MADE WITH…
MAXINE BRISTOW, ANNA FAIRCHILD, SIAN-KATE MOONEY & MARK WOODS
Curated by John Stephens
4 July – 1 August 2020
Exhibition details
Cross Lane Projects launches its 2020 programme with the exhibition Made With… considering materiality in contemporary sculptural practice. Curated by John Stephens, this new group show of contemporary sculpture presents work by artists Maxine Bristow, Anna Fairchild, Sian-Kate Mooney and Mark Woods.
Made With… is concerned with materials, not just as the means by which art objects are made but also with the ways in which the intrinsic qualities of materials and associated processes determine the form and the meaning of art objects. Their use of materials reflects the artists’ interests in social issues and issues of culture, gender and sexual politics, psychoanalytics, psychogeography and semiotics.
Independent curator Stephens has selected artists whose practices ultimately draw attention to the very materiality of the stuff they work with. Stephens has previously been a Director and Curator with artist-run Castlefield Gallery in Manchester.
About the curator
John Stephens is a painter with a particular interest in a pared down abstraction. He uses the materiality of paint and its associated processes along with the structure and design of paintings to focus on articulations of colour. His curatorial interests embrace a wider range of artistic practices outside his own that include installation, photography, performance and mixed material processes. Of particular interest to him is the way in which artists generate ideas that then become manifest in close association with materials and processes. They are often ideas about space, place and location but also aspects of the human condition and identities and the way the semiotic processes of art can be exploited and reinvented by artists.
During the 1980s and 1990s, he was involved as a director and curator with the artist-run Castlefield Gallery in Manchester. Between 2004 and 2006, he curated the exhibition space at Luton’s Hat Factory in 2010 on behalf of the University of Bedfordshire, where he commissioned public works by the artists Cedric Christie and Susan Stockwell. In 2012, he was a performer at Tate Moden in Tino Seghal’s These Associations. He is involved with various artists’ group, projects and exhibitions in London and in residencies in Croatia, Germany and Italy. He has recently written for the online journals Saturationpoint and Artlyst.
About the artists
Maxine Bristow is based in the north west of England and has a background in textiles. She considers the complex material and semantic conventions of the medium of textiles in her work, including the everyday functioning environment, modernist legacies and postmodern discourses with which the medium is entangled. Her expanded artistic practiCe takes the form of wall – and floor – based objects, sculpture and installation.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in the permanent collections of the Crafts Council, London; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery. She was selected for The Jerwood Textiles Prize in 2002, and in 2008 was one of the nominated artists for the Northern Arts Prize.
ANNA FAIRCHILD
Anna Fairchild works with sculpture, film and photography. Her practice includes the process of direct casting of spaces. Through a material and process-led operation her creative practice has asserted a balance of rational decision-making with an intuitive approach – out of which emerge works that are to a large extent unanticipated. The material processes she uses enable a mapping of traces of unseen places, giving form to fragments of images, memories and experience.
Selected solo exhibitions include; Mill Flow, 2019, Mill Green Museum, Hatfield UK; The Fluid and the Fixed, 2019, University of East London; Virtual Shift, 2018, Luton Culture/Arts Council England, The Storefront, Luton Bedfordshire.
Sian-Kate Mooney, with a background in fashion and textiles, has over the past ten years developed a sculptural practice eschewing conventional sculptural materials in favour of those who used to make utilitarian things. For example, she has used recylced fabrics and fashion items, latex, building materials, self-fabricated soap, felt and combinations of these. Having been a fashion designer, much of her work acknowledged the human dimension.
Exhibitions include: Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2015; London: Fall of the Rebel Angels, 2015, Venice, Italy; Pravac Sila, 2014; Ozone Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia, Directional Forces 4, 2014; Artoll, Bedburg-Hau, Germany; Vroom, 2014; London: Chinese Open, 2014; Q-Park, Soho, London; Colony 55, Sale Docks, 2013; Venice Italy and Directional Forces 2, 2013; Artoll, Bedburg-Hau, Germany, for which she was co-curator and exhibitor.
MARK WOODS
Mark Woods uses a range of materials that include epoxy resins, silk, leather and faux materials to create ‘trangressice’ objects that reflect an extraordinarily high level of execution. These materials become part of the objects’ allure, eroticism and ambiguity; connecting to the viewer’s sense of the fetishistic. They have been described as laying bare a fascination with the “fradulent simulation phenomena of a society increasingly obsessed with glamour and pornography”.
Selected solo exhibitions: A Return to Old Certainties, 2017, Lubomirov/Angus Hughes Gallery: London; Saturnia, 2012, Brussels, Belgium, 2010 and To Have and to Hold, The Wapping Project, London. Selected group exhibitions: Collecting Craft, Chariman Adams collection, Holburne Museum, Bath, Engalnd; Miniscule Venice, curated by Vanya Balogh, Venice, Italy; Flugblätter, curated by Birgit Jensen, Maebashi, Japen, Schloss Plüschow Mecklenburg, Künstlerhaus, Upahl, Germany; Flugblätter, curated by Birgit Jensen & Mark Patsfall, Clay Street Press, Cincinnati, USA (all 2019). Flugblätter, 2018, curated by Birgit Jensen, Dordrect, The Netherlands; EMPIRE II, 2017, touring to Venice, Brussels, London, Kendal and Berlin; The Kick insid, 2016, Tel Aviv, Israel; Curious Bodies, London; Nirvana, Les entranges formes du plaisir,Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
Centre image by Mark Woods. Outer images by Rebecca Larkin. All works copyright the artists.