Artists
Rosalind Barker
us (2018)
Drawing in ash and dust
Rosalind seeks to interpret the transience and traces of human presence and absence. Dust is the substance that holds life together and could be viewed as a witness to human physical and spiritual vulnerability: ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. us are male and female life size sculptural shadow drawings of ash and dusty debris, the residue of human DNA collected in her domestic cleaning rituals. The Crypt environment may resume the artist’s drawing process.
James S Bond
If I do not know the kind of person you are and you do not know the kind of person I am (2019)
A triptych of wooden tablets
Sculptor James Bond is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. For over 25 years he has run social art projects. ‘My work has uncovered a practice that reaches back to a time when all humans were present to the life of trees and explores how and why they applied certain methodologies with hand tools in working the wood from trees.’
Deborah Burnstone
Make a wish (2019)
Video projection, handwritten wishes, textiles, embroidery, pearl buttons
Deborah collects stories about people and place in paint, video, words and textiles. Ritual wishmaking is common to us all. Wishes float around us like invisible energy. For Make a wish Deborah asked hundreds of people to write out a wish anonymously and cast it into a cloud with a silver lining. These wishes are projected in a dark recess of the Crypt and visitors invited to share their own wishes.
Zara Carpenter
Polaroid 15 (2019)
Polaroid photographs
In this new series of work I take instant photographs of myself – mostly in short bursts of compulsive activity, often producing many at a time. The process involves a ritual of attacking the photograph whilst the image is developing, disrupting the chemistry, bruising the emulsion and distressing the image, creating abstractions of what might
have been.
Blandine Martin
Objets sans importance (2018-2019)
Mixed media
Blandine Martin looks at objects and their place in the home, transforming their functions and associated rituals with women in particular. Objets sans importance explores the weight of female history and how society has objectified women. Blandine plays with conceptual ideas and the art of dismantling objects and their purpose.
Elspeth (Billie) Penfold
Walking with the Wasteland – Varas (2015 to 2019)
Wooden poles, paint, handmade ropes, bobbins, found materials
Textile artist Elspeth Penfold formed Thread and Word in 2012. She works with invited artists and academics to develop performative walks. Elspeth is interested in exploring the relationship between walking, weaving and storytelling. She makes handmade ropes, which are in turn knotted by her fellow walkers. These ropes are then fixed to Varas or poles. Each Vara becomes an archive of the walk.
Zoe Simons-Walker
All that Glitters is Not Gold (2018-2019)
Baked bread rings, sealant
I am interested in the rituals that working class people perform in order to climb the social ladder and their attempts to reduce the social gap between them and the higher classes. Working class culture is the culture of overdressing. Working class people buy ostentatious chunky gold chains and lower priced high fashion brands, which they flaunt to gain social status. This self-deception is the incentive behind my pieces.
Lunchtime Walk (2018-2019)
Drawing, photography, found objects, collage
Drawing upon the history of landscape, comprehending nature as culture and examining the perceived divide between them, I use drawing to explore nature, the natural sciences and social history. I am drawn to our everyday or overlooked interactions with the natural world, and the everyday effect the natural world has on society. Place is important to me, and most of my works are site-specific, in the broadest sense, drawing on a place’s history, memory and time.
Sally Tyrie
Beyond the Edges (2019)
Mixed media on acetate
I create mixed media drawings and paintings, which explore ideas to do with time, transition, absence and presence. Using photography, drawing and installation, my recent work takes inspiration from investigation into the fragile and splintered shoreline of the Essex East Coast. In particular I am interested in how the rituals of mark making and artistic process can create a dialogue about these transient and enigmatic coastal margins.
Portrait of a Woman summoning Magpies (2019)
Poppy Face (2019)
Oil on linen
These paintings are the beginnings of a larger project depicting private moments of imagination or ‘the dream world’. I spend a lot of my time living in my head and daydreaming to a fault. Drawing from the surrealist movement, I’m interested in their ideas of drawing straight from ones subconscious, or forms of expressing the uncon- scious. I try to get onto canvas as faithfully as I can any interesting apparitions I may have. These two paintings are intended to be ambiguous. I am also aware of the unintentional symbolism that magpies and poppies can hold in many different cultures. You have a segment of my mind in the hope that it makes you disap- pear again into your own.
Monument (2019)
Oil on panel with thread
Jane Walker makes 2D work with lines. Composition for her is a mathematical presence in the arrangement of the lines. The place she is basing her small pieces on looks like a communal place of ritual but it is actually used as a place of solitude and reflection. Each panel represents a visit to the place.
The Blue Hour (2019)
Brass and steel sound notes created from dawn chorus recordings made during the blue hour, brass bells, silk thread, chain, steel sound boxes playing the birdsong, blue light
Dawn chorus recordings fill the space both aurally and visually. A single bell rings in the silence between one bird chorus and the next.The Blue Hour draws from the French expression L’heure bleue alluding to the strange and elusive moments be- tween night and day when the natural world is silent. It is after these moments of silence when light covers the darkness and the blue appears that the dawn chorus begins.