Space | angellspace

Beyond Skin 2016

Beyond Skin 2016

The place where we encounter the Stranger is a threshold.

Metaphorically, we can see “thresholds” defining the the edges of human being in many ways: () at the limits of my physical body, a threshold of pain, of pleasure, a threshold at the limits of one culture and another, one political group and another.

At such thresholds of experience, we stand in an event: an opening onto hospitality. But doors can be opened or shut. Or stand ajar. It may be unclear who or what moves first.[1]

A shelter, an extension of the space of the body made from membranous, skin-like materials.

Awkward angles describe a lived space within, hybrid wooden structures that could be stage flats, sections of stud wall or lean-to roofing anchor dynamic swathes of soft jersey dancer’s fabric.

At once warm and welcoming, this architecture of non-place forces a negotiation of barriers or thresholds, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out.

We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between Hostility and Hospitality.

Artist Helen Angell-Preece has created this installation in response to the idea of Being in Place, from the position of her own creative practice exploring the sense of being ‘not in place’, not belonging, or in locating and identifying oneself in multiple places at once.

The artist believes this threshold position to be one of value, a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. The ability to recognise we are all Strangers, we are all somehow Foreigners, may perhaps lead us to a Place where,

each would take the risk of other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness, rather, delighting to increase through the unknown that is there to discover, to respect, to favor, to cherish.[2]

[1] Kearney, Richard., and Semonovitch, Kascha. 2011. Phenomenologies of the Stranger New York: Fordham University Press P4.

[2] Cixous, Helene. 1972. ‘Sorties’, The Newly Born Woman London: I. B. Tauris P78.

Jersey Lycra Fabric, CLS timber, packing string, acrylic paint. 2016

Walk : Don’t Walk 2016

Walk : Don't Walk 2016

My work is driven by a fascination with urban Space and Place – in particular the ‘Edgelands’ or liminal, between spaces of the city where a construction site or derelict building reveals the armature of our dwelling, showing the physical and material aspect of our ‘Being’ in the world.

Drawing upon my own experience and research within city space, I construct interactive installations, choreographing a journey with structure, rhythm, contrasting materials and colour, a physical space for the viewer to experience for themselves.

My intention in creating this kinaesthetic experience, is to put the audience temporarily in the position or role of the ‘Stranger’, or the ‘Foreigner’. In so doing we have a heightened sense of our bodies, of ourselves, of our existence and ‘Being’ within the world.

For the PG Humanities Rebirth conference 2016, I installed within the University of Dundee, Dalhousie Building a ramp and platform walkway constructed using re-appropriated wooden palettes found on the street. This structure, using materials associated with movement of goods and international transit, has been re-formed, painted, re-constructed, re-born to form a liminal threshold space to be negotiated by the viewer.

Wood, palettes, acrylic paint, wool. 1m x 4m x 3m

Horos (My Space, Your Space, Our Space) 2016

Horos (My Space, Your Space, Our Space)

Horos, khoros, choros: a space, a boundary marker, dance,

Many of the man-made structures, buildings and settlements visited on a study trip to Athens and Aegina had a visible as well as tangible, layered, complicated history. Their purpose was multi-functional and has un-definable identities.

Acropolis in Athens (Acro, meaning edge or extremity, polis, meaning, city) functioned as a sacred space, a temple to worship and receive protection from the gods. But it also served as a fortification, for if the city was to be successfully captured by enemy forces, the Acropolis also had to be possessed as well.

Kolona Archaeological Site – layers of time are visible in a series of ten towns each built on the ruins of the previous one during the Bronze Age (2500-1600 B.C.) The architecture of the houses changed and responded to outside attacks from the sea, doors and windows turning inwards, the walls of the domestic home becoming a part of the city wall and fortification.

Kapodistriako Orfanotrofeio Orphanage building has been a refuge for children, housed vast numbers of war refugees, as well as functioning as a Prison to incarcerate Greek citizens during the German occupation of the Island, and later political prisoners post-2^nd World War.

War Bunkers at Perdika Concrete and Iron defences built into the headland of the Island, materials and construction originally carried out by Germans during WW1, they were subsequently used against the allied forces during WW2.

Although not inspired by such painful and traumatic events, this kind of complicated overlapping of space and place, is one I relate to in the aims of my own installation practice.

Making use of boundaries, barriers and edges I am inspired by the Edgelands and non-places of the city to create a space of indeterminate identity, which contrasts and jars with its surrounding environment. The purpose of these experiential installations is to make the viewer more aware of both their surroundings and of themselves ‘Being there’ in that moment.

The physicality of the act of creating these sometimes uncomfortable interventions is important, as is the kinaesthetic sense they instill upon entering. They are a way of exploring a sense of ‘not Belonging’, not ‘Being at home’ in the world, and the mediation between feeling rooted in a place and conversely the freedom, heightened awareness and possibility of movement that comes from being put in the position of the Foreigner, or the Stranger.

These physical installations can be described as embodying the concept of Horos – a space, a non-place, a boundary marker, a choreography – an area defined by movement / action of the Body.

Ehfkhareesto Pollee to Elika Vlachaki, Nancy Avgery and George Mouratides.

Wood, palettes, scaffold safety netting, pattern paper, digital photographs, steel wire, wool. 2.5m x 2.5m x 3m

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.

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

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

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

Step-up 2007

Step Up

proprioceptive adj. relating to stimuli produced and perceived within an organism. esp. relating to the position and movement of the body.
[Latin proprius ‘own’ + RECEPTIVE]

Kinaesthesia (“the feeling of movement in all skeletal and muscular structures” ) is the first of 3 methods of proprioceptive signal generated and received by the body to give us our sense of self-awareness, of ‘being’.

As we look downwards into the viewing box of Step-Up, we experience abstracted images of body movement – shifting weight, balance, stepping, lifting and placing of feet. This hypnotic and rhythmic formation gradually induces a sympathetic reaction in our own limbs, the sensations of kinaesthesia.

Yet the movements we see performed within a formalised stage-like space are not clear and continuous, but are cut, shortened, repeated and distorted by reflection, becoming more akin to our own inconstant and fragmented awareness of body movement and of self, throughout the day.

In Step-Up we see a continuation of the artist’s on-going fascination with, and research into proprioceptive triggers. Her trademark manipulation of spatial organisation and integral movement is apparent, to create a fleeting sense of ‘being here’ now within the viewer.

Step-Up (Installation views) 2007

DVD (3 sequences 5min looped), plywood, paint, acrylic sheet. 50 x 65 x 70cm

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