CRYPT RESIDENCY DECEMBER 2016

For our final residency of 2016 we have 6 very different artists working in the Gallery to create work in response to its evocative spaces and history.

Annie Ho Cooper

My work borders between remembering and forgetting, the visible and the invisible, and the known and the unknown. As a fine artist, I have a deep interest in memory and identity issues. My work continues to ask questions about the ongoing relationships between individual memory and collective memory, as well as between personal identity and community identity. Through using material objects such as worn textiles and linens, and exploring the memories and the related stories behind them, I want to make special again and give value back to what is lost. My current project, ‘keeping time’, involves making visual images which express the thinking, sensing and marking of the passing of time.

www.anniehocooper.co.uk

Claire Curtin

During the residency I would like to produce a series of portraits using mono printing and direct screen-printing techniques.

My latest project explores outsider artists; I wanted to capture them because I have a huge admiration for their art, their drive and their devotion. Their work is not egotistical and neither are their reasons for producing it, it is purely personal. I would like to reflect this during the residency by making loads (maybe hundreds) of mono prints in quick succession, which would be hung in an installation, which would grow throughout the week.

As the work is produced it could be hung using fishing wire or a washing line, sewing two mono prints back to back and hanging at average eye level.

As the residency unfolds it may be that the work changes as it develops.

Eleanor MacFarlane

An investigation into the relationships between shadows and echoes

When I was a child I believed in shadows. I believed they copied us deliberately, and played tricks on us, the way they stretched out or hid secrets deep within them.

I listened to echoes then, the way they whispered or made the walls call back.

I always thought if I could turn around fast enough I would catch my shadow, like it was an echo of myself.

I thought that echoes never stopped, and wanted to go on listening to them as they got smaller and smaller, like watching a balloon float up into the sky, beyond where it becomes a dot, when you know you are still looking at it, only you can’t see it.

http://www.eleanormacfarlane.com/

Grace Holliday 

‘Black + Blue’ is a project that I have been experimenting with and developing for the past two years now. Fundamentally, it is a growing collection of conceptual mark-makings – mixed media patterns and abstract shapes on various canvases that together communicate tangible, sensory narratives. I plan to use the scale of the gallery space / atmospheric heritage of the crypt to build a specific set of reference patterns. The reference drawings could be magnifications or exaggerations of the crypt’s character filled and very human identity – exterior and interior Georgian / Victorian architectures such as columns, statues and structural surfaces.

http://graceholliday.com/

Phillipa Wall
My recent works reflect my developing practice surrounding creating cameraless 16mm Optical Sound Films. From a background in traditional print making methods, and then photopolymer Etchings, the element of repetition has always been present. I have used 16mm as a comfortable medium and conduit for my practice, now, and during this residency I wish to expand into 8mm film and VHS Film. Therefore, creating a mixed channel dialogue between analogue and digital. Using contact microphones I will explore the optical sounds created through my hand made films. This will then add a sound element to the install. The creation of the films themselves will be entirely site specific to the Crypt.

www.philippawall.com