Installation | angellspace

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void) 2014

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void)

The body, and what it feels like to be in it, is the first architectural framework we learn to use. Its symmetry, balance and sense of space are not just the equivalent of all the doors it will walk through and all the windows it will look out of. It is also a dynamic spatial-sensing device that sees a space to be long or wide, but measuring and feeling it simultaneously.

Coates, Nigel. 2003. Guide to Ecstacity, London: Laurence King Publishing, P193

‘Let Yourself Fall’ – an invitation – a request from the artist to the viewer to take part in a physical, bodily sensation on entering the Installation.

In this exhibition, Helen Angell-Preece continues to explore her fascination and research into how we experience Architectural Space and Place, and to what extent the built environment gives us a sense of ourselves. This new series of works sees the artist moving away from the practice of creating an enclosed space to enter into, but now playing with the signifiers of our built environment in a series of cardboard and Reboard structures.

These temporary materials – cardboard packing boxes, string and unfinished / overlaid patches of painted colour – are most usually associated with movement and migration – here however they take up a dynamic presence and habitation of the gallery. The distinction between wall and floor, between the stability of the horizontal and the vertical is blurred as these sculptures make a fragmented, rhythmic journey, undermining the perpendicular white planes of the gallery ceiling and walls to rewrite their own form of language – somewhere between the Solid and the Void.

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void) 2014

Reboard, Cardboard boxes, Acrylic Paint, Packing string, Cup hooks.

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.

Tunnel 2001

Tunnel

The work is driven by a fascination with the issue of our ‘Being here’; of our awareness of ourselves as existing ‘within’ the world.

Temporary architectures are created by tensioned fabric sculptures, installed to disrupt the viewers’ journey, forcing them to negotiate and become acutely aware of their own passage through space and time.

In Tunnel, screen-printed dyes are embedded into soft plastic fabric, marking its skin with signs – real and imagined - left on the landscape by human presence. These are made three-dimensional, referencing architectural motifs, and drawn across the space with taut wires to create a rhythmic, intense passageway. The colours and formation encourage the reading of a ‘route’ or journey being followed.

At once both playful and unnerving, the artist’s concern is to evoke an intensified awareness of self and environment using contrasting materials to disrupt/reorganise everyday spatial relationships.

Tunnel 2001

Screen-printed soft plastic, tension wires. 6 x 2 x 2.5m

Mirror 2002

Mirror

Mounted on the wall of a staircase, just before rounding a sharp corner, a circular ‘Mirror’ is angled at eye-level, as if to reflect and warn of oncoming traffic coming the other way.
However, this mirror doesn’t reflect it’s own immediate surroundings, or an image of ourselves, instead it reflects back the texture of cobbles from outside in the street - albeit softened and distorted by printing in neon pink. To what extent does the built environment stay with us, define us - give us a sense of ourselves as ‘Being here’?

Mirror 2002

Screen-printed Acrylic Sheet 35cm diameter

Always ‘there’ 2001

Always 'there'

The work is driven by a fascination with the issue of our ‘Being here’; of our awareness of ourselves as existing ‘within’ the world.

always ‘There ’ is a large-scale video projection immersing the spectator in a virtual world of movement through the urban landscape. A superimposed coloured ‘dot’ or map-marker becomes the hypnotic and constant presence or reference point throughout this exploration.

Distorted projection screens form a temporary architecture, installed to disrupt the viewer’s journey, forcing them to negotiate and become acutely aware of their own passage through space and time.

Always ‘There' 2001

2 x 3 x 3m Video Projection

Grass 2002

Grass

The green colour and curved lines of the screen-printed grass panels were chosen to engender a relaxing effect within the technological atmosphere of the computer library in which they are sited. The grass motif also references ideas of making yourself at ‘home’, creating a personal space for yourself to inhabit.

Grass 2002

Screen-printed Acrylic Sheet 6 x 1m

Self 2002

Self

Self creates a personal space for the viewer. Behind the privacy of an opaque wall, a circular mirror angled downwards towards you confirms your presence while reflecting the red dot marker painted on the wall behind you – “You are here”.

Self 2002

60cm diameter mirror acrylic sheet, angled bracket, acrylic paint 3 x 1 x 2m

Welcome 2002

Welcome

This work explores the issue of how we experience space, how we relate to our surroundings. In the construction of walls and the laying down of borders a sense of our own ‘Being there’ is also established.

Welcome begins to draw out a personal space for the viewer to inhabit. 3 vertical walls delineate a minimum human space – the dimensions relating to a shower cubicle or phone box.

A circle on the floor marks the spot:
‘You are here’.

However, alike to awareness of one’s own presence, this architecture is only temporary and contingent.

Red pathways signal elsewhere. The transparent walls are distorted by light and the image of cobbles – that material most usually solid and stable beneath our feet.

It is this duality of attraction and apprehension experienced in a new place, intensifying a feeling of self-awareness, that the artist wishes to communicate in the work.

Welcome 2002

Screenprinted Acrylic Sheet 3 x 3 x 2.5m

Red Ring 2002

Red Ring

The warmth of the red and orange coloured acrylic is employed to create an inviting central point to the vast low ceilinged computer library in which it is situated. The ring form and lozenge shape can also be seen to represent the individual mental learning space of the computer user within the room, in the same way as a red dot often marks the spot ‘you are here’ within a map.

Red Ring 2002

Coloured Acrylic Sheet 3 x 2m

Chaos 2002

Chaos

chaos n. non-coherence, decomposition, disunion, discontinuity, random order, amorphism, unstructured, formlessness, scattering

To what extent do our surroundings give us a coherent sense of ourselves?

Do endless cuboids and delineated pathways of streets, corridors and roads construct a feeling of our being here?

In chaos, the artist subverts the image of cobblestones, a material most usually stable and enduring beneath our feet, rendering it sheer and unreal as it is screen-printed onto clear acrylic ‘walls’.

Instead of ‘supporting’, these walls move and sway, casting shadows and creating a disorientating yet alluring space for the viewer to enter; where their reflection distorts and slips reappearing again within the textures of the cobbles.

Shades of sheer cobalt blue and fluorescent orange act to dispel the reading of the image, referring instead to the emotive repel+attraction of a WARNING! sign.

Chaos 2002

Screenprinted acrylic sheet, acrylic paint 7 x 3 x 2.5m

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