Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes…
Welcome to Exquisite Corpse, the 2023 Oxford Brookes MFA Fine Art graduation show. The title of this exhibition promises to be ‘greater than the sum of its parts’, a laudable ambition from nine artists who share seven nationalities and diverse intersectional identities. Like the characters that emerge when playing the titular game—invented by the Surrealists—these artists have embarked on a transformational journey throughout the MFA programme, during which there have been phases of extreme creativity with moments of surprise, puzzlement and delight. Each artist has approached their individual programme of study with an open mind, prepared to take their thinking and practice into unchartered territories, holding onto their creative core, but taking risks whilst steering new paths through a range of contemporary and traditional media and modes of practice. They have all come to ‘expect the un-expected’. Seeing themselves as a ‘collective of individuals’ they have whole-heartedly moved towards developing an audience experience that goes beyond an encounter with individual artists and works. So, in the spirit of their curatorial concept… Let us fold our sheets of paper and begin to play…
Head:
The brain is an organ about which we know comparatively little. Scientists are able to identify those areas that are responsible for particular activities, including movement, higher reasoning, emotion, memory etc., but psychoanalysts (and the population at large) still ponder the meanings of dreams. The latter are the preoccupation of one participating artist who juxtaposes a disciplined dream recording methodology with votive painting practices found in her native Mexico. Results are surprising and strange. Incongruous shapes and colours simultaneously suggest one thing and another. Ambiguity continues elsewhere, in work where visual, aural and sensory disturbance characterise a wide-ranging practice encompassing works in film, drawing, objects and text in an ‘installed tableaux’. These emanate, not only from the artist’s academic research into archives of decay, but also are rooted in formative experiences of a perception altering ophthalmic condition. Ways of learning are central to other work in which the relationship between image, text, process and historic documents are interrogated and re-interpreted for contemporary audiences, through practices involving contemporary ceramics and archival research.
{FOLD AND PASS ON}
Body:
A limb and fingers stretch beyond where they should… and they just keep going. These are not imagined fantasies of surrealist iconography, nor the body parts of circus contortionists. Rather, performative objects and images visualise experiences of disability, foregrounding for audiences the embodied experience of being the object of others’ curiosity whilst challenging ableist assumptions. In works elsewhere, bodies, centres of gravity, dance and movement are starting points for paintings and drawings where the act of image making has become as integral to the completed work as the subject represented and image produced. Another artist mediates the sensations of occupying urban architectural and natural environments whilst translating experiences on to a layered painted surface. Using the practiced ‘muscle memory’ of the hand whilst channelling a response to 20th century utopian materiality of, for example, Brutalist architecture, ideals of form, texture, shape, colour and abstraction are revisited and invigorated for a contemporary audience.
{FOLD AND PASS ON}
Legs:
Houses on stilts mark a precarious path through unchartered territories. These metaphoric sculptures evoke the protective refuges against tides used by pilgrims on their way to holy sites at Lindisfarne. They represent a liminal space, where unsteady physicality and ability to hold hopes and fears are channelled, simultaneously, through personal experiences of life changing illness. Wet feet are the intention of another artist who disrupts a watercourse through an ecological sculptural intervention. This action mimics the work of beavers, once widespread throughout the UK, and welcomes back the ‘othered’ bodies of non-human life forms to environments shaped, historically, by human behaviours to suit our own purposes. This work, in sustainable, locally sourced willow, brings a new perspective to William Morris’s concept of ‘useful and beautiful’. We are also invited to find the source of humanity and creativity in a range of works produced both in collaboration with and opposition to the generative capacities of AI. Characters including ‘Ballerina’ and ‘Mr Owl’ metamorphose, grow and reach beyond the picture plane. The very bottom of our Exquisite Corpse sees Mr Owl’s trunk reaching down to the world of humans, whilst the algorithm reminds us that “The End is manifesting – one head at a time.” I guess this means we need more paper and should start the game again…
{FOLD AND PASS ON}