Cover: An Ode to Christian Joy (2014) Emily Sparkes

Paroxetine (2014) Lisa Marie Williams Sertraline (2014) Lisa Marie Williams

A Message to You Rudy (detail) (2014) Michael Carr 06 07 newartwestmidlands.org tpwestmidlands.org.uk

New Art West Midlands Turning Point West Midlands

The New Art West Midlands TPWM is pleased to support TPWM is hosted by Birmingham exhibition, now in its third year, New Art West Midlands as a vital School of Art, Birmingham City is a Turning Point West Midlands platform for graduate artists University along with its sister initiative which launched in 2013. from the region’s universities at project New Art WM which Turning Point West Midlands a crucial stage in their career is developing the market for (TPWM), a network for the visual development. The exhibition contemporary art in the West arts and part of the national continues to be an opportunity Midlands. TPWM and New Contemporary Visual Arts for the region to celebrate high Art WM are supported by Arts Network (CVAN), was established calibre art schools and the Council England. in 2010 to strengthen the visual wealth of creative talent that arts in the West Midlands. exists among its visual artists. Professor John Butler, Chair, TPWM does this by working with Turning Point West Midlands partners to develop and support projects of lasting significance Wendy Law, Director, for the region and its artists. Turning Point West Midlands 09 newartwestmidlands.org

Preface

Birmingham Museum and Art Our three selectors were Amna Rachel Bradley is Project Gallery has for the third time Malik (art historian and Senior Organiser of New Art West taken the lead in developing Lecturer, The Slade School Midlands 2015 the multi-sited exhibition New of Art, UCL), John Newling Art West Midlands 2015. The (artist and formerly Professor partnership of venues continues of Installation Sculpture, to evolve and this year The Nottingham Trent University) and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Bedwyr Williams (artist). The Coventry is participating in selectors have written essays addition to The Barber Institute of for this publication that are Fine Arts and Wolverhampton Art responsive to the exhibition’s Gallery. Now an annual event in selection process, the creation the region’s visual arts calendar, of a sense of place and race the exhibitions showcase some and representation in higher art of the best work produced by education. graduates of the West Midlands’ five University art schools: Birmingham City, Coventry, Staffordshire, Wolverhampton and Worcester.

Sting in the Tail (detail) (2013) Kathleen Fabre Untitled (2014) Jessica Holt

10 Mappiness in Birmingham

John Newling

“Thoughts of fringes being symbols area is the crux of the nation and yet, resources associated with capital of exclusion saddened many with the exception of electioneering cities. Instead it has resources based hairdressers” politics, it has become an on industry and the enlightenment. indeterminate region, hidden in It is constantly looking forward and On Tuesday 15th of July I arrived plain sight. In its cartography it its history informs its attitudes rather at New Street station destined for benefits from avoiding the binary than ossifying them. Soho House Margaret Street. I was to meet up of the geopolitical borders north in Handsworth can claim to be the with a group of people and, with and south. This may be why it has home of the English Enlightenment them, spend two days selecting been the incubator of so many artists and yet, despite having been born artists for New Art West Midlands across all creative endeavours. only a couple of streets away, 2015. I only discovered this recently. Birmingham is unlike many post- Birmingham doesn’t stop being Birmingham is important to me; it is industrial cities in that it has a thirst curious, but it doesn’t concentrate where I am from. My art education for the new and the innovative. It is so much on its past that that hobbles was bookended in the West a place that seems reluctant to dwell its future. Midlands. I began as a Foundation on the past as it constantly moves student in Birmingham and returned itself forward; even when that is “More sameness means less to Wolverhampton University to towards a future not easily defined. distinction” take my M.Phil. In the late ’70s, I Birmingham always feels like it is returned to live a few streets away ready to take a chance and it is this Wealth and capital are viewed from from where I had been born in sense of risk and uncertainty that a different perspective in the West Handsworth. engages me. Midlands. It is the home of social experiments such as Bournville Birmingham, and the West The culture of the West Midlands as well as the heavy industries Midlands, are important in a more is nourished by a very particular of armaments and chain making. general sense. Geographically, the ecology. It doesn’t have the capital Value is more than just money. The Spirit Collection (2014) Jade Simpson

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Value is imagination and creativity; live in an oddly controlling state, we “Common lives were glimpsed it is a sideways glance from the seek meaning in new or perplexing through the rip in the shroud of periphery. It is important to value ideas. We conjure a kind of divine global economics” the resources that nourish ecology cartography for ourselves: a weird if the various elements are to thrive kind of mappiness. We create a The Margaret Street building is a and prosper. Risk is part of the cartography that can never really be fine one: a Victorian bank foyer ecology that nourishes the West drawn but somehow brings depth meets the irrepressible spirit of art Midlands. Resources are not just and pleasure to many. students. The very walls of the things; resources are also attitudes place have the patina of decades of and processes. Art, for me, feels like a geological arts production. To be there seeing layer of our soil. In the ecology of so many examples of artists’ work “Choice is good for those that can values it persists as a kind of truth was a privilege that weighed heavily choose” whilst many other soils have washed on me. I really appreciated the away. Art advocates a world seen coffee. When you arrive at a place you strange, a sideways glance that see it through first impressions: asks questions of everything. Art We saw works that were full of a kind of guiding cartography. can construct a map of bewildering questions. This seems to be an New Street station is a mess of complexity that has an island of ingredient of art’s geology: layer confusing signs and directions positive uncertainties as its only upon layer of questions that compact that echo the mesmeric lines of landmass. In an archipelago of a soil. They are questions that Spaghetti Junction. Perhaps this thought, reason and emotion, refute the need to identify a specific disorientation is good for those art is the island that encourages problem. At times, when these wanting to experience art in the city. investigation. Art is first hand in its questions become over abundant it It is the irrational and disorientating dialogue with the world. It is truly feels like the soil is de-laminating, views of young artists that I have local. falling apart and producing less come to see. Perhaps, because we successful works. 12 13

“Geologists were perplexed by building bridges outwards but the not concerned solely with moving of reason, it seems to me that we introducing worth over symbolic brave, to take risks and to try to find the recent outbreaks of mind map truth is that essentially they are money about but much more to do still have a need to find meaning value. new ways of generating, producing avalanches” clubs where membership is strictly with new strategies for production. in our lives. Art does try to re- and disseminating their work. defined. The gap between members This applies especially to the way map everything and is involved in I saw many works that were Mind maps are very useful in and others has exponentially that art has been produced and shifting meaning. And meaning, in concerned with shifting our views John Newling is an artist and guiding and quelling the storms of increased over the last decades. For enjoyed in the West Midlands. I this instance, does not necessarily of meaning, which insisted on a former Professor of Installation uncertainty manifest in the processes artists it is not a question of ‘mind grew up with the art of the city. adhere to a symbolic order that is language of uncertainty and risk. Sculpture, Nottingham Trent of making art but, in the hands of an the gap’ but rather a sense of what Like so many I regularly visited tacitly agreed through our culture. Each presentation gave us an island University artist they connect and connect and the gap may be and how to bridge it. the great municipal building that Art does unglue things. The map of value and the feeling that art is connect. The cartography is infinite houses the Birmingham Museum is, if it is anything, a constantly needed. There was a truth given and makes the positing of a thing as “The global shortage of post-it and Art Gallery. But in a typically mutable set of borders where new by the generosity of these artists. art very tricky. notes was traced to the dams on the Birmingham manner, one of the regions can emerge. Art may be a geology hidden in our rivers of audit trails” incarnations of the Ikon Gallery was soils but it will always be needed “Storm clouds gathered as people not in a museum but in the newly Meaning and purpose, worth and as a vital element in our ecology of sensed that participation didn’t In Margaret Street I was looking for built Bull Ring shopping centre: value, move around each other values. mean inclusion” works that possessed a conceptual an exchange of ideas in a place of in our understanding of symbolic value that would push ideas and exchange and commerce. language. The recent phenomenon My hope is that a generation of It may be a peculiarly English thing explorations. Works like that are of hand crocheted poppies artists now working in the city to understand that participation is hard to make. “Throats got hoarse and lips dried substitutes the delicate fragility of and studying at its art schools not the same as inclusion. We are so as bank vaults became freezers for a paper poppy for a robust creation should feel encouraged to look at familiar with institutions that we see It is not just that Birmingham is the new gold; ice cubes” in crimson wool. We are invited to the region’s past, not as a way of them as places where the included good at making stuff, although it assess the aesthetics of the poppy, influencing the art they make but are found. Institutions look to patrol is; the real merit lies in its ability In these times when meaning and especially when we see them now rather as a way of informing the way inwards around their own borders, to bring new ways of thinking to purpose in our lives have become rendered in enamel and crystal. that they make it. They should feel protecting all that is held within. methods of making and sharing. It troubled as ideologies fail and This may wobble the symbolic the lightest hand of history on their They may purport to be forever is an attitude of risk taking that is belief systems crash on the rocks order of remembrance, momentarily shoulders encouraging them to be Conspiracy to Undermine II (2013) Glenys Shirley

14 Rethinking the curriculum for art education: a view from the archives of Black Art in Britain Amna Malik

The Runnymede Trust, Britain’s curriculum? Within arts education through their inclusion in Rasheed premier think tank on race in that question inevitably raises Araeen’s exhibition The Other Britain, organised a series of events the history, in Britain, of artists Story, and his painting The Wall in a number of universities across from the former colonies, whose (1958) entered the public collection the country throughout 2013 and presence within its institutions of art of Birmingham Museum and 2014, on race in higher education. constitutes a story of long-standing Art Gallery. The relevance of A key area for discussion was the struggle for recognition. Shemza’s career to the question of question of curriculum change in The West Midlands has how one may address the problems response to the needs of students played an important and role of a curriculum that is currently from BME backgrounds. That these in this history: the first black too Eurocentric, touches on the matters still need to be addressed art convention, organised by difficult place of art history within is a terrible indictment of higher Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers and the art school. This is a necessary education in the UK, which has Claudette Johnson was held at institutional issue for art schools to become a two-tier system. In this Lanchester Polytechnic, Coventry in explore and address. age of neoliberalism, that system October 1983. Before this moment Traditionally, while art has yet to recruit sufficient BME – a moment that in many ways historians have seemed to be out of staff to make a difference to what inaugurated what has subsequently step with the contemporaneity that is given value in the factories of come to be known as the Black art dominates studio practice, they have knowledge production. Much of movement in Britain - the artist arguably fulfilled the necessary role that, however, is all too familiar Anwar Shemza had lived and taught of insisting on the importance of and is not the focus of this essay. and painted in Stafford, 30 miles history. But that, of course, begs the UCL’s diversity unit is leading the north of Birmingham, for most of question of whose history? This is way in achieving and promoting his life. By 1984, a year after the a question that in some respects has the need for change, with the most convention, he had passed away, but determined the activities of scholars, pressing topic of the moment being his abstract paintings came to enjoy artists and curators associated with the question of what constitutes a considerable success posthumously Third Text, the Black Art Gallery An Ode to Christian Joy (2014) Emily Sparkes

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in Finsbury Park and, later, Iniva. across Britain). If one considers difficulties with the then, admittedly A key, associated issue is the this development alongside the rise narrow emphasis on life drawing, place of the international within of postcolonial studies within art have been well documented, and the European and particularly history, and the enormous impact were a focus of Araeen’s exhibition the British art world - a concern of cultural studies on public debate catalogue for The Other Story. that artist, teacher, curator and over British identity in Britain Shemza attended Ernst Gombrich’s administrator Gavin Jantjes was for the past 30 years (sadly under weekly lectures on art history drawn closely involved in from the early threat with the demise of Stuart from immensely successful book 1980s through until the mid-1990s Hall and the uncertain future of The Story of Art (1950) and, in later when he moved to Oslo. It is sad Iniva), one can perhaps seize the years, he recalled the impact of to note that we are still having to opportunity to look back at the Gombrich on Islamic art: ask these questions and raise these archives of Black art in Britain to ‘When I was attending a Slade issues, despite the success and widen 21st century understanding weekly lecture on the history of art, indeed institutional acceptance of of relationships between the Euro- Prof. Gombrich came to the chapter the work of artists such as Piper, American tradition of art history and on Islamic art – an art which was Chambers, Himid, Boyce, Araeen, the increasingly global reach of art ‘functional’- from his book, The Bhimji and many, many others. historical knowledge to encompass Story of Art. I remember leaving As an art historian I have to the regions of South Asia, Africa and the room a few minutes before the acknowledge that some of these Latin America, to name just a few. lecture finished, and sitting on a on-going issues are related to the Why is this global context bench outside. As the students came discipline of art history itself, but important? If one takes a look at out, I looked at all their faces: they the situation appears to be changing Anwar Shemza’s early years as seemed so contented and self- with art history’s expansion into a student one can understand the satisfied.’ contemporary art (so evident in dilemma better. Shemza came to Quoting this passage from the many courses now offered by London from Lahore, Pakistan, Shemza’s 1965 exhibition university art history departments in 1956 to study at the Slade; his catalogue for the Gulbenkian 18 19

Museum of Orientalist Art in work, and was prompted also by the creation of the painting The Masterpieces of Mohammaden emerging or recently independent by European artists who were Durham, Araeen asks ‘What was his persistent failure to pass the Wall – itself a consequence of his Art and his subsequent, pre first nation-states, including Pakistan instrumental in raising the profile it that upset Shemza, or put him compulsory life drawing exams, discovery of the work of Paul Klee world war travel in Tunisia to see, and Sudan. From this vantage point and visibility of art and art education in such a dilemma?’ Reflecting which would bring to an end his through his tutor, Andrew Forge, first hand, examples of what was one can consider Shemza’s sense in East Africa and Saharan Africa on the marginalization of non- period of study at the Slade. The who had published a number of categorised as ‘Islamic’ art. of alienation and struggle within and Pakistan. Already to some Western art in Gombrich’s book ‘marginality’ created by Gombrich’s short monographs on the artist in In the privileged position of an the Slade, which continued after extent tutored in the European Araeen suggests ‘Perhaps in this lecture was doubly forceful because English. For Forge, Klee’s work art historian working at the Slade he was able to persuade the Slade tradition of life drawing and marginalization, Shemza saw his it was invisible: that modern art was seminal in the continued with access to student archives Professor to allow him to remain on painting, Iqbal et al were familiar own marginality. Whatever it was, was a living practice in the hands nurturing of a European abstract and within a stone’s throw of UCL the programme to complete a three- with the conventions and standards it was unbearable’. Quoting from of artists in post-partition Lahore art tradition in post-war Britain, and the Gombrich archive at the year diploma course. Shemza’s of the academy through their first- Shemza again he notes the artist’s was a fact that was largely unknown from its early moments in the 1920s Warburg Institute, it has been experience contrasts quite sharply hand experience of places such realisation of an identity crisis: ‘I and neglected. Indeed, it is only when Ben Nicholson and Barbara helpful to broaden the invaluable with those of Sam Ntiro from as Georgetown School of Art in was an exile, homeless, without a through Iftikhar Dadi’s very recent Hepworth were associated with the intervention made by Araeen on Kenya, Ibrahim El-Salahi from Khartoum, the Department of Fine name… No longer was the answer publication Modernism and the international Abstraction Creation this matter in his catalogue for The Sudan and interestingly, Khalid Art at Punjab University in Lahore simply to begin again; the search Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) group. For Shemza, against the Other Story. A number of striking Iqbal, also from Lahore. and the Department of Fine Art at was for my own identity. Who that a comprehensive modern art backdrop of the marginality of factors emerge and have been Shemza’s struggle offers Mackere University in present-day was I? The simple answer was: a history of Pakistan has started to be the international modern tradition highlighted in a collaborative project a counterpoint to the polarised Uganda. Their resultant networks Pakistani. But that wasn’t enough. written - in contrast with the many (understood in European terms in with Melissa Terras of UCL’s positions of, on the one hand, provided them with greater support I could see Pakistan in my mind’s rich publications and extant, vibrant the parochial period of the 1950s Centre for Digital Humanities: artists such as Aubrey Williams and they all became very successful eye: Lahore was where I came from, scholarship addressing Indian art in Britain), there was a further Transnational Slade: Mapping the and Rasheed Araeen - who were in their respective countries. my friends, painters, their work, all history. Part of Shemza’s dilemma, marginality that had to be brought Diaspora of an Art School. The resolutely working in the absence of Shemza’s position as an outsider little Picassos, Cezannes, Braques, his struggle for recognition as an to light: Klee’s internationalism project has uncovered a rich and institutional support from within the in Britain was, in contrast, perhaps Van Goghs. I could see a third rate established artist, was to insist was rooted in north African diverse student body at the Slade in art school system in the UK – and, exacerbated by his marginal position “Paris”.’ [2] on the presence of, as he put it, architecture, mosaics and textiles the 1950s and revealed a complex on the other, artists such as Iqbal, in Lahore, where he failed to secure This crisis led Shemza to an orientalist art history in South as a consequence of his visit to the network of affiliations between El-Salahi and Ntiro - who were a position at the Mayo School of Art. destroy a great deal of his existing Asia. The result of his crisis was seminal 1911 Munich exhibition the Slade and other art schools in supported in their native countries It is thus instructive to note the 20 21

complex positions of a wider range theories of hybridity, in relation to at making history accessible to racial difference. In other words, the 1960s and 1970s in New York. when these radical changes to the of artists who were at the Slade at which conventions of artistic styles children, but from 1944, when Gombrich’s desire to place the Bowling’s critique of Black art was discipline of Art History were the same moment as Shemza and and genres simply fail to account it was first commissioned, to its discipline within a field of objective particularly striking at the Black art undertaken by exiled Jewish art to ask what one can learn from the for the practices of artists drawing eventual publication in 1950, the analysis was motivated by the desire convention in Coventry in 1983, historians fleeing persecution, particular challenges that Shemza on what appear to be contrasting project changed in approach. As to eliminate all analyses of cultural which he aimed at Araeen’s paper can still define the terms in which himself faced. The most evident, traditions of making. a text aimed at a wide and general differences, which were viewed as on the subject. In other words, the the subject of race and cultural of course, is that, before arriving at Considering the wider readership it became part of a move essentially negative theories driven very vocal critique of black identity difference is openly and centrally the Slade, he had been embedded historical context for Shemza’s towards the popularisation of the by social Darwinism. and art undertaken subsequently placed within an art school in an artistic tradition that was moment of crisis and struggle, one discipline also taking place in the Why is this relevant to the by Araeen and within the pages of curriculum today? contrary to the European canon. must also address the failures of US: James Elkins has argued that, wider questions of the curriculum Third Text can be traced back to Many other students were to change art history, which are another focus in many respects, Gombrich cannot within art education and the place Clement Greenberg, who, arguably, Amna Malik is Senior Lecturer, Art their practices only after they left of Araeen’s framing of The Other be seen as an art historian, that of art history within Black art? One was as deeply marked by the desire History, Slade School of Fine Art, to return to their countries but, for Story and provide a crucial aspect of ironically, though he popularised of the major concerns in addressing to self-censor any references to UCL Shemza, his quest to engage with discussions regarding the curriculum the discipline, his engagement with the legacy of the art made by Jewish identity as, arguably, was the Orientalist roots of European within art education. Whilst visuality through empirical models Shemza, Williams, Piper and others Gombrich. While these concerns [1] Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story Afro- Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, The South modern art arguably set him apart Araeen’s exhibition encapsulates the of perception positions him apart is the difficult place of race within appear to be in the distant past, they Bank Centre, London 1989, p.84 from parallel artistic practices in history of diaspora artists in Britain, from the majority of art historians. [3] art historical scholarship. Recent have impacted a great deal on the [2] Ibid, p.85 Pakistan and Britain. This artistic it also starkly draws attention to the Yet, it is also undoubtedly the case research on Frank Bowling’s points of intersection between art homeless-ness is one that has been need for an art history to be more that Gombrich’s desire to position paintings by Kobena Mercer [4] and history and art criticism in relation [3] James Elins, ‘Ten Reasons Why E.H. Gombrich is Not Connected to Art History’ and continues to be experienced inclusive of cultural difference. the study of art history within subsequent debates over the place to the history of Black art and artists Human Affairs 19 (3) 2009 by many art students before and Shemza’s sense of alienation scientific and psychological models of black identity in these paintings in Britain. They prompt us to ask [4] ‘Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey since Shemza. Caught between in Gombrich’s lecture requires can be understood as part of a wider evident in the writings of Leon whether the understandably very Williams and Frank Bowling’ in Discrepant contrasting cultures, it is perhaps some further contextualisation. shift within art history determined Wainwright and Dorothy Rowe, difficult conditions that generated Abstraction edited by Kobena Mercer, Iniva and MIT Press, 2006 their particular isolation created by Gombrich’s The Story of Art by its Hegelian legacy, specifically draw attention to the impact of anti-Semitism, not only in Germany diaspora that suggests the necessity (1950) was, as we know, based as it emerged in the inter-war period, Clement Greenberg’s art criticism but in the US academy, and which for returning to Homi Bhabha’s loosely on a similar book aimed and which was marked by ideas of on Bowling’s writings on artists in marked the early post-war period Girls on Bridge – Amsterdam (detail) (2014) Jennifer Shufflebotham

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Bedwyr Williams

The first morning of the selection judging was to happen in the very institutions that warned you in bold process in Birmingham I woke up handsome Birmingham School of that they wouldn’t be able to return to an announcement on the local Art. There aren’t many art schools them to you. Think of all those TV station that a baby falcon had in old buildings anymore which is slides. Where are they now? In a hatched out of its egg on top of the a shame, because looking the part landfill where their transparency is BT tower. I’ve been trying to think goes a long way. completely useless. ‘Great slides’, of a way in which this was symbolic The unsettling thing about a know-all selector might have said in relation to the judging of this selecting work is that you have a twenty years ago whilst looking at event but there’s no convincing feeling of déjà vu. I don’t mean a candidate’s work. Now we might connection to be made. Neither is that in a negative or positive way. say,‘nice images’. there a connection with the enormous Somehow the images that are shown So that’s what I’m going croissant I saw at breakfast (the in front of you seem familiar as if to do now, blurt out the ones I biggest I’ve ever seen). you had worked on them yourself thought were ‘nice images’ without I’ve sent in an application or or seen them somewhere. That’s unpacking them at all. It’s up to two over the years. Sometimes inevitable I suppose and what a you guys to form your own opinions successfully and at other times selector wants is to be jolted out and reactions. My observations are they’ve bounced right back to me. of that. I’ve heard horror stories based on looking at hundreds of I’ve wondered about ways of spying about people being locked in rooms images one after another. on the process with a concealed drinking ‘technician coffee’ and There was a painting in cold mic and camera in the jiffy bag, and eating lame provincial pizza for days. colours by Jennifer Shufflebotham even about setting up a speaker to I’ve heard about arguments during of what looked like friends trying scream ‘how dare you’ when my selection when people have cried. to hide behind a pole with a street work was passed over by a tired I’m not that old, 40, but I converging in the background, or lecturer with cramp. remember slides and the expense are they bisected by a mirror? It’s On this occasion I was judge and disappointment that came with not clear; their chains are festooned - or one of them at least – and sending them through the post to from god knows where. Painting is John Millais (2013) James Turner

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Foremark Reservoir II (2014) Jennifer Shufflebotham

good like that because you can be too well. He defaces the images the side room which every gallery bold but still be unclear. In another with light in a way that reminds has at an art fair. A little galley with of the artist’s paintings she has two me of a guy at school who used to works not on show, expensive coats smudge-faced kids coming out of a draw penises of absurd lengths onto and shoes belonging to the gallery kind of tent, but not in a cute way figures in school textbooks. Some staff and maybe some white paint (more creepy). Creepiest of all of them would start on page 9 say for touching up. It’s where the though is a picture of a grinning/ and continue as two parallel lines gallery ladies go to hitch up their grimacing figure and his silhouette on every page until the head would tights and the gallery men go to pick friend standing by a reservoir. emerge triumphant somewhere in their noses out of sight. Then there was a gangly the index. Others that left an impression safari of 2’ by 2’ animals by Jade One of the most arresting were a laptop with flying slices Simpson: strange, come-to-life images was a harsh orange of pizza embroidered on a hoodie clothes-maidens that despite their photograph by Megan Sheridan of by Adam Gruning and Alexandra modest materials have real weight a fishmonger, his face obscured by Darby’s absurd orange and blue and stature. They could also be the two hanging squids. Substituting photo scenarios, Chrysophobia. props and costumes of your local heads for fish and so on is nothing There are others of course but these Shaman or part of a very niche new of course, but somehow the are some that stayed with me. carnival. candid feel of this image and the Like I said there is no James Turner’s re-jigging of schlock of the food all around the connection between the baby Augustus Egg’s The Travelling figure behind a misted up window peregrine falcon and the selection Companions (1862) and John made me sit up and feel sick at the process, but I like the idea that in Millais’ The Blind Girl (1856) same time. the days between its hatching and from Birmingham Museum and Reece Kennedy’s installation maybe the time it opened its eyes for Art Gallery’s collection managed mimicked an art fair stand. What the first time, we had selected New to make an impression even though made this work distinct from other Art West Midlands 2015. I imagine they don’t photograph similar works was the rendition of Bedwyr Williams is an artist. Squid (2014) Megan Sheridan 28 Dan Auluk 30 Jade Blackstock 32 Michael Carr 34 Jakub Ceglarz 36 Alexandra Darby

Artists 38 Lucy Dore 40 Kathleen Fabre 42 Joanna Fursman 44 Adam Gruning 46 Shijie Hai 48 Andrea Hannon 50 Josh Hazell 52 Jessica Holt 54 Reece Kennedy 56 Sevven Kucuk 58 Amanda Pearce 60 Yasmin Rennie 62 Vicky Roden Earthly Pleasures (2014) 64 Camilla Searle Sevven Kucuk 66 Carole Sherman Brevity of Life (2014) 68 Megan Sheridan Sevven Kucuk 70 Glenys Shirley 72 Jennifer Shufflebotham 74 Jade Simpson 76 Emily Sparkes 78 Emma Starkey 80 Sarah Thorley 82 James Turner 84 Jodie Wingham 86 Lisa Marie Williams 28

Birmingham City University

Dan Auluk

Dan Auluk’s action research visual impairment as a result of German Democratic Republic, experiments, performances and his chronic diabetes, Auluk was 1984. Muhe’s character Captain residual installations respond blindfolded for a walk between Gerd Wiesler is engaged in the to different sites and contexts his Selly Oak home and the mac surveillance of the suspected to create reflexive video, arts centre in Cannon Hill Park. anti-Communist activity of a photography, sound works, texts, An experiment in trust, he was playwright and his partner, drawings and interventions. guided by his partner who read recording his voyeuristic findings His body of work reflects his out directions and recorded on a typewriter. Similarly, Auluk curiosity in engaging with, or the ambient, amplified sounds will be sitting still, blind-folded simply observing the public of the walk. Blindfolded once and typing what he hears – a as he proposes an internal again, these sounds were later disrupted narrative - in an challenge or exploration of his transcribed by Auluk as a line attempt to capture the liminal personal emotional and physical drawing. space between what is truly boundaries. His performances The Lives of Others (2015) private and public. and installations also attempt to will be performed by Auluk at dismantle the passive nature of the private view of New Art West art audiences by producing art Midlands 2015 at The Barber that addresses the complacency Institute, when he will document of seeing revealing multiple a version of conversations perspectives that interrogate he hears at the reception, how we, as individuals, look and transcribing odd words and see differently. He contemplates murmurings. Auluk’s The Lives that which we choose to erase of Others is inspired by Ulrich and that which we can and can’t Muhe’s performance as a Stasi The Lives of Others (detail) (2015) remember. In Blind Drawing 1 secret policeman in the film of Performance (2012) responding to his fear of the same name, set in the former Photo: Emily Warner 30

University of Worcester

Jade Blackstock

Jade Blackstock’s time-based Her performance work In, In, social construction, defined by work reflect her fascination In (2014) has been documented its opposite, blackness. The with impossibilities, trials, as a video-work in New Art West ironic and repetitive use of failures, and Sisyphean cycles Midlands 2015. Blackstock more and more white materials which are tasks that can never performs this work dressed head in a layering process for In, In, be completed. Interested to toe in white clothing, covering In emphasises the futility of in transubstantiation – the any bare flesh with white paint. attempts to strip the meaning Roman Catholic belief that in In an act of endurance she is and symbolism of white from its the sacrament of the Eucharist bombarded with white liquid associated contexts. bread and wine become the foam from a foam cannon, actual body and blood of Christ which appears to overwhelm her - she develops her works with creating a claustrophobic and a trial and error approach to oppressive environment in which create alchemical spectacles. she finds it difficult to breathe. Employing arbitrary materials The purpose of In, In, In is to and using them for purposes propose the impossibility of the that they are not generally used objectivity of the colour white. for Blackstock develops works Her aim is to transform the term where bread becomes clay, ‘white’ and its meaning from an plastic becomes skin and liquid adjective used to describe an foam becomes a blindfold. She object into an actual object. is particularly drawn towards the Blackstock also works versatility of non-conventional within the academic inquiry materials making sculpture and of Whiteness studies which performances that use food, treats whiteness not as a In, In, In (2014) perishables and bacterial cultures. biological category, but as a Performance 32

Coventry University Michael Carr

Michael Carr produces in multiple places across cultures. revival which is closely associated objects, texts, spoken word The sculpture The Green, with the city and the wider West and performance works which Green Grass of Home (2014) Midlands region. explore relationships of diaspora provides us with a bright green, and multiculturalism that often turfed outline of the African bear a direct relationship to his continent as postcolonial Black/Irish dual heritage. He mapping, an exploration of uses lo-fi materials such as vinyl new formations and changing records, maps and found objects diaspora that question identity to examine Jean Baudrillard’s and a sense of belonging. Carr’s theory that new media creates work for New Art West Midlands new cultures and languages by 2015 reflects his interest in the which we assimilate or dissimulate demise of a physical interaction information. Carr is interested once inherent in the recording in new materialism and the new and playing of music. The lyrical, landscapes created through a instructional text of Instructions process of both exchange and Not Included (2014) meticulously loss; a loss of tangibility and informs us of how to care for objecthood incurred as a result a vinyl LP record. His work A of rapid advances in media Message to you Rudy (2014), an technology. For him these new inked silhouette of The Specials landscapes are emerging as band member Lynval Golding, Instructions Not Included (2014) a contemporary expression of transposed onto a street map Vinyl record inner sleeve diaspora and provide examples of Coventry, provides a direct of polydemic living, which means connection between Carr and A Message to You Rudy (2014) they are simultaneously occurring the musical heritage of the SKA Map, ink, pencil 34

Birmingham City University

Jakub Ceglarz

Cinema captures the sound (1975) which is concerned with offers the audience a choice in of speech close up and makes hedonism and the cathartic what they take away and also in us hear in their materiality, pleasure of reading, to the point how they read the conversations, their sensuality, the breath, the at which the reader becomes their readership creating yet gutturals, the fleshiness of the immersed and lost within a text. another level of articulation. lips, a whole presence of the In his examination of the theories The title of this work and the human muzzle (that the voice, of the readerly and writerly texts style in which Ceglarz has written that writing, be as fresh, supple, presented by Barthes, Ceglarz these conversations pays homage lubricated, delicately granular creates a series of conversations to two of Roland Barthes other and vibrant as an animal’s between fictional characters H works, S/Z (1970) and A Lover’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting and S that question the originality Discourse: Fragments (1977). In the signified a great distance and authorship of texts. these associations Ceglarz’s and in throwing, so to speak, the This multimedia installation installation becomes a tribute anonymous body of the actor into consists of stacks of A4 sized of sorts to an interdisciplinary my ear: it granulates, it crackles, pieces of paper on which there approach in creating art, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it is written text of conversations combining his passion for writing comes: that is bliss. and a projected film that shows a and video-making. Roland Barthes, close-up of a mouth articulating The Pleasure of the Text (1975) the words of the conversations in Polish. The pieces of paper are a Jakub Ceglarz’s video installation mixture of blank sheets and sheets H/S Conversations (2014) explores of text written in English available the boundaries of written and for the audience to pick up, take spoken text and its articulation. away and keep. As each paper H/S Conversations (2014) This work references Roland stack consists of a multiple and Video, paper stacks Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text different set of scripts Ceglarz Dimensions variable 36

University of Wolverhampton

Alexandra Darby

Alexandra Darby’s works straddle she fears the most. coloured images are inviting, the divisions between fine art and Many surrealist dreamscapes luscious and intriguing. The clean fashion photography. She draws of the early 20th century were lines and the framing of each together a range of psychological, influenced by psychoanalytic scene is dynamic while remaining formal and conceptual concerns anxieties and complexes. These perfectly static. The works evoke a through images with highly featured inanimate objects sense of both absurdity and fear saturated colour palettes. and domestic environments to within the viewer, and are difficult The series Chrysophobia evoke a sense of the ‘unheimlich’ to shake from the mind. (2014) explores a fear of the colour (uncanny) within familiar settings. orange. The protagonist of the Darby consciously references this photographs makes moves to hide context in her works. Touching, herself from a range of orange- too, upon fantastical worlds coloured objects (clocks, knives within fiction created by authors and forks) that encroach upon her such as Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through peaceful cobalt blue world. She the Looking-Glass, and What fearfully stands upon a table as if Alice Found There’ (1871), Darby’s she has seen a mouse, she hides photographs are strange, behind the table, she hunches in otherworldly and, yet, somehow the corner of a wall eyeing orange perfectly logical. Everyone is cutlery as it seems to dance frightened of something after all. across the wall next to her. It’s Darby’s works are also coming for her, coming to get her. deeply seductive. With perfectly Chrysophobia #2 (2014) All the while, she is slowly turning coiffed hair and elegant shoes the C-type photograph orange herself. Her hair, clothes protagonist and the photographs and shoes have all turned orange. themselves are immaculate, slick Chrysophobia #1 (2014) She cannot escape from the thing and heavily staged. The vibrantly C-type photograph 38

Birmingham City University

Lucy Dore

Derived from an informal social stitched and hand embroidery. to shape the way we view media survey of friends and They bring together a range of images and objects, and how family in which she asked people traditional drawing and sewing traditional value systems are to tell her about their personal skills that place emphasis on the altering as a result. How might idol, over thirty five handmade material process of making the traditional skills remain integral dolls make up the The Idol Project works. The finished idol dolls to contemporary art practice? (2013) series by Lucy Dore. Each were given to each respondent What role do personal idols one is unique and particular as a good luck token. These occupy in a celebrity-obsessed to the respondent. In this way, cherished objects, generously society? What place might the content of the project is gifted, demonstrate a warmth a doll have in a world where determined by Dore’s audience. and generosity within Dore’s children are entirely comfortable The idols include such diverse work. For New Art West Midlands with computers and other digital figures as Charles Darwin, Bill 2015, each of the dolls have technologies? These are just and Ted, Margot Fonteyn, David been reasxsembled, kindly lent some of the questions that Dore’s Lynch, and various mums, dads, by each of their owners so as works elicits. grandparents and children. to be displayed as a complete There is a sense of equality collection for the very first time. to Dore’s work, as each idol is The artist’s practice transformed into a small stitched looks, in a wider sense, at the and stuffed portrait with the ways in which objects can same care and attention, no be embedded with memories matter their field, achievements and emotional significance, or status. and at the ways that value is Dore’s dolls are carefully determined subjectively. Dore is made from calico and interested in how an increasingly The Idol Project (2014) embellished with machine- digital culture is continuing Hand-made calico dolls x 36 40

University of Wolverhampton

Kathleen Fabre

Strikingly formal contrasts puncture is imminent, perhaps the vibrancy and gloss of the inhabit the work of Kathleen inevitable. inflatables carry with them Fabre. Hot pinks and oranges The artist’s use of materials an inviting sensual quality. It with black; cold, hard steel with has a personal resonance too. is in the interplay between soft, malleable inflatable rubber She describes this in relation to these divergent material rings and armbands. From her childhood memories of being characteristics, both pierced series What the Water Gave Me in and around water. On one and intact, that their power lies. (2013), Fabre presents works that occasion, for instance, she combine these unusual elements recalls being pushed out to sea to create bold and bizarre forms in a deflating dinghy. Although that command a given space. the title of the series could be Fabre’s interdisciplinary read literally, the water giving practice brings together a her these experiences and range of artistic approaches. objects, Fabre also relates the Combining the weight and mass title to her subconscious mind, of sculpture, the temporal nature filtering through into each work of installation and the linear she makes, generating new aspects of drawing-based work, ideas and images, and bringing What the Water Gave Me is a forth forgotten memories. Fabre precarious series of sculptural enjoys the instinctive processes interventions that have a clearly of making works that this minimal, stripped back aesthetic. approach facilitates. The spikiness of the black steel There is also something rod structures contrasts with a little sinister within these What the Water Gave Me (detail) the vulnerability of the buoyant sculptures. A sense of danger (2013) water aids. The possibility of and of violence can be felt. But Inflatables, plastic tubing 42

Birmingham City University

Joanna Fursman

This series of photographs ‘disrupting’ the aesthetic by space, ripe with new possibilities. by Joanna Fursman takes creating something unexpected Similarly, Not an Art Room a different approach to the within the frame of the picture. (Drama) (2013) features a layer process of making art. The works The disruption takes the form of unidentifiable grey material were made in collaboration with of photographic collage-based which obscures most of the secondary school students in pieces wherein card, paper drama classroom behind. These workshops, a method which and other materials, often the grey screens, folded and with has allowed Fursman to explore ‘left-overs’ from previous works, irregular sections cut through, her dual role as both artist and are overlaid onto photographs. offer glimpses of black classroom teacher, as well as some of the These elements radically alter curtains which are framed in a tensions and opportunities that the view of a particular physical way that is reminiscent of the the student/teacher relationship space by re-shaping it with focus of a pair of binoculars. The brings. By making new works various ‘screens’ and structural works make any room into an art with other people, the artist layers within the flat picture room. points toward the debates plane. These screens must around the authorship and be looked through within the consequent ‘reading’ of the finished photograph. artwork as discussed by French For instance, in Not an Art philosopher and linguist Roland Room (Mobile) (2013) Fursman Barthes in his essay The Death of shows a mobile classroom the Author (1967). whose windows have become Fursman also takes influence eye-like features for the octopus- from the writings of such limbed layer of card in front theorists as Jacques Rancière, of it. Playing with perspective exploring these with her students and scale, the mobile classroom Pacmann (2013) to reflect upon the idea of is transformed into a different Photograph 44

Staffordshire University

Adam Grüning

Adam Grüning uses interrogates interior and web appropriated images and objects design processes and aesthetics, to consider design, placement juxtaposing a physical and the digital environment in environment with a digital the making of his work. Through environment that is both familiar playful and witty arrangements and unfamiliar. of ready-made objects and The objects Grüning manipulated imagery he creates, altered and decorated, provides a critique on various disrupt the commonplace spectacles in contemporary home and office displays to society that question the notions question traditional modes of of value and banality. categorisation. The customised Paradise Series (2014) is a hoodie replicates casual office series of works that investigate clothing that is worn by the dialogue between office, home stereotypical web or gaming and internet environments designer of Generation Y. The aiming to initiate a conversation pizza and laptop embroidered about how we live. The patch references online culture installation uses arrangements and its associations with eternal of Googled images depicting youthfulness. iconic cultural figures, sports brands and fast food alongside houseplants, a contemporary self-made stylised shelving unit and a customised hoodie. The Paradise Series (Hoodie) (2014) arrangement of the installation Hoodie, chair, plant 46

Birmingham City University

Shijie Hai

Shijie Hai’s work typically takes I hear everything in my room. to feeling the gaze of others and the form of graphic novels and Vroom Clip to doing something off-kilter, even artist’s books, bringing together Everything is so loud a little embarrassing, in a public design, illustration and fine art but me. place, Hai regards the book as contexts in new forms. Hai is It reminds me of an experiment a ‘carrier’ of his experiences. interested in the texture of paper, I did This is an idea which is integral its material qualities and the in science class when I was little. to his artistic practice. The impact that binding has upon The bell jar was connected to a simplicity of Artist Down (2013) books: the fact that the book as vacuum pump belies its complex conceptual an object is increasingly under the air in it was slowly removed. roots, namely a series of variable threat from digital methods The tinkle of the bell became mediations on the act of looking of reading and experiencing weaker and weaker and being looked at. images. He describes his until nothing in the end. working processes as journeys … which are as important as the No matter how hard I tried, finished books he makes. no one could hear me from the Catsmountain (2014) vacuum jar.’ is a series of short stories Artist Down (2013) is a within a graphic novel. Full of photographic artist’s book. It fear, loneliness and anxiety, features the artist in a variety of Catsmountain No. 2 (2014) tells locations over a period of seven a fragment of narrative via months. On the left hand side drawings and short texts in which of the spread, Hai can be seen the protagonist experiences standing up, and on the right, sleep paralysis: lying down in the same place. Books including Catsmountain ‘I hear the busy world outside, Relating to emotional responses (2014) 48

Coventry University

Andrea Hannon

Andrea Hannon’s work imagery, paper cut-outs from consisting of found objects and magazines, encyclopaedias and two- and three-dimensional tabloid newspapers which are collage reflects her interest incorporated with other objects in dichotomous thought and materials associated with structures that establish binary the home. She painstakingly categorisations such as man works with intricate materials versus woman, subject versus to slice, fold and layer cut-outs object and male versus female. to create sculptural works with Hannon is interested in female names such that interrogate encounters with traditional existing narratives and histories knowledge frameworks aiming of being female, challenging to deconstruct them, exploring established discourses that the split between the self perpetuate a universal formula as a subject - an individual of woman. encountering the world and the physical self that is a pre-described and defined objectively within the world. In works such as Housekeeping (2014) and Roost (2014) traditional knowledge structure is metaphorically represented or referred to as the ‘house’ and visually represented Territory Formula (detail) (2014) in deconstructed existing Collage, mixed media 50

University of Worcester

Josh Hazell

Josh Hazell’s art practice and evil found in the Garden considers the continued of Eden. Hazell’s performance influence of technological uses this biblical allegory, advances in contemporary presenting himself as an society and the inexorableness everyman attempting and failing of human beings’ dependency to eat forbidden fruit, perhaps upon machines. His film Man. a warning directed towards the Machine. (2014) was made as viewer to resist the insatiable a performative response to the though potentially perilous reliance on social networking desire of contemporary society now placed on communications for new information and new strategy. knowledge advanced through In the film Hazell acts as an technological change. automaton in methodologically destroying an apple with his teeth, taking bites and then spitting out the fruit scrapings, rather than swallowing them. The performance is an act of endurance and the gag reflex which occurs invokes repulsion in the viewer. The apple is often used in Western painting as a symbol of knowledge commonly portrayed as the fruit of the Man. Machine. (2014) Tree of Knowledge; of good Video 52

Birmingham City University

Jessica Holt

Jessica Holt’s sculptures take Holt’s sculptures bring itself as a series of shifting linear a minimal approach to form together natural and man-made drawings within the space, and material. Grounded in the materials to create works that unfolding around them. In this minimal Modernist sculpture occupy the particular space vein, the site becomes part of the prevalent in the 1960s, at least they are placed into. They are sculptures and the sculptures in a formal sense, various works also literally made from space: become part of the site, perhaps with the name Untitled (2014) the negative and positive spaces even part of the body of the are composed of rocks that that the thin steel structures viewer too. act as bases for delicate steel create. By encroaching upon the structures above. The elegance, physical space of the exhibition lightness and seeming fragility visitor, the works butt into them, of the metal structures is creating new interactions counterbalanced by the heavy between the sculpture and the mass of the supporting rocks. In viewer. The artist is particularly a conceptual sense, Holt regards interested in places that are gestalt theories of perception created and activated by the and interpretation as central to sculptures she makes, the idea her works. This idea determines of site and non-site and the that separate elements are dialogues initiated within these combined into wholes: that complex relationships. separate objects, lines and Untitled (Testing) (2014), for materials become whole forms example, is a larger work which and are viewed as complete incorporates shale with Holt’s systems rather than disparate rocks and five geometric steel elements in the eye and mind of structures. As the viewer walks Untitled (2014) the viewer. around the form, the work reveals Steel structures, rocks 54

Coventry University

Reece Kennedy

Reece Kennedy’s installation have ‘become economically’ as he questions the metanarrative Greatness Engine Future people, as subjects, as objects. of the art-world, also projected Prospectus (GEFP) (2014) The props in the art by the art school that such explores the role of the artist- collection have been selected representation is the pinnacle anthropologist using institutional to reveal a knowingness in their of an artist’s achievement and a critique to question the reverence and reference to the singular benchmark of success. hierarchies and dynamics of history of art, the mediums used, Kennedy has recently co- socio-political systems including the hierarchies of those mediums founded Rope Press with Elyse ‘the Art-world’ that influence and dictated by the art-world and Jinks, a new independent print construct the economies of art the means of presenting ideas and publishing facility based at and education. The installation, as narratives, intrinsic to and the Jubilee Centre, Birmingham. complete with gallerist and curated between pieces of administrative backroom, is work. Greatness Engine Future a replica of an art fair booth Prospectus (GEFP) as a real-life, and displays a collection of physical gallery structure raises works by the universal artist, an questions about the default expression of Kennedy’s research position of the white cube concerning the representation exhibition space, the role of the of art and how it is informed artist, the value of the artwork, by a hierarchical positioning and the status conferred on according to class and to the the international art fair in its individual’s possession of social, commodification of art. Kennedy cultural, political and economic interrogates the notion that the capital. The on-going inquiry ultimate aspiration of the artist Greatness Engine Future of his practice is to find the should be to have gallery and art Prospectus (GEFP) (2014) means to describe how we fair representation. In doing so Booth, props, artworks 56

Birmingham City University

Sevven Kucuk

In a practice taking influence death’ or ‘remember you have inevitable loss with simplicity and from the genre of still life to die’) and Dutch sixteenth and sharpness. painting, Sevven Kucuk’s work seventeenth century vanitas The artist’s use of objects lends a contemporary twist to painting practices, the work is are loaded with art historical, the subject now often regarded a personal reflection on lives cultural and personal symbolism as unfashionable. Working with lived and the fact that death and each photograph has been c-type photography she is able accompanies life at every step. shot in her family home which to capture fleeting moments, The skull in the background of provides an extra layer of highly material transformations, and Brevity of Life (2014) emphasises personal meaning. The last in the rich tonal and textural this subject boldly. Kucuk’s series, Earthly Pleasures variations of a range of objects Taking a highly personal (2014), which will be displayed in precise clarity and detail. approach, Kucuk’s work is as an intervention at The Barber Brevity of Life (2014), taken inspired by her Turkish Cypriot Institute of Fine Arts, again from the Acceptance series takes heritage and her own family references classical symbols and two floating bubbles as its points circumstances, specifically her motifs from vanitas paintings. of focus. As the viewer is aware grandfather’s dementia. From the It is captured in such a way as that the life of a bubble is short, same series, Knowledge (2014) to be tempting to the viewer. a sadness pervades the image. and Beauty (2014) reference Kucuk wanted to photograph Although the bubbles will soon her grandfather’s treasured art the lemons so perfectly that the be popped, here they are frozen, book collection, now passed on viewer would feel they could collected and immortalised by to her, and his favourite flowers almost pick one up and walk the lens of her camera. Kucuk’s respectively. But there is no away with it. practice, is, in this way, a sentimentalism in Kucuk’s work, meditation on time passing. In rather the elegant, poignant the tradition of the momento and beautiful images evoke an Beauty (2014) mori (meaning ‘remember abstracted sense of sadness and C-type photographic print 58

Birmingham City University

Amanda Pearce

Amanda Pearce’s series of ephemera have been returned to the material properties of sugar framed works Probability 75 their roots, to the location that as a potential artistic medium: (2014) was made in response made their existence possible in its limitations, capabilities and to her residency at the Pen the first place. temporality as it crumbles, melts Museum in Birmingham’s Pearce’s Sugar Play (No. and deteriorates over time. Jewellery Quarter. Pearce 18) (2014) takes a very different cites the fact that in the late approach and subject. This nineteenth century and early work relates to her experiences part of the twentieth century, as a primary school teacher, 75% of everything written with particularly the sense of free a pen, anywhere in the world, play and curiosity inherent was with a pen manufactured in within children which is so often Birmingham. For a site-specific lost through the ageing process. installation originally shown Using coloured sugar from in the Pen Museum, Pearce melted Fox’s Glacier Fruits boiled collected and displayed letters sweets, Pearce has constructed and postcards from all over a series of thin, delicate plates the world dated during this which appear like sheets of time period in a vitrine-type glass: glossy, with tiny bubbles arrangement: the probability and imperfections which invite that the pens that inscribed the viewer’s scrutiny. The vivid these documents were made colours and small, oblong sweet in the city, being seventy five shapes tessellated together are percent. Pearce explores the reminiscent of stained glass. The likelihood that three quarters of artist remade the work for the Probability 75 (2014) these documents and transient exhibition and is interested in Postcards 60

Birmingham City University

Yasmin Rennie

Yasmin Rennie gathers together Using statistical data centimetres on the steel drum. ‘immaterial’ findings produced which plots time, distance and The depth of the craters is also through observation, recording movement Rennie produces de- significant to the work as Rennie and documentation, from the scaled versions of vast spaces, tries to manifest the sounds objective fields of physics, such as the poles of the moon of the craters as a spatial mathematics and statistics. in her prints Warped Lunar understanding of the moon’s She is interested in making North No.2 (2014) and Warped surface. In evoking the notion tangible objects of what Lunar South No.5 (2014). These of what the moon ‘sounds’ like, is scientifically known and manipulated, computer-aided Rennie acknowledges how the presented in the mathematically designs aim to allow the viewer depth of the craters will affect determined world as numbers new readings in fathoming the the sound and reverberation and statistical data. Rennie huge expanses of the lunar the steel drum makes when is particularly focused on landscape. Rennie processes played. This reflects the way ways of processing objective the data concerning crater that astronomists have begun data to change perceptions depth, width and co-ordinates to simulate sounds set by sub- of it, turning it into a new form further making new forms,and is atomic particles as a means to or materiality, often using currently creating a steel drum listen to data and also to find a sound. Her practice is rooted in surface that reflects the craters specific particle. For example, philosopher Edmund Husserl’s and other indentations of the in November 2014 scientists were theory of phenomenology moon’s hemispheres. Large able to reveal the first recorded which questioned scientific craters such as Poincare and sound of the oscillations in the reductionism in its oversight of Schwarzschild are accurately magnetic field of the Comet 67P. the value of everyday experience de-scaled by a ratio formula in determining the world and our that translates the 303 kilometre place within it. width of the crater Bailly into 8.6 Lunar South (2014) Digital ink print on paper 62

Birmingham City University

Vicky Roden

Vicky Roden’s sinister, knitted found objects, from odd flea- time the population has grown poppet simians or sock monkeys market finds and Victoriana to and they now number in their explore every day mythologies old discarded letters. She has hundreds, ranging in size by popping up in the least used these objects to form a from a few centimetres to six expected public spaces in collection of fables as the work feet long. Roden regards the Birmingham. Languishing on Ms. Roden’s Compendium of the poppet simians as a metaphor the side of the Dhuvra Mistry’s Fantastical and Mythological for humanity as they are all fountain The River (1994) in (2013). Ornaments are ostensibly sewn to the same Victoria Square locally known customised, trinkets become pattern, but each one is as the ‘Floozie in the Jacuzzi’ treasures and decades old entirely unique. For New Art or sitting astride the bronze bull ephemera is celebrated. Roden West Midlands 2015, Roden sculpture at the entrance of the often performs spoken word as has created a new site-specific Bullring Shopping Centre, Roden her Vaudevillian character Nonny installation as a false, but uses guerrilla tactics to place Warn, an alter-ego inspired sinister narrative, placing a large these nightmarish creatures by a half-remembered family poppet simian into the clutches to question the ownership of photograph. Warn conducts of Jacob Epstein’s sculpture of public space. Working with public soirees and gives readings the fallen angel, Lucifer (1944-45) performance, sculpture, textiles, of strange, exaggerated local at Birmingham Museum and Art text and embroidery Roden stories gathered in the tradition Gallery. creates narratives countering of oral history from around the received histories often by West Midlands region. constructing false histories, The poppet simians began encouraging the audience to life as a representation of become complicit in a bubble Roden’s caffeine addiction of altered reality. Much of her sewn using the vivid, stripy Simian (Lucifer) (2015) work is made as a response to pattern of a voodoo doll. Over Simian doll 64

Birmingham City University

Camilla Searle

Camilla Searle creates of found metal pieces and bars a precariously stacked plinth sculptures with found materials propped up against the gallery made of house bricks. Using life and video which aim to capture wall emphasises her interest in expectancy calculation tools fleeting, ephemeral moments individual fragility, instability provided by the National Health in time. Time is important to and temporality. These materials Service, which assess the impact Searle’s work as she explores are not new, they bear the traces of an individual’s environment the ways in which natural forces of prior use and the textural and and lifestyle on their life-span, and processes and the laws visual evidence of decay. This Searle estimated that she would of physics dictate outcomes work was made as a foil to chaos likely live to the age of 83. In an that are one-directional and in its exploration of an ordered effort to make these statistics unpreventable. She is also subjectivity whereby Searle, who tangible to the viewer Untitled interested in the concept of has a depressed sense of smell, 5 (2014) depicts Searle walking entropy as a measure of chaos licked each metal piece so as away from the Beachy Head and disorder beyond human to place them in an order that cliff edge having calculated and control. Searle is conscious that reflected which one felt or tasted measured the amount of coastal during the brief moment of their the nicest. erosion that will occur between existence her works are imbued Searle’s sculpture Untitled now and her expected ‘death with something of the present in 5 (2014) further explores the day’, at an estimated rate of 63 which they are made, in other instability, unpredictability and centimetres erosion per year. A words the essence of something precarity of the human life- pole marks the position at which that is viewable only for that span. This work combines a the cliff edge will be on this day brief moment, before the present video-monitor displaying a film in the 2070s. becomes the past or the ‘has of the coastal chalk headland been’. of Beachy Head, East Sussex; Searle’s work Untitled a notorious suicide spot. The Untitled 5 (2014) (2014) which consists of strips monitor is positioned atop of Bricks, video monitor, video 66

Birmingham City University

Megan Sheridan

Megan Sheridan works in resort. Sheridan’s aim is to the tradition of documentary synthesise both human elements photography, particularly of the landscape, the quirky focusing on the recording behaviour of people combined of the British landscape and with the everyday architecture communities. She is interested and fabric of built and natural, in the vernacular and in popular urban and rural environments. culture producing street Her work Lunch (2014) gives us photography which capture a snapshot of the lunch-hour images that play with irony and eating and resting habits of humour. Her photograph Squid the workers and shoppers in (2014) depicts a fish monger in Birmingham’s busy St Philip’s his shop, surrounded by trays of Square. Works from Sheridan’s different fish and seafood, his wider series This is England face completely obscured by (2014) are being exhibited at the two hanging squid that form his Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, new head, shiny and visceral in Coventry for New Art West the artificial orange light that Midlands 2015. illuminates the scene. In the tradition of Martin Parr’s The Last Resort series (1986) Sheridan has produced a Seaside (2014) number of works such as Seaside Photograph (2014) and Fish and Chips (2014) that depict families visiting Fish and Chips (2014) attractions at an English seaside Photograph 68

Birmingham City University

Carole Sherman

Locating one’s self within an these contribute to our sense to be layered in a constantly evolving globalised landscape, of locational identity. Sherman shifting pattern of forms as particularly one which is so describes the works as ‘psycho- the eye of the viewer travels reliant on digital technologies, collages’ because they connect across a seemingly impossible is becoming difficult. The work not only to physical places and continuous surface, alluding by Carole Sherman shown here to our subjective perceptions of to the ways that memory takes mapping and geography them, but to the places that each connects to the passage of as its core ideas, deliberately of us carry within ourselves. In time. The drawings themselves using pen and ink drawing as this way, the places of our mind are taken from a specific place a counterpoint to these new and our body are as significant, with personal significance to developments. if not more significant, than Sherman: a small fishing port Sherman’s work references the material environments we in South Devon. Operating as architectural and graphic inhabit. a foil to the interconnectedness drawing practices, languages Her installation Inner and instantaneousness of the of marks particular to the Landscapes: Homecoming (2014) globalised world, Sherman’s work rendering of place in a visual is one of her most recent works. is a localised study of place. format. By layering small Made from a range of drawings detailed drawings on acetate on transparent semi-rigid plastic, and revealing the traces left by her delicate forms are twisted the making process, the images into a jumble of long Möbius are heavily layered, multiple and strips. This action makes the often re-contextualised. The work drawings appear as a series is underpinned by themes of of endlessly repeating forms, place and our journeys through which loop and double back on Inner Landscapes Homecoming places, how memory moulds themselves. The transparency of (2014) these experiences and how the plastic enables the drawings Polythene Mobius strips, ink 70

Staffordshire University

Glenys Shirley

Glenys Shirley’s work is a kitsch ornaments and furniture Conspiracy to Undermine cognitive inquiry into our from a different era to reveal (2013) melds together a ceramic perceptions of art and taste a display of ambiguity that bird which is painted with a informed by the allocation of highlights conflicting systems green and brown marble effect, boundaries imposed through of value that change over so that it blends seamlessly with restraints of definition, value time. For Shirley the decline the kitsch, faux marble topped and status. Shirley is interested of the pottery industry in the table on which it sits. Again, in the notion of connoisseurship late 20th century has meant Conspiracy to Undermine II and the divisions, classifications the gradual replacement of (2013) combines a cheap low and taxonomies of art-world high quality ceramics with table with a classical Wedgwood hierarchies that categorises high an unsatisfactory array of patterned Formica surface with art and low art. uncanny, misrepresentative two classical female figurines Her works Conspiracy to and sub-standard imitations. which have been painted in Undermine and Conspiracy There is a continued and prolific the famous Wedgwood blue. to Undermine II (2013) reflect manufacture of modified In both works Shirley explores her on-going fascination with substitutes, which though how objects are re-defined by discarded ceramic figurines of attempting to imitate and juxtapositions, altered stance, wildlife, 18th century dandies associate with the status of an the fusing of different times, and crinoline-skirted ladies as elite, disregard any notions of histories and contexts that well as classical figures that are historical transmission or the change our perceptions of their sourced from charity shops in aesthetic value associated with value and re-assign status. the vicinity of Stoke-on-Trent, one the original. Shirley questions of the five towns that form The the cyclical nature of value Potteries, internationally known systems which move up and down, as the home of ceramics. Shirley in and out of fashion, in relation to Conspiracy to Undermine (2013) combines these figurines with collector tastes and trends. Table, ceramic bird, paint 72

Coventry University

Jennifer Shufflebotham

The shifting qualities of memory and therefore limited, and a very is blurred so much that his nose are of primary concern to different kind of photograph and mouth are lost and his painter Jennifer Shufflebotham. to many of today’s digitally single eye is a dark smudge, After discovering a collection captured images that never even yet his hair is glossy and of 35 mm photographic slides leave the screens on which they clean, and the top of his ear a in a family attic, she began to are displayed. dark pink, perhaps hot where use these as starting points for Shufflebotham keenly he has rubbed it. Similarly paintings. The slides were taken investigates how photographs Foremark Reservoir II (2014) in 1965 on a number of family can ‘block’ memory: that provides us with an unsettling, holidays and Shufflebotham the photographic image can painted sketch of two children, has layered and refocused actually replace the memories with smudges for faces at the them, building new, sometimes in our minds. By working with waterside. abstracted compositions from found slides and using scenes these vintage family images. from new holiday photographs Interested in the physical another series of vividly coloured qualities of the slides as objects paintings including Girls on as well as images, Shufflebotham Bridge – Amsterdam (2014) points toward the problematic Shufflebotham adds a new layer disposability of contemporary of inquiry, altering images that digital photographs. When every capture ‘real’ experience into Foremark Reservoir II (Sketch) single moment can be captured reimagined narratives. (2014) on a camera phone today, what Preparing to Dive Sandgate Oil and acrylic on canvas value do these images hold? & Wigwam Whitstable (2014) This question sits in relation to reflects the experience of Preparing to Dive & Wigwam the context of photography in muddled memories and Whitstable (2014) the 1960s which was expensive imagination. One child’s face Oil and acrylic on canvas 74

Staffordshire University

Jade Simpson

Taking natural history museum head in Hercules (2014), of a wooden frameworks that refer to collections as a starting point, snake’s coiled neck and polar display cases or crates whose Jade Simpson’s sculptural bear’s body in Cobrabear (2014), construction has only just begun. works are formed from collected of ivory elephant tusks, of a Like real taxidermy specimens, objects and materials such as pterodactyl’s wings. The simple these hybrid creatures exude cardboard, wood, fabric, fur and wooden frameworks from which a sense of disquiet, of things other discarded items. Simpson the works are built are frequently trapped in one state but not takes on the role of producer adorned with fabrics that really existing in any: neither and curator as she assembles suggest human clothing, animal alive nor dead, neither animal these into large-scale works that skin and fur. These flesh out nor object, but things hovering recall skeletons and taxidermy the skeleton of each sculpture, between these classifications. specimens most frequently transforming them into tangible, Exploring various aspects found in traditional natural disconcerting creatures. of the museum institution - the history collections. Twisting With a strong theatrical display, the store, the archive the idea of the specimen into presence, the zoomorphic - Simpson’s work builds a new new and surprising forms, sculptures of The Spirit kind of museum, one in which Simpson’s sculptures retain Collection series are a the exhibits are creatures formed familiar elements but are in ramshackle bunch. Arranged from her imagination and from fact peculiar hybrids which in tableaux, Simpson’s works materials found in whichever attempt to defy classification. exude character and attitude, environment she happens to be Crowbear (2014) combines the anger and loneliness despite working in. She describes her fur of a black bear with the their throwaway materials approach as building a kind of beak of a bird; the suggestion and deliberately obvious ‘cultured nature’. of a praying mantis’ mandible construction methods. The works and legs in Babirusarilla (2014), are propped up on wooden The Spirit Collection (detail) of a rhino’s horn and beetle’s pallets or displayed within bare (2014) Mixed media 76

Birmingham City University

Emily Sparkes

The central character of Emily theatrical backdrops. She queer culture, a questioning Sparkes’ Pearly Queen Series connects this influence, not of Christianity’s expectations (2014) is a cross-dresser, clothed only to the ways that gender of women, a comment on the in the heavily decorated outfits and identity are ‘performed,’ as ritualistic aspects of being of the titular Pearly Kings and theorists such as Judith Butler ‘woman’ in society, but also Queens. Other figures within have posited, but also to key a humorous play on words as the painted formal triptych are British cultural reference points an homage to Christian Joy, depicted in performative poses such as the Shakespearean the famous American costume sporting Victorian clothing tradition of men playing female designer. Her new painting, mixed up with 1970s Glam Rock roles. Someone scrawled on the walls: attire. The work makes specific Firmly rooted in queer ‘I smell the blood of the les reference to the trial of Ernest theory Sparkes moves beyond Tricoteuses’ (2015) considers ‘Stella’ Boulton who was charged normative binary classifications the role of an historical female with ‘unnatural offences’ in the of man/woman, homosexual/ group, ‘Les Tricoteuses’, as ‘the Victorian era, for appearing heterosexual relations to present other’. in public dressed in women’s categories which are far more clothes; the Glam Rock era unstable. The gendered body pinpoints another time in British is reconsidered as something history when effeminate men which is necessarily difficult to were at the forefront of British define and subject to change. popular culture. For example, the title of her The influence of traditional self-portrait An Ode to Christian portrait painting and studio Joy (2014) in which Sparkes photography can be seen in is dressed in an elaborate, Pearly Queen Series Sparkes’ foregrounding of the colourful costume, is a challenge Triptych – Right (2014) subject or sitter and constructed to hostile attitudes towards Oil on canvas 78

University of Worcester

Emma Starkey

Emma Starkey’s performance her body bent over under their and oil is difficult to stomach work Attempting Omega (2014) weight; sometimes she takes rest. metaphorically and literally. It provides a double-edged image Her movements are ritualistic causes a visceral reaction in the of a subject that is both inhuman and seem to speak of another viewer, who starts to gag too, and human. The performance age of humanity, that is, until the imagining the relentless cloying begins with the artist standing final moments when she stops sweetness of the honey and the naked in a small, narrow barn and redresses. slimy, slipperiness of the oil. or shed with clouds of her own Honey and corn oil are the Starkey’s work, in its approach to hair lying on the floor, along primary ingredients Starkey uses repetitive actions, the endurance with a pile of clothes. Within to perform Sickly Sweet (2014). of the body and the urge to test these confines Starkey raises a In this performance shown as its limitations, has its roots in the pair of antlers above her head, a video-work Starkey, dressed performances of artists such as struggling under their weight in a pink cardigan, bow and Ron Athey and Marina Abramović as she repeats the action and Barbie-blonde hair, eats firstly who famously scrubbed clean scrapes them across the walls a large quantity of honey and a mountain of cow bones for six and floor. Pacing, stretching then of oil, scooped from a hours a day in Balkan Baroque and testing her own boundaries large bowl with her fingers. At (1997). of endurance as well as the first, tentatively scooping up parameters of the space in the sticky viscous substance, which the performance takes the action is highly sensual, but place. Starkey becomes animal, then Starkey starts to eat using transforming from woman into a compact disc as a spoon. As deer. Sometimes the sharply she starts to gag, honey runs pointed antlers become down her chin. She speeds up. appendages to her arms, like Her wig is cast off. The film is Attempting Omega (2014) claws, wings or walking sticks, difficult to watch; the honey Performance 80

Staffordshire University

Sarah Thorley

Sarah Thorley’s performances cleaning staff. are enacted within the tradition Thorley is interested in the of 1990s maintenance art in their role of the artist and crossovers exploration of the low status of between being an artist and the blue-collar jobs and roles such playing out of a role. She is also as cleaning and caretaking that interested in domesticity and the persistently go unnoticed or are low status attributed to female undervalued in contemporary roles in domestic life, but also society. Thorley’s recent practice in the workplace. She brings has involved her working closely together high and low status with the cleaning staff of a working spheres to critique number of public institutions inequality as she interrogates including the university and the the accordant value allocated museum in order to investigate to different forms of labour, the politics of the sexual particularly manual labour. division of labour that continue For New Art West Midlands 2015 to pervade cleaning work. Thorley will perform Cleaning Using mixed media the work Performance (2015) at the Cleaning Performance (2014) Private View of Birmingham was enacted at Staffordshire Museum & Art Gallery and also University fine art studios and its at intervals throughout the run of residual installation displayed the exhibition. as a series of dirtied, cleaning cloths as a form of readymade Untitled sculpture along with of a series (Cleaning performance) (2015) of photographic portraits of Performance 82

Birmingham City University

James Turner

James Turner’s series of works lit up, now pulsing electronically gesture toward the art historical take reproductions of famous like an art historical disco. which is both aggressive and paintings from the collection of Flashing, strobing and fading playful, Turner appropriates Birmingham Museum and Art colours entirely transform the and converts these canonical Gallery and transforms them into original subject of Egg’s painting. nineteenth century works into light-boxes with strange science- In works that utilise entirely new objects. These new fiction type interventions and reproductions William Adolphe forms are unsettling, with their drawings. Bouguereau’s Charity (1865) alien-like mutations, questioning Augustus Egg (2013) and Pre-Raphaelite, John Everett how such works might be for instance, is derived from Millais’ The Blind Girl (1856), understood today in a constantly Augustus Leopold Egg’s Turner not only alters the eyes evolving art-world. oil painting The Travelling of the female protagonists, Companions (1862) which can but obliterates their faces currently be seen in the Round with his linear patterns and Room at Birmingham Art Gallery. graffiti interventions. This is In Turner’s work, liquid-like, white not intended to diminish the patterned drawings flow from the female subjects in any way but eyes of the two women. These to reference how contemporary spread between their laps like a design, street-inspired graffiti blanket, scratching and eating and the appropriation of into the surface of the image. historical materials is changing Turner transforms the oil painting the ways that art is made and into a light-box and when the the ways in which the past is lighting system is switched on, viewed. the scratched white patterning In a total disruption of the John Millais (2013) and the surface of the image is expected picture plane and a Wall-mounted light-box 84

Birmingham City University

Jodie Wingham

Jodie Wingham’s research films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of voyeurism through the centres upon the idea of the Rear Window (1954) in which an use of mirrored foil which reflects viewer as voyeur: how the act of apartment-bound photographer the look of the viewer back to looking can be invested with a witnesses what he thinks is a them. power which is uncomfortable, murder through his window. This even dangerous. reference highlights the fact that Wingham’s starting point it can be a risk to look, but that is the taking of photographs it is always a temptation and a of people in their own private necessity. homes performing everyday Wingham chooses to screen- activities such as applying print her images on to metal bar make-up and looking out of a structures mounted on to the window. These images are then wall or on to wooden plinths. digitally manipulated so as to Her series Looking (2014) retains force the exhibition viewer into the small scale of a laptop or close inspection of the work, but older television screens. The the tiny dots that make up the bars of the metal screens create surface of these images make barriers to the act of looking, them almost unreadable. The while simultaneously framing finished images appear like the images beyond. The bars enlarged pixels of television and must be looked through, like the computer screens, devices she slats of a Venetian blind, offering connects with the fulfilment our partial glimpses and an intrusion voyeuristic desires by spying on on to something that should the lives of other people. Such perhaps not be seen. Watching Untitled (2014) ideas can also be connected to (2014) further emphasises the Screen print on aluminum 86

Staffordshire University

Lisa Marie Williams

Lisa Marie Williams’ sculptures ‘doodles’, evocatively entitled and steel support structures as combine found or everyday with the pharmaceutical names bones. These materials become materials with domestic of anti-depressant medication: a metaphor for the literal make- furniture often creating surreal paroxetine, duloxetine, fluoxetine up of the human body, but the vignettes that include human- and sertraline. Williams sculptures are suggestive rather type figures. These works describes these works as akin than descriptive. The two free synthesise the organic with to a series of ‘situations’ that standing figures of Fluoxetine the artificial; the comical with visually express conditions of (2014), as mother and child the ominous. Working closely anxiety, confusion, oppression, are imbued with a sense of with a small group of patients, rejection and loneliness. physicality and presence, as if Williams interpreted their stories They combine symbols of new beings about to become of experiencing mental illness comfort – duvets and hand- animate in their own right at in an attempt to sensitively knitted cardigans – whilst any given moment. The horse- express that, which as one of hinting at mental and social like, lamp-shade headed figure the last taboos, is often deemed precariousness; anxieties about of Paroxetine (2014), a hand- inexpressible. Williams’ subtly friendship, motherhood and crocheted rug beneath its feet, navigates a pathway in which to parenting, anomie, the role of ready to be pulled from under explore mental illness as a site of the individual in society, finding it, its light-bulb shining brightly, conflicting emotional states. one’s place in the domestic makes a futile attempt to hide Williams’ sculptures environment and the workplace. away in the corner. But, there is juxtapose blonde hair extensions, Williams works with no hiding place. giant black pom-poms, wooden anthropomorphic ideas to articulated legs, shoes, foam- make new bodies, contrasting stuffed flesh tone tights, ironing soft and hard materials that boards and other domestic represent organic matter or Duloxetine (2014) furniture to create sculptural flesh, with more rigid wooden Mixed media 88 newartwestmidlands.org

The organisations listed will offer Airspace Gallery mac selected New Art West Midlands airspacegallery.org macbirmingham.co.uk 2015 artists residencies, projects, Compton Verney Meadow Arts membership, and mentoring comptonverney.org.uk meadowarts.org throughout 2015. Turning Point Division of Labour National Trust West Midlands and New Art divisionoflabour.co.uk nationaltrust.org.uk/croome West Midlands partners would Eastside Projects Royal Birmingham Society like to thank all of them for their eastsideprojects.org of Artists generous support. The Infirmary rbsa.org.uk worcester.ac.uk/your-home/ Rugby Art Gallery and the-infirmary.html Museum George Marshall Medical ragm.org.uk Museum The New Art Gallery Walsall medicalmuseum.org.uk thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk Leamington Spa Museum Wolverhampton Museum warwickdc.gov.uk & Art Gallery Library of Birmingham and wolverhamptonart.org.uk GRAIN grainphotographyhub.co.uk See. Buy. Collect. Contemporary Art.

Division of Labour Developing the market for contemporary art in the West Midlands. newartwm.org @newartwm

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you love. C

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The School of Creative Arts & Design has a long history of art and design Y excellence and has been offering specialist education for over a century. CM Our creative community consists of a team of academics/industry MY professionals, expert technicians and internationally recognised researchers. CY

We offer a broad range of courses all housed within one purpose-built CMY building in the heart of Wolverhampton. K Undergraduate courses: Postgraduate studies: Visual Communications: MA Design and Applied Art BA (Hons) Photography MA Digital and Visual Communications BA (Hons) Visual Communication MA Fine Art BA (Hons) Visual Communication (Graphic Design) BA (Hons) Visual Communication (Illustration) You can also apply to research for a PhD with the Centre for Art, Design Research Visual Arts: and Experimentation (CADRE). BA (Hons) Applied Arts BA (Hons) Fashion and Textiles BA (Hons) Fine Art BA (Hons) Interior Design BDes (Hons) Product Design

Contact us Follow us Call: 01902 322 058, Twitter: @WLV_Arts, email: [email protected], Facebook: /WLVArts visit: www.wlv.ac.uk/creativearts Birds in the Park by NAWM 2014 artists: James Birkin Lucy Hutchinson Santhanha Nguyen Sharon Farrelly Photography by Jack Nelson Jack by Photography ART AND DESIGN AT THE UNIVERSITY OF WORCESTER National Croome “We are a lively community of scholars, researchers and Animation Trust creative practitioners. To join the Institute is to be part of Art & Design At Croome, we embrace contemporary art, supporting artists from a rich culture of activity, shaped by the knowledge that Creative Digital Media the West Midlands and beyond to develop an ongoing programme of academic work is exciting, enriching and empowering.” Film Production site-specific works. Artists and crafts people from a range of disciplines are being invited to respond to the architecture, landscape, stories and David Broster Fine Art Acting Head of Institute, Humanities & Creative Arts collection through a series of installations and interventions. Game Art Design Come and visit us. For details about the courses that we offer or to attend an Graphic Design & Multimedia open day, please visit us online at www.worcester.ac.uk Illustration Croome, near Worcester, WR8 9DW. Telephone 01905 371006 Open all year round (house closed Tuesdays)

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New Art West Midlands AD.indd 1 27/11/2014 13:26 We live in a world saturated by images of one form or another and opportunities for artists are increasingly dependant on flexibility of approach within well established disciplines. Visual Arts at Coventry University is about being engaged in an exciting, stimulating and challenging world of images, objects and ideas. Our students are taught by top-level creative practitioners and encouraged to develop their own potential to exploit imaginative, experimental opportunities that stretch and challenge accepted orthodoxies.

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Acknowledgements

This publication has been produced to accompany New Art West Midlands 2015 Photography by David Rowan, Emily Warner The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum the New Art West Midlands 2015 exhibitions and we ©Birmingham Museums Trust, the writers, the artists, and the artists Jordan Well would like to thank the thirty participating artists the photographers Coventry CV1 5QP for their enthusiasm and commitment to the project Designed by Heavy Object Tel: 024 7623 7521 and the three selectors – Amna Malik, John Newling Edited by Antonia Payne and Rachel Bradley Rosie Addenbrooke, Curator and Bedwyr Williams – for their humour, spirited ISBN 978-0-9570494-5-1 discussion and incisive debate during the selection Artists texts by Rachel Bradley and Anneka French Wolverhampton Art Gallery process. We would also like to thank Turning Point Printed by Tuckey Print, Birmingham Lichfield Street West Midlands (TPWM) for its financial support and Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery in an edition of 1000 Wolverhampton WV1 1DU particularly Wendy Law, Annabel Clarke, TPWM 13 February to 17 May 2015 Tel: 01902 552055 Advisory Board. Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery Marguerite Nugent, Curatorial Services & Further thanks is extended to all the directors, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts Chamberlain Square Programme Development Manager curators and co-ordinators who have worked on 14 February to 27 April 2015 Birmingham B3 3DH Neus Miro, Exhibitions Curator, Education & New Art West Midlands 2015 to make it a success: Tel: 0121 303 1966 Enterprise Rachel Bradley, Project Organiser of New Art West The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry Ellen McAdam, Director Midlands 2015; Toby Watley, Lisa Beauchamp and 14 February to 15 March 2015 Toby Watley, Head of Collections New Art West Midlands is financially supported by Katie Hall at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; Lisa Beauchamp, Curator of Modern and Turning Point West Midlands (TPWM). Robert Wenley, Chezzy Brownen and Sarah Wolverhampton Art Gallery Contemporary Art Beattie at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts; Rosie 31 January to 25 April 2015 Rachel Bradley, Project Organiser and independent TPWM is supported by Arts Council England in Addenbrooke and Jessica Pinson at The Herbert curator, New Art West Midlands partnership with Birmingham City University. Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry; and Marguerite Selectors Nugent and Neus Miro at Wolverhampton Art Amna Malik, art historian & Senior Lecturer, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts New Art West Midlands 2015 has been generously Gallery. We would also like to thank freelance co- The Slade School of Art, UCL. University of Birmingham financially supported by Birmingham City ordinators Anneka French and Olivia Jones for their John Newling, artist and formerly Professor of Edgbaston University, Coventry University, Staffordshire contribution to this year’s project. Installation Sculpture, Nottingham Trent University. Birmingham B15 2TS University, University of Wolverhampton and the New Art West Midlands 2015 has been made Bedwyr Williams, Artist. Tel: 0121 414 7333 University of Worcester. possible by support from the five university art Nicola Kalinsky, Director schools based in the West Midlands region and we Exhibition curated and organised by Robert Wenley, Head of Collections would like to extend special thanks to Prof John Lisa Beauchamp and Rachel Bradley Chezzy Brownen, Curator Butler (Birmingham City University), John Devane at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Sarah Beattie, Collections Assistant and Prof Mark Evans (Coventry University), Mark Robert Wenley, Chezzy Brownen and Sarah Beattie Webster, Michael Branthwaite and Anna Francis at The Barber Institute of Fine Arts. (Staffordshire University), Dr John Pymm and Prof Rosie Addenbrooke Dew Harrison (University of Wolverhampton) and at The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry. Prof Antonia Payne (University of Worcester). Neus Miro We would also like to thank Antonia Payne for at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. editing the essays, David Rowan for photography and publication designer, Heavy Object. newartwestmidlands.org Dan Auluk Jade Blackstock Michael Carr Jakub Ceglarz Alexandra Darby Lucy Dore Kathleen Fabre Joanna Fursman Adam Gruning Shijie Hai Andrea Hannon Josh Hazell Jessica Holt Reece Kennedy Sevven Kucuk Amanda Pearce Yasmin Rennie Vicky Roden Camilla Searle Carole Sherman Megan Sheridan Glenys Shirley Jennifer Shufflebotham Jade Simpson Emily Sparkes Emma Starkey Sarah Thorley James Turner Jodie Wingham Lisa Marie Williams

ISBN 9780957049451

9 780957 049451