angellspace

Dr Helen Angell-Preece | Artist-academic | Auto-geography: Critical Spatial Practices: Sculptural Installation, Critical Writing, Curating Dialogue

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)

Third Space: Hiwar: 7iwar:

Third Space: Hiwar: 7iwar


 

East / West                                                  Global North / South

                                                Palestine / Israel                                                                Solid / Void

Jewish / Muslim                                                                   Islam / Christianity

                                        Time / Space                     Emplaced / Displaced

 

Contemporary culture, media and politics often represent global relations in a series of reductive dichotomies of opposition.

For a more useful dialogue to emerge, we must, believes Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, focus instead on the space between. The space that opens up in the act of translation between two, often opposed cultures or languages, Bhabha describes, as The Third Space. It is, he says, a critical site for forging ‘new signs of identity and [re]negotiating cultural values’.

In order to help us explore and negotiate our way into this Third Space, curator Helen Angell-Preece brings together Palestinian-Scottish artist Leena Nammari, Saudi Arabian sculptor Lujain Jamal, and Palestinian cultural translator Dr Rana Abu-Mounes, to engage in an artistic, cross-cultural, translational and transnational dialogue, or Hiwar.

Beginning with an exhibition of artwork by Nammari and Jamal, this is a spatial and material exploration of the ruptures of time and place experienced by both artists. The value in experiencing multiple angles-of-vision emerges at the edges, the ruptures and repairs, the shifts between permanency and contingency within the artworks.

Dr Rana Abu-Mounes, director of Dundee-based translation company Al-Mushkah, and expert in comparative religions and cultural diversity, will respond to the exhibition and discuss with the artists how their identities inform their creative choices and practices.

The week of creative dialogue and translation will culminate on Sunday 16th December with a Cultural Diversity Workshop run by Abu-Mounes. This course will address vital areas such as the importance of cultural awareness, etiquette, communication, relationship building and traditions, as well as more complex topics such as religion, cross cultural attitudes, and language.

‘By exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves’. (Bhabha, 1994)

 

Gallery 1, 4th Floor WASPS, Meadowmill, West Hendersons Wynd. Dundee DD1 5BY

Exhibition Preview: Friday 7th December 2018, 6-9pm

Artists talk and cross-cultural dialogue: Sunday 9th December 2018, 2-4pm with Arabic coffee and Ma’amoul

Cultural Diversity Workshop Sunday 16th December 2018. Free, booking essential.

 

With thanks to artists Leena Nammari, Lujain Jamal, Cultural Translator Dr Rana Abu-Mounes @ Al Mushkah for participating and Alan Richardson @ www.pix-ar.co.uk for kindly documenting the event:

Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS


Pic Alan Richardson www.pix-ar.co.uk
Third Space Exhibition WASPS

Warped Space (The Things We Carry With Us / The Things We Left Behind) 2018

Warped Space

(The Things We Carry With Us / The Things We Left Behind)   2018

Linen, Jute, OSB Board, CLS Wood, Travelling Trunk.

The tension of the warp thread repeatedly connects two opposing sides.

The weft thread pulls together the closing gap, forming a construction of immense strength and flexibility.

Utilising the global language of textile construction, artist Helen Angell-Preece establishes a Threshold Space for the viewer to negotiate and inhabit.

An architectural intervention of Linen, Jute, Felt and everyday building materials, is a timely reminder, not only of Scotland’s colonial histories of textile trade and manufacture, but of the personal significance of our everyday materiality in establishing our human ‘being’ within the world.

Linen, Jute, Felt, OSB Board, CLS Wood, Travelling Trunk.

9 x 8 x 4.4m (L x D x H)

Things I carry with me / Things left behind (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Things I carry with me / Things left behind (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

 

 

Things I carry with me / Things left behind (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

Travelling Trunk, CLS wood, OSB wood, jersey fabric. 160 x 400 x 70cm

Things Fall Apart, Some Stay Connected (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Things Fall Apart, Some Stay Connected (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within – at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

 

 

Things Fall Apart, Some Stay Connected (Things Fall, Fall Apart)    2017

Jersey Lycra Fabric, Wooden batons, Print drying rack, Steel hooks and eyes. 600 x 400cm x 250cm

Slipped (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Slipped (Things Fall, Fall Apart)  2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

 

 

Slipped (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

MDF, acrylic paint, CLS wood, stretch netting, nylon tights. 250 x 240 x 240cm

The Bridge (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

The Bridge (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

 

 

The Bridge (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

CLS wood, acrylic paint, wool, wooden panelling, wardrobe door. 500 x 170 x 230cm

Ripped-Torn (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Ripped-Torn (Things Fall, Fall Apart)    2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

Ripped-Torn (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

Jersey Lycra Fabric, Wooden batons, Steel hooks and eyes. 300x180x140cm

Pulled Apart (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Pulled Apart (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

 

 

Pulled Apart (Things Fall, Fall Apart)   2017

Screws hooks and eyes, wool, CLS wood, plasterboard. 240 x 60 x 50cm (h x w x d)