of childhood, seen through the eyes of a child and delivered to us via the materialisation of childhood associations. Most successful though, is Collins' intimate installation. Successful because of the re-creation of a psychological space in which objects are piled with the haphazard familiarity of a personal museum. The open invitation to flick through photographs, and to freely select and watch VHS tapes, that were simply left by the TV, gives one the mixed feelings of intrusion and intimacy - of transgressing a personal space at the same time as being invited in to pry. Sitting in the sofa to ponder this little alcove world, a simple invitation for positioning the viewer in a space of domesticity, one forgets that the sofa itself has writing upon it. The reminder of this, when the viewer inevitably leaves the space, is the reminder that Collins felt compelled to somehow anchor the work in the world of art. This too obvious reminder destabilises much of the works power.

John Byrne


Nice density and concentration in the space behind the curtain. The artist
has found a generous framework which can take a rich accumulation of detail
without becoming confused. Here objects are used with a minimum of
modification in a world unto itself. In the corridor, objects are presented
awkwardly, seem lost and without context. They are like samples or examples
of techniques, which makes it impossible to see them as works in their own
right. It would be interesting to see them incorporated into the
claustrophobia behind the curtains, there they might have a sense of place.
They work with a type of labour-intensive, domestic novelty/craft process
(boats made of matches, pictures made of coloured pinheads etc.). Putting
them into a strong context such as the world behind the curtains might lift
them out of the danger of reproducing the very banality they are trying to
speak about. Behind the curtains, domestic ennui is suggested more
convincingly and in less literal ways, generated between the accumulated
mess of elements rather than by any single one. Sitting on the kind of sofa
which makes you instantly into a couch-potato, watching other kinds of
repetitive DIY (cigarette-rolling, hair-cutting etc.) interestingly, I find
the video threatens to mirror my own life as much as showing me someone
else's. The space begins to invoke, in the ugly, tightly-packed arrangement
of the furniture, as in a Kabakov installation, the psychic space of its
absent occupants. A couple of details didn't work - the didactic placement
of three or four books, near the TV, for example; perhaps it's a question of
asking whether the room behind the curtain is a sitting room or is
referencing the idea of one.

Imogen Stidworthy


Positioned under the main staircase, just to the side of an anti-space - normally home of the vending machines - Collins's 'Front Room' installation invites you in.
As you pass through a set of home made curtains that contain hundreds of sewn on pockets - each containing snippets of text, extracts from the artists diaries, drawings and other pieces of information - you find yourself in someone's front room. Collins's front room.
Inside the room, devoid of natural light, there is an intimacy which is to do with the furniture - a bean bag as you enter on the floor, a settee to the right, a series of shelves, a coffee table, a cupboard, a TV and video, family photos and albums, video cassettes, a tape player and tapes, woodchip wallpaper to the left.
As I sit on the couch, what seems to be a home video is playing. I read the first thing I see which happens to be the edge of the video cassette on top of the table…'HAIRCUT BEFORE CATERACT OPERATION, AFTERMATH OF OPERATION-DAD'. It suddenly dawns on you that the person in the video is very ill, dying, possibly dead. What's it like to sit in a modern art mausoleum? What's it like to consider that this may be the artist's dad (or grandad). Nothing new in that - we may site Viola - but there was some warning in that.
Sitting there thinking about what you are seeing in terms of the video image directly in front of you, you now notice the rest of the family - who begin to emerge via the family photos - as you look beyond the TV screen. You looking at them, them looking at you whilst you look at their father, their grandfather, their brother, their husband, their friend, their lover.

We may argue that this is cathartic art, therapy art, art sitting in between life death and memory, and it is, but the piece is beyond that and more. If the definition of art is the ability of the artist to translate or portray what issues concern them deeply then this works, of course that is one definition of art (many artists make works that concern them deeply and
still make really bad work). However the relationship between the artist and her family and how that is communicated to us, the viewer, is only part of the story, for this piece really works in spite of that as it takes you out of where you where, the anti-space, and into another spatial condition. You are in Collins's room as opposed to being in a room which happens to have an installation in it. The room doesn't just reflect Collins's recent
problematic, it talks to all of us or at least anyone who's ever lost someone. That raises the question of do you get the dead dad scenario if you have never lost anyone. Can you engage with the work on that level?
There are also problems with the installation however, most notably the text/narrative piece which is embroidered onto the couch. Too much information and I don't want to read whilst I am watching the telly.
Equally, the room could be a fabrication of the truth and if it is it's a great lie. If it isn't then it's a remarkably brave piece of work that takes all the personal risks and plunges into the family psyche by way of a structural palette. Presumably also a risk which could jeopardise those
very family links that make the piece possible in the first place.
As I left the room I noticed that the counter on the screen was counting down, counting down
in reverse.

Passing by the room again on the way out, I noticed in one of the curtain pockets a diary entry under the heading 'Year 1: music, ideology and religious studies' which read 'My family is complicated'.

Paul Sullivan

The nest of a British family parlour is veiled by a curtain of handkerchiefs. The oppresiveness of the setting finds its most poignant irony in the photographic interventions in Joyious Living in the New World. No doubt a bestseller in the category Self-Help the book aims to channel desire back safely into the Oedipal fold but the juxtapositions created by the artists between family snapshots and the highminded domesticity of the text discloses its blockage. Not a pretty picture. In the installation which as a whole suffers from a lack of editing all lines of flight return to banality. How to escape? The trivia of teabags and testimonies go nowhere, whereas the video and audio recordings of home would thrive with a dose of sensible deadpan.

Paul Domelar

HELEN CROOKES

Crookes' sculptural work consists here mainly in forms of hanging installations. Most are made out of slip plaster which has been introduced into the display environment and solidified, presumably, in situ. It is only this that gives it any allusion to sight specific work. Once again, the viewer is invited to do no more than wonder at either the technical competence of the artist or the ability of clay to hold itself in occasionally intriguing relationships to gravity. One piece, a hanging cone of string, down which slip had been poured and pooled on the floor before solidifying, was a case in point. Besides wondering, briefly, about how insecurely its temporary anchoring to the floor had been, I found the work had nothing more to say. As with much of the work on display, I found its formal competence crying out to be allowed a serious relationship with content, location of display and audience.

John Byrne


The central piece of Crookes' exhibition is a ceramic sculpture that hovers in the 'U' space, a series of 2M high thin white ceramic tubes delicately suspended concentrically from a well engineered 22mm square hollow section steel frame, hung fragility on fixed stability. This work, which we can walk around is flanked by a series of wall based white ceramics (the exception being one rope/fabric piece which nevertheless seems to fit into the process) and one floor based long thin ceramic.
There is an abandonment of the negative in Crookes' work and I got the feeling that I had been here before somewhere and will no doubt be here again, 'Here' meaning a place (a belief) where white = purism, purity, puritanicalism…..white out. 'Here' is also a place where control of the object is all encompassing.
One critic referred to this work as having "an almost pointless fragility" which is a great sound-bite but I don't think the 'puerile fragile' content inherent in the work is that pointless for it ensures a certain caution or respectfulness of the work which entices the viewer to want to touch the work to see if it is really as light as it looks. It is a tactile piece.
Crooke's wall based ceramics look like they are the remnants of the firing process, items that industry discard but artists find intoxicatingly beautiful. I have to agree that the by-product, the chance must exist, but are these intuitive chances or afterthoughts. Why are they on the wall?
The good thing about Crookes' piece is that on the one hand I want (or I am forced) to ask these questions, but on the other hand I find the work as beautiful as I find pebbles on the beach beautiful, and therefore what separates the causal from the prescribed. What makes us consider that what is on show is something beyond nice objects in a nice space?

Paul Sullivan

CLAIRE FANNON

Fannon has produced a set of unitary, white textile arrangements constructed out of small, repetitive elements. Not repetitive in a bad way. More like the tonal minimalism of an early Nyman or Glass score. One free standing sculptural piece, of pockets or containers, seemed crowded in the cramped corner allocated to it for display. This work was mature enough, and sculpturally strong enough, to hold its own in an isolated space. Likewise her quilted wall hanging/installation, in which a repetitive geometric pattern of horizontal cuts each reveal a rolled up piece of written text peeping through the interior lining, displayed a rigorous commitment to material which I have not come across in some time. In contrast to this, my favourite Fannon piece was another wall hanging. Simply made of many crumpled and highly compressed black plastic bin liners. The uniquely repetitive use of the materials here gave the piece a solidity a volume which defamiliarised its usual appearance as malleable wrapping. A good 'formal' show in itself, but it would be intriguing to see how, indeed if, this practice could be sustained and developed.

John Byrne

EMMA GING

There seems to be two distinct styles in Ging's work. On one hand, there are predominantly square canvases in monochrome, spreads of stained black paint that saturate the surface like bruises. Their amorphous shapes and delicacy of application destabilise the usually stark contrast of black and white. I'm not sure how what to make of them, they're unlike her other paintings and drawings. Perhaps that's the point. A contrast between the apparent lack of physical engagement - stains are stained not painted - and a taught almost wiry use of charcoal line scraped into the impasto surface of the paint makes the latter appear almost like a complaint against existence of surface. The subtle, gradual tonality, coupled with the strong use of line and collage contrast well against the other works. Pity they weren't exhibited together.

John Byrne


Ging's two most successful pieces are two large 1M x 1M canvases positioned over a series of computers in the grand hall entrance foyer. Successful in that they present a three dimensional spatial depth. This is achieved by the variations in the layering of the image.
The frontal plane is brought into focus by the strength of it's painterly line whilst the incremental blurring of the rest of it ensures we see a receding perspective. Not a fixed Euclidean perspective but a series of multiple perspectives. Not quite narratives.
Ging's paintings work in that the illusionary quality in the work ensures that you don't exactly know what you are looking at. Fractals or dense rain forest? Microscopic or 20/20 vision?
As with the best part of the 'Ask the family' quiz show in which a commonplace object is presented at point blank range - the families being challenged to beat the clock and shout out the name of the object as the camera slowly pans out to reveal it's true identity - we never quite get to that stage with Ging's images and therefore they always remain at the
unanswerable early stage, something of a mid-fixed point. A pivotal point between us and the artist. Put your hand directly in front of your eyes, look at it and then move it into the distance whilst retaining focus……

This of course doesn't mean that these works are illusionist, it just means that they are close to something but not close enough for me.
Ging's work is fortunate in its location, not due to the fact that you have to ignore the group of people sitting underneath it playing on computers, but because of its elevated position (3M high), therefore it's a little bit like looking up at iconic religious paintings hung high up in the naïve of the cathedral, a suitable height for the mortals, a suitable height that
gives a certain amount of reverence and stops us looking too closely.
It's safe, it's competent but it's not nearly ambitious enough, as is testified by the remaining collage and paint pieces which are strewn across two other locations (some in a corridor, some in a second floor gallery, a problem of location which is endemic throughout the whole exhibition) and some other time frame which makes me feel I could have been looking at this
work in a previous life. Circa 1950.

Paul Sullivan

I like Kafka, I like Orwell, I like the void and the angst in all its forms but I don't really want to see the way Hughes sees because it's bleaker. It's dark out there.

Paul Sullivan

WENDY ISAAC

Isaac's work consists of sculptural experiments with weight, volume and material values. Her main motif/object of construction are small filled, or semi-filled sacks. Often, they are tied up into arrangements of various hanging volumes. Others are place in arrangements of tension, hanging over the edges of other materials. One intriguing work consists of sacks packed, along with various shaped pieces of wood, into a confined Perspex box. As a collection of formal sculptural experiments, this work is quite interesting. Beyond this, Isaac's work lacks the power of scope or scale that would enable it to engage the viewer in a physical, and not only optical dimension.

John Byrne

NATALIE JONES

Jones' enlarged Xerox images of circular targets, reminiscent of John's, hover somewhere between the place where one would normally expect a painterly surface sit and the real flatness of the paper copies. Its just quotation, like a Liechtenstein at face value. However, in Jones carefully enlarged re-prints of textile patterns, a real tension is created between surface, image and viewer expectation. The re-presentation of a textile surface problematises its existence on the surface plane of the canvas itself. Somewhere between the layered meanings of this tromp-l'oeil trickery the viewer is offered the temptation to regress into an entirely formal relationship with the work, an interesting and mature manoeuvre.

John Byrne

MELANIE LOCKWOOD

Melanie Lockwood's main installation pieces consist of large hangings, constructed in net, and inscribed with a series of small drawings which appear to be tracings of snapshots. The schematic nature of the drawings themselves - appearing as repeated 'outlines' - deprive us of their detail and specificity whilst offering them up, simultaneously, to our own imaginative investment. The motif of 'veiled memory' works well, if somewhat predictably here. Likewise, in Lockwood's intimate wall installations, small transparent boxes filled with toy animals, pine cones and other such life-debris offer us a museum or scientific like access to some body's memoirs, or somebody's waste.

John Byrne


Lockwood's main body of work, an installation in a first floor studio, centres itself on the main wall piece, ninety-nine net lace pockets on a net lace background, eleven vertical, nine horizontal, each containing faceless people, cars and other things - drawn form family snaps or magazines - but with all the humanist elements taken out, faces, mannerisms and vehicle types all erased leaving more whiteness….they're all cartoons.
Lockwood's lace drawings may be about loss or childhood memories or last week's barbee on Sefton Park, we just don't know.
What we do know is that Lockwood's collaborative project with Karen Armstrong - two tubular net lace shafts, suspended from two Doric Columns in the Main hall which draws you into Armstrong's 'Clothes Stacks' installation - is more problematic.
We can't treat this work as an individual installation as it is part of Armstrong's work, and vice versa. However, it's more difficult to assess than Armstrong's piece because if you take away Lockwood's work, Armstrong's piece still has some gravity. If on the other hand we take away Armstrong's work, it would leave Lockwood's tubular constructs in somewhat of a flap, in that they would be leading us directly into a brick wall, a dead end. That probably seems unfair but in collaboration there are often losers. These works work well together but I don't particularly want to discuss Lockwood's lace on the back of Armstrong's garments.
Lockwood's net lace tubes have a series of drawn figures on them - similar to the studio pieces - and are therefore directly related to that work. So does this mean that the drawings in the first floor studio also relate to Armstrong's work? Probably not, so we must assume that the columns are more theatrical props and therefore are approaching something else called set-design.

Collaboration: A late twentieth century euphemism for artists working creatively together.
Collaboration: An early twentieth century euphemism for so called enemies working creatively together.

Paul Sullivan

LAURA MARSDEN

Marsden's work consists of several large, black and white portraits. What more can I say, they are large and black and white. If they were much larger, they would have some power. Not due entirely to their scale, but the brutalism that such an approach would bring to the usual grammar of the advertising image. As they are, they look like rather vague, manageable sketches - in terms of scale and ambition - that have been put there for assessment. What more can I say.

John Byrne


In a 3M x 3M U-shaped white space hangs a series of black and white portraits.
Portrait meaning a representation of someone's face and not necessarily the process of making that representation whilst the sitter sits.
It's hard to imagine therefore that Marsden's portraits are constructed in any way other than from drawing/painting from photographs. Not a criticism, as these images have a certain level of detachment, not from the sitters (who look a bit too real wherever they came from) but from the subject entitled 'Painting', which on occasion should be applauded.
If these are not paintings - they're not because they are constructed as a series of photographs blown up on a photocopier, glued together to form the image, stuck onto canvas (maybe an ironic attempt to make them look like paintings) then drawn over with what looks like a marker pen - then can the mechanical process listed above replace the process of painting or painting the real sitter. Can the character of the sitter make it into the work. This seems to suggest that you have to be present to project character, which the painter miraculously understands and translates into the painting. In the absence of the sitter as a real entity, can the artist make a portrait from a photograph or is this something else called illustration. Could we also make the argument that the portrait is the extension of the character of the artist.
That said, Marsden's sitters - there or not, friends or family, unknown faces plucked from magazines - are imbued with an inherent physical deformity and a certain prisonesque quality that ensures a sinister presence, looking at each other before we enter the room, looking at us when we enter the room.

The core argument to this type of work is what is the level of thought process. What is the process and what is the ambition.

If Marsden's work is an attempt to deconstruct the process of portraiture to deliver the 'detached' portrait, it works to a certain level. The downside being that it is already a well-trodden path of interrogation (which isn't to say don't do it), but on the upside it will more than upset the purists who will claim 'This is Non-Art'. If however they are a genuine attempt at portraiture, they are equally successful in both unwanted arenas of caricature and mediocrity, in that they are caricature, obvious, but also in that they don't do anything more than that.

Paul Sullivan

A real coherence here in the visual language of the works, the sculptural
shifts that the artist articulating, and the installing. The sculptural
sensibility of these translations between volume, space and flat mark,
connects with an historical sculptural line running through Bruce Nauman -
especially his 'Holes showing the Spaces of my Waist and Wrists' and 'The
Space under my Chair' - and Rachel Whiteread, also in the use and metaphors
of domestic objects. Always a sense of the body invoked through the objects
close to it, and the traces of its invisible gestures, the image being built
up by rubbing. Images which retain multiple status as representations,
indexical records, memory traces - of an object and the process of the
making of the image. Nice written statement too, though the only image which
worked for me in terms of a 'loss of visual identity' is the series 'Mug'.
The domestic object, smashed, becomes a slight visual explosion, gains a
psychological resonance. Embodied here is the time of a process (rubbing)
and an instant (the instant it takes to smash a mug out of three dimensions
and into two).

Imogen Stidworthy


Whereas the statement makes allusion to the difference between print and mass production this difference is not actualised in the print itself. I am thinking between the precise techniques Richard Hamilton has employed so skilfully and the Derridian notion of the differand. I suggest that fashionable terminology homogenisation / hybridity / globalisation distracts from the quiet (in)certitude that the work emanates. There is an interesting space between the gestural event and processual technologies which can no doubt be opened out further given sustained attention. I see the conceptual elements all given, it is articulation of their precise relationship that needs tuning. I silence the presence of the tablecloth experiment, which to me is a mistake whereas the paper studies need to be brought in a more resonant presentation surrounded by further thought.

Paul Domelar

Paul Sullivan

What remains arbitrary in the P-type and N-type pair of paintings in the Great Hall gains a strong sense of repulsion in the visceral installation situated on the 2nd floor. It makes you feel this body of unstoppable leakage and hairloss that we are to believe is behind this staging. However, we have no recourse to empathy as the work remains located in a field of abstraction. Contrary to the work of e.g. Franco B, Jo Spence or Ron Athey our senses are drawn to a 'fear and loathing'. The statement suggests auto(?)biographhic motivations but acceptance of the absent 'dysfunctional body' remains unapproachable in this archive of catastrophy.

Paul Domelar

JENNY MUSCART

I don't know if its' still there. I hope it is! On a wall, not far away from Lime St. Station is an image of Mickey Mouse. Sprayed recently onto concrete at the time of the Second Gulf War, it's a simple, small, black stencil. Mickey's eye, however, has been replaced by a Crescent Moon and Star - stencilled in red. It works perfectly. Mickey's red star pupil glistens menacingly, glancing out at you with the reminder that culture, especially dominant culture, can be subverted, turned, and used against the self satisfied sanctimony that it has come to represent. It's one of the most powerful pieces of detournemont I've seen in a very long time. Sadly, any of this critical possibility has been lost in Muscart's repetitive, Warholesque (I invent words when I'm bored) prints of Mickey. Her statement says she likes him. I'm pleased - it could have been left at that.

John Byrne


Paintings of Mickey Mouse. A lot of paintings of Mickey Mouse. The art of nothing. Nothing but the obsession that by being obsessed with Mickey, art will then flow.
"Dear Tutor", Muscart may have asked, "Can I do paintings of Mickey because I am obsessed by him, not him of course because he doesn't really exist, but the image of him". Or was it more like "I want to do a piece of work which investigates the condition known as obsession". Muscart's introduction text would seem to point at the first option.

If this was the image of 'Che' for instance, would I be that concerned, would I not see this as the Warholesque commodification of the image, the reproduction of the arch anti-capitalist by a capitalist art system and applaud the artist for highlighting my inability to see pathos, post-modern pathos in the thing that one sees.
So what is this? Do these paintings of Mickey continually test or experiment with anything beyond the obsession, the inability to function normally without the obsession 'interfering'.

I tried to think of something positive, I couldn't, but I really hope that this work is important and that I am the fool who didn't see it and that I will never understand post-modern irony.

As I was trying to think of something good, I saw a possible similarity in one of the early 'Mickeys' to that of Duchamps 'Bride descending the staircase'. I asked my distinguished colleague John Byrne if he could see the connection, after a few seconds of deliberation he replied - review fatigue written all over him - in a slightly Alan Benettesque scouse voice " I wouldn't have thought so Paul, I wouldn't have thought so".

Paul Sullivan

CLARE NEWBY

There are some interesting things that appear to be going on in Newby's work. A set of physically contained 'cross sections' of domestic interiors fill perspex display boxes. A vertical cross section of floor board construction and that of a garden path made me wonder it there was a floor or a path somewhere with small symmetrical sections missing. A set of plaster casts in which footprints, tape measures, brushes, a spoon and a small bottle are arranged on the floor. Despite being reasonably intrigued, I'm not sure of the level of engagement that this, or much work like it, is supposed to evoke from the viewing public. One of the great difficulties of working personally, as and artist with your own materials, concerns and subject matter, is that you can tend to forget that its made to be exhibited and looked at. Whilst one can wish this away with a stereo-typical 'I don't care what the public think' you run the risk of turning your work into intimately solipsistic ornamentation. Newby, by taking such a quirky angle on the domestic interior theme, just about manages to avoid this. But only just.

John Byrne


It's difficult not to be descriptive of a work that offers little in the way of spatial narrative.
Two sets of floor based plaster moulds - one set of four containing a screwdriver, a spoon, a brush - the tools of the sculptor or the elements of the toolbox that we may keep under the sink for those emergencies. The second set of ten have the objects removed to leave the negative impression in the mould - more tools and ironmongery, a screwdriver, a nail, a hacksaw…..
The third piece in the installation (not necessarily in that order) is what seems to be a deconstructed window frame - positioned (not thrown or exploded) into the corner of the room. This piece also includes a fragment of floor and wallpaper.
Each element of this work may give rise to the notion of process by hinting at the relationship between the tool as the art object, the art maker and the instrument of deconstruction. We are therefore made to read the moulds and the window frame as one elastic entity. Banded together in the same space and treated in much the same way, there is an obviousness to the sequence without it ever quite being naive.
Modern tools do look good, they are now in bright yellows, reds and blues, given macho names such as the 'Turbo Terminator drill', the fetish object sold to the ever-increasing army of DIYers. Newby's tools by comparison are old and worn, out of action and dormant. Maybe that's the point.
So where does this leave us? The process of deconstructing an object, putting it into a context not of it's original purpose or meaning is not new. Newby's deconstructed window frame and the neighbouring tools - now art objects - are of course implicated in the process. To deconstruct, we may argue, is to go beyond the meaning or find the real meaning in the original object. Newby's objects unfortunately don't carry the required burden of believability in this context and seem ad-hoc in their presentation, despite the attempt at visual process narrative.
I can walk between Newby's objects but I can't quite see beyond them.

Paul Sullivan

NATHAN SAYER

Shapes cut out, or semi cut out of paper remind the viewer of industrial templates. Later in the exhibition, the proximity of drawn plans, isometric elevations and photo's tends to illustrate, rather literally, the proposed intention of engaging the viewer with the interactivity of space, body and materials. The video work that accompanies this exhibition, of a figure struggling with a large peace of cloth on a windy beach, does this job much better. As with all video and photographic imagery of a performance, one is left to recreate the struggle against the elements, the tension of body against environment that the work is predicated upon. Again, as with all video and photographic work of performance, the viewer becomes increasingly aware of their absence from this location, from this struggle, from this electronically and optically captured aid memoir of an artistic event/statement. The background sound to the video indexes this performance, as it does the intention of this work, far better than any illustration. Environmental sound works offer themselves as possible alternative here.

John Byrne


Sayer's Installation (Main Hall), four wall based white card sheets reveal a series of scored lines made by a scalpel. The lines follow the outline of a packaging pattern and are all at various stages of completion, from lines barely touched by the scalpel (so light that they may have been made with the 'waft of an angel's wing' as Frank Melvin always used to say) to lines cut all the way through.
What do these lines represent? When the two dimensional pattern is folded into a three dimensional form, what will it be? The answer is a small white box. How do we know this? Unfortunately not because we have worked it out by building the box in our heads, the mental construction process, but by the fact that the box - the object of desire - is positioned on the floor next to the drawings, simple really.
In the context of this piece, we can argue that Sayer has revealed too much too soon, he has taken the imaginary process away from us. This argument could however be counteracted with good reason if this was Sayer's sole contribution to the show - in that although it revealed too much it still had a degree of refinement, almost an exquisite touch and boldness in it's its minimalism - and at this stage I thought it was, that was until I got to the first floor studio.
The second instalment from Sayer reveals all and smacks of Product Design as opposed to sculpture. This series of works shows a set of technical drawings (1st degree isometric projection) of the box, twenty boxes neatly positioned on the floor - the floor piece - photographs of the concept and process of the box and a video presumably of the box (it wasn't switched on). There is even a table with pencils on it inviting us to also join in, draw a box and make one! The cult of the box.
As with other work in the show, Sayer seems to be trying to communicate with his tutor or an external examiner and not with a wider audience and you wonder whether this is an institutional problem or a lack of risk or consideration on behalf of the artist.
The work is therefore nullified by this all-encompassing ideology. Do we imagine that an orchestra would show a musical score whilst playing the piece, or an architect revealing the plans on completion of the building or a director showing the script on the first night of a film?
Sayer's lines are delicious and precise at times but we don't know what's behind it - or maybe we do but it doesn't look that good - however there is more than a hint that he may go beyond the trap of the external review next time. Get more existential and stop showing too much.

Paul Sullivan

KEELY STASIK

Stasik's work consists of a room installation cluttered with an eclectic collection of images, photo's and objects of animal death, decay and waste. I'm assuming that the intention of this work is to bring us into a shocking re-configuration with such everyday dramas in the 'comfort' of a domestic setting. If this is the case, the work has missed the mark rather badly. On one hand, the installation is just 'too' full of indexes to the 'suggested' material for it to make sense as a 'suggestion'. Instead of the images disrupting our everyday engagement like the nightmares of Surrealism, Stasik offers us the cluttered overkill of a temporary migraine.

John Byrne


An accumulation of mainly modified elements, something between a museum
display and a 'sur-realised' sitting room. At first glance there's a visual
coherence which quickly starts to break down - disrupted certainly by the
presence of documentation booklets which confuse things and certainly
shouldn't be here - it would have been so easy to make a discrete and
unrelated place for them, even within such a small space. Another more
positive kind of disintegration of the first impression is also at work
here. Where it is successful it is a key part of the work. Then, the eye
falls upon the details of an ornament which appears unexpectedly: a gold
objet d'art, upon refocusing, is revealed as a formless lump of gilded wax.
A gold purse made of a sows ear; perversion of the language of bourgeois
decoration. But this process of shifting our perceptual engagement needs to
be more controlled by careful editing and a more critical awareness of the
relation between the work and its site. I enjoyed the rich language of
materials and transformations here, and the energy and density in the space,
but it could be made much tighter by taking out some unnecessary
elaborations. Where installation elements attach directly to the space -
like the chandelier or the curtains - they become literal and theatrical;
where they are placed within a frame - a space within the space - such as
the table or the glass-fronted cabinet, they work on their own terms,
'natural' (at home) and disturbing at the same time. I could imagine it
working with only the table, cabinet and chair.

Imogen Stidworthy

Is this the enemy of kitsch or chintz? Stasik's installation 'creature comforts ' partially takes us to the interior of that type of working class family who, although living on the same estate as everyone else, believe they are somehow superior to their neighbours. Not exclusively a working class pursuit.
In Stasik's world and in ours this is done by celebrating individual items of furniture, from reproduction Regency display cases to Edwardian tables, trophies and illusions of a bygone grandeur - one that didn't exist in the first place - which must be bought from bespoke establishments, 'Home and Garden' as opposed to the homogeneity of IKEA and Habitat, the places where those others from next door go.

That's where the social realism ends and the story of the 'Dead Pigs Head' and the 'Dead Pigeon' begins, for all of Stasik's furniture, the budgie cage, display cases, photo albums and picture frames all contain images of pig and pigeon in various forms of deadness. Creature comforts.
By substituting the family portraits and family snaps with images of pigs heads (located in domestic places such as on the kitchen worktop or living room table) and road kill pigeon, Stasik's work may be considered as thought provoking in its attempt to show items normally considered outside of the domestic - but which in fact are part of our everyday experience (if we can argue that the car is an extension of the domestic) - in order to question whether or not we have become desensitised to the actual rather than the
presented. Or rather the lack of choice inherent in the structure of it's own death as witnessed by the animal, which has no form of representation and thus is presented to us on the one hand by the meat industry (it's breeder, feeder, killer and distributor) as a 'packaged commodity', aesthetically, purely removed from it's own relatively recent living past, and on the other hand by Stasik, who by exaggerating the contradictions in this very point, by bringing the abattoir, the butchers or the road into the front parlour makes us question the complex and yet obvious dualities between us and them.

Stasik's work suggests that although on the surface we may buy nice furniture to create a sheen of domestic respectability to one's peers, we still cut animals to pieces in order to eat them in and around the domestic abode. She may also be arguing that a pigeon killed by a car then flattened till it is mechanically bio-degraded by the instrument of its death, is no less important than the pig which is, like the glass cabinet, a legitimate form of consumption in today's society.

Stasik's work gives us a world of repro-furniture, dead animals that replace the family in photo albums and good quality 70's flock wallpaper ruined with £2.80 Rapid Hardware border rail trimmings. We must therefore assume that contradictions clarify Stasik's thinking, but perhaps the starkest contradiction of all is why Stasik is graduating from printmaking and not
painting, dare I say fine art?

Still not sure whether or not I would like to go around to Stasik's for a cup of tea.

Paul Sullivan


To find the unfamiliar in the familiar is an establshed tradition and in its modern incarnations held fascination from the Wunderkammer to the Surrealists. The debate on categorisations has been going on for some time especially coming out of postcolonial theory and to explore 'dirty' misfits in the aesthetic of Brookside chique adds a refreshing turn. However I find the installation weakened by an overload of displacements and would be more compelling had a choice been made for one obsession, i.e the pig or the dead bird on the road. One could read the work as the anality of the petit bourgeois parlour where knick-knacks become the expression of the 'kitsch perverse' as a play on Guillermo Gomez-Pena's 'mainstream bizarre'.

Paul Domelar

LIZ WHITE

Liz White is another of those graduating artists whose subject matter seems to reside in the past. Not the past of art itself, but the capturing of memories. Her 'wall paper' paintings are, I assume, intended to remind or evoke the feeling one gets when looking into an old disused room. Layers of peeling wallpaper reveal, or conceal, the historical layers of their interior decorating forefathers. In some of her other work, collections of old cigarette cards, stamps and butterflies act as another attempt to evoke either memory or nostalgia. In one way they are quite contemporary, reminding me of the mass produced 'Olde Worlde' clutter which lined the walls of many a public house in the mid 1990's. There are some good ideas here, but the false butterflies, crudely pinned to their framed background metaphorically say it all. More subtlety is needed.

John Byrne