Exhibitions | angellspace

There’s Nobody Home Right Now – Please Leave a Message with a Passing Stranger 2019

There’s Nobody Home Right Now –

Please Leave a Message with a Passing Stranger 2019

I make Space for you.

I define the Space, line and upholster it.

Make it comfortable, cushioned, luxurious.

Intimate – a resting place for the body, like Home.

Yet the seat is upturned like a café out-of-hours.

The architecture of Home is strung together - tied and knotted – ready to be carried away at a moments notice.

Within the public space of the Telephone Box Gallery 201 artist Helen Angell-Preece creates a Threshold experience for the audience between inside and outside, domestic and public. A Place-in-transition where the heirloom solidity of heavy upholstered furniture is torn apart. The raw materiality of the interior emerges, unfurling from its strictures, growing, fashioning itself into something new.

The artist believes this Threshold position is an important space for new meanings, new identities to emerge. By disrupting our usual everyday spatial coordinates, she endeavours to create a Place-of-Potentiality where we can recognise the Stranger-within-ourselves and open to the Stranger without.

Upholstered Ottoman (decking treads, upholstery webbing, springs, twine, coir, jute scrim, calico, velvet, upholstery nails), Drawer Fronts, Upholstery twine, Dining chair, Clipboard and sign.

80 x 80 x 205cm

Making Space for the Stranger / The Velvet Rope 2019

Making Space for the Stranger / The Velvet Rope 2019

Helen Angell-Preece’s art practice resides within the threshold. She explores the space between inside and outside, the solid and the void, the body and architecture.

For this exhibition, the artist responds to the unique corner site of the Tatha Gallery, on the bank of the River Tay and the edge of Fife, contemplating the building’s original function as a Coaching Inn, to provide hospitality to the passing Stranger.

The comfort and luxury of velvet and upholstery contrast with the tilting un-homely angle of the floorboards and unbalanced seat, bringing to mind our often ambivalent attitude to welcoming the foreigner within our midst, as well as acknowledging the Stranger within ourselves.

The velvet rope demarcating a space of safety and home for the permitted few, can also act as a suffocating barrier, inhibiting opportunities to see and experience from different angles of vision.

Making Space for the Stranger / The Velvet Rope 2019

Pine Maritime Floorboards, Upholstered Dining Chair, Bannister Posts, Velvet, Upholstery Cord, Screws.

260cm x 100cm x 150cm (length x height x depth)

There’s no place like ‘Home’?

There’s no place like ‘Home’?

1^st July 2017 marked the 20^th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China from British administration.

14^th, 15^th, 16^th August 2017 mark the 70^th anniversary of the dates of Independence from British rule of India, Pakistan and Partition of the country.

This is a vital time to open up discussion about ideas of Home and Displacement, the importance of incorporating post-colonial dialogues in opening up new angles of vision and of thinking about our own identities and ‘Place’ in the world.

Please join us for an informal discussion and exhibition tour led by Lecturer and specialist in African History Dr Matthew Graham and Reader in Humanities and Urban Theories Dr Lorens Holm with 5 artists of different nationalities exploring just such themes and ideas through materials, space, print, language, paint, humour and sculpture.

Helen Angell-Preece is a Welsh-born, Scottish-raised, London-educated artist with an English family. Continual movement and journeying up and down the length of the country, and the idea of ‘Home’ always being elsewhere inform her spatial and ‘displaced’ architectural installation practice. She believes strongly the threshold or in-between position, a space with multiple viewpoints that allows us to acknowledge the stranger or foreigner in ourselves, is one of power and value.

Hong Kong-born, Scottish artist Jacinda Chan explores the cultural differences, symbolism in Chinese culture, slippage in language and translation and play on words through her sculptural art objects and practice.

Clara Lang-Ezekiel is a dual French and U.S. citizen. Her own experience of belonging to two strong national identities have lead her into an in-depth study and research project on African Histories and their relationship to European and Western notions of Identity.

For Astrid Leeson home is where she was brought up in the isolated Scottish Highlands but she has spent many hours travelling the length of Britain to family in the crowded East End of London and a South East New town. These almost contradictory influences are another of the dualities that inform her spatial walking, drawing, painting and installation practice.

Rishi Srinivasan is a Californian citizen and former active member of the U.S. military, with a close family connection and cultural heritage in South India. His unique background and experience feed into strong graphic imagery and print works.

Thursday 24th August, 1 – 2.30pm

6th Floor Crawford Building

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design

13 Perth Road

Dundee DD1 4HT

With thanks to Gordon MacKenzie for kindly documenting the event: (info@mackenziefoto.com)

Location RED 2014

Location RED

The rich potential relations between thinking and the body, the way one person’s act can be an invitation to another’s imagination; the way every gesture can be imagined as a brief and invisible sculpture; the way walking reshapes the world by mapping it, treading paths into it, encountering it. Rebecca Solnit 2001. Wanderlust: a history of walking London: Verso.P276

The important thing is to be aware one exists. For three-quarters of the time during the day one forgets this truth, which surges up again as you look at houses or a red light, and you have the sensation of existing in that moment. Jean-Luc Godard quoted In Penz, Francois. and Thomas, Maureen. (eds), 1997. Cinema & Architecture, London: British Film Institute, P111

Location: Top Floor, Meadowmill – Formerly South Dudhope Jute Mill, West Hendersons Wynd, Old Industrial Quarter, Dundee, Scotland. 2011

RED: Signifier of human presence – Map marker – “You are here”

This dual-screen video installation is a record of the last original, remaining floor of the Meadowmill building prior to renovation into Artist’s studios in 2011. Despite, and perhaps because of, its semi-derelict state, the video footage reveals the beauty inherent in Dundee’s Industrial Architecture - its symmetry of line, ranks of windows letting light pour onto the pattern of flagstones underfoot and the sheer grandeur of the vaulted roof and expansive scale room.

This scale is contrasted with that of the human form as we catch glimpses of the artist’s body in RED as she explores the space - her movements responding to the shapes and forms of the architecture, suggested by the exuberance of the open expanse of space or possible actions of former inhabitants and workers of the looms and spinners.

Yet despite the strength apparent in both the building’s and the body’s structure, there is a fragility and sense of loss in the peeling paint, the decaying damp walls - as well as in the skin and lines of the hand, the arm as it strives to measure itself against the rooms perspective. There is a vulnerability to the sound of the body’s breathing and footsteps within the echoing abandoned room, contrasting to the sounds of the busy city sirens and construction noises from outside.

In this exploration of the Space between Architecture and the Body, the artist hopes to question and reveal some of the Universal elements with which we make ourselves at ‘Home’. How do our own body armature, the structures we build around ourselves, as well as the emotional and historical aspects of Place interact to give us our sense of ‘Being’ in the world? Perhaps the answer lies in the Space we inhabit, falling somewhere between the Solid and the Void?

Location RED 2014

Dual Screen Video Projection. Duration 20mins, over 9 Sequences.

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void)

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void)

The Meffan, 20 West High Street, Forfar DD8 1BB

26^th July – 23^rd August 2014

In this exhibition Helen Angell-Preece expands her ongoing fascination with Architecture and Space, and how Place gives us a sense of ourselves ‘Being’ here.

She will investigate the sculptural concerns of the Solid and the Void, by dividing the Gallery Spaces at the Meffan with her architectural constructions, creating a physical journey for the Viewer to negotiate and experience for themselves.

A new video projection will enable us to explore the vast, semi-derelict expanse of space of a former Dundee Jute Mill. We experience the space from the camera’s viewpoint, glimpsing the body itself exploring the area – an arm, shoulder or torso, moving through the exaggerated perspective of the Industrial scale room.

The artist intends to explore the Potentiality of ‘Being’ in a space – the feeling of inhabiting / becoming the space; and how much this has to do with materiality, boundaries and our own body movement.