Specialising and Exhibiting

Exhibition and Research

I am invited by The Cult House to show ‘Its Art call 2022-Art Prize’. Luke Edgar is the winner who is an Essex-based artist, who spent the last few years exploring different techniques of working on steel.

He scratched down through the layers exposing the metal underneath; Luke’s tattooing background has now become an integral part of the process by tattooing directly onto the metal surface. 

Exploration of technique is a definite driving factor in Luke’s work as every piece evolves from a different process that is influenced by the scientific method; scale also plays an important role in Luke’s practice as most of the recent work is around 7ft tall which aims for the viewer to be absorbed. 

My work is inspired by everyday life, and serial sketching seems to develop a pattern recognition of the world around that unconsciously becomes part of the work; I am mostly drawn towards the human form and what it is to be alive. 

I often work by limiting the technical aspect and constantly changing any variables I have control over within my practice; my most recent work of my daughter was created by tattooing the surface and glazing it with oil paint.

Luke Edgar

I also went to Cornelia Parker’s exhibition because I really like the work he made on the poster. There was one of the pieces related to sound art field which called Negatives of sound. It was made in lacquer in 1996 and the experience of it was he visiting the Abbey Road studios in London and accidentally drop some lacquer in the record.

Cornelia Parker is one of Britain’s best-loved and most acclaimed contemporary artists. Always driven by curiosity, she reconfigures domestic objects to question our relationship with the world. Using transformation, playfulness, and storytelling, she engages with important issues of our time, be it violence, ecology, or human rights.

The Story of Cold Dark Matter

Parker liked the idea of something that happened in a split second but that could also be made to have a durational aspect to it. As an MA student, she had made a series of ‘wooden explosions’ – small models of explosions, which she then left outside to weather and disintegrate. The explosion of Parker was the latest in her series of orchestrated ‘clichéd cartoon deaths’. She had previously steam-rollered silver objects and had coins run over by a train.

As the objects were suspended one by one, they began to lose their aura of death and appeared reanimated, in limbo. The light on inside the installation created huge shadows on the wall, so the shed look like it was re-exploding or perhaps coming back together again.

I operate very often in these ‘frozen moments’ where there’s been lots of action but this a sort of quiet corner of that…So it’s not the explosion, it’s more the contemplation, you know, the quiet contemplation of these things in the air and because the things are in the air, they haven’t got the pathos they would have had if they were on the ground. It takes away that kind of pathos, which is there when you see a lot of the debris on the ground after an explosion, well put it back in the air and it’s still got some life.

Cold Dark Matter is a three-dimensional artwork that works against some traditional ideas of sculpture. Whereas traditional sculpture is concerned with something solid, here the artist is fascinated by fragmentation and materials in a state of flux. The artist herself writes, ‘I’ve never made a solid sculpture; I am more interested in the space with and around the mass, in the atmosphere’. The space between objects is an important part of the work and boundaries between the work and the viewer are blurred. The objects cast dramatic shadows on the gallery walls, adding another dimension to the piece and another level of meaning. I found her work was very intensive not only because of the scale, but also because of the 3-dimensional movements and perfectionism. But I thought it might be more living if they designed a sound for it.