To mark the completion of the 2010 S1 Bursary Studio programme, S1 Artspace presents SHOWCASE, two week long exhibitions presenting new work by six recent BA Fine Art graduates from Sheffield Hallam University. James Clarkson, Joe Cutts, Jim Howieson, Peter Martin, Emily Musgrave and Linny Venables were selected for the S1 Bursary Studio programme in January this year, a pilot scheme aimed at providing third year fine art students insight and experience of working within an artist-led studio environment during the final stages of their BA programme, as well as opportunities to benefit from mentoring and professional support. The individual exhibitions include sculpture, sound, video and collage works.
pt 1: James Clarkson | Joe Cutts | Linny Venables
James Clarkson creates exotic sound and sculptural works using electronic circuitry, natural materials and unsophisticated custom built objects. He creates new relationships amongst disparate objects opening up new possibilities for them to engage with the potential of their new fictional settings. Similarly, in his collage works, fragments of found photographs are isolated from their original context, breaking the structural conventions of their usual environment.
In his videos, Joe Cutts captures vistas which at first glance appear static and void of any discernible human presence. Interested in the relationship between photography and video, Cutts creates seemingly still scenes shot from one perspective and slows the footage down to such an extent they reveal subtle movements and almost imperceptible shifts in momentum.
Linny Venables’ uses found, commonplace materials and objects, which she incorporates into new sculptures and groupings of items. Her work centre’s on the transformation of these exhausted materials, ascribing to them new status by emphasising their absurdity, vacuity, or oblique social reference. Her aim is to liberate them from the drudgery of service, allowing them to masquerade outside of their traditional norm.
pt 2: Jim Howieson | Peter Martin | Emily Musgrave
Jim Howison’s works are largely informed by an interest in the language of design and the boundaries that divide an art encounter from that of an everyday experience. Through enquiries into material, form and spatial arrangement, he explores the displacement and reconfiguration of everyday objects and materials through video and sculptural works.
Peter Martin finds new ways of exploiting information that technology makes readily available. This materialises as a combination of sculptural installations and traditional digital forms. Using source material from television, the Internet and popular music, he re-appropriates particular aspects to find new significance, offering a reinterpretation and new mode of understanding.
Emily Musgrave’s work addresses the formal qualities of abstract sculpture by using forms influenced by the subtle details of everyday construction materials. She makes multiple compositions, each piece developing in such a way that it directs the next. Her assemblages and collages explore and test the elasticity and fragility of the materials. The move from studio to exhibition space offers up specific relationships between object and environment, making reference to minimalist values of action, site and material.
