Sculpture | angellspace

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

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

Folded (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Folded (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

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

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.

Folded (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Drawer, cotton lawn.

50 x 70 x 70cm (hxlxd)

Collapsed (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Collapsed (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

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

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.

Collapsed (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Wardrobe door, key, wool. 130 x 70 x 45cm (hxwxd)

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)

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.

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