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Sheering the sheep as a metaphor for self-actualization and self-liberation

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Sheering the sheep as a metaphor for self-actualization and self-liberation

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Traditionally, lambs represent innocence. In the Christian Gospels, Jesus Christ is compared to a lamb because he goes meekly to be sacrificed on behalf of humanity. Moreover, lambs, as baby sheep, are connected to the theme of childhood that runs throughout the Songs of Innocence.

in Christianity, the lamb represents Christ as both suffering and triumphant; it is typically a sacrificial animal, and may also symbolize gentleness, innocence, and purity.

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Marlene Dumas born 1953

Marlene Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa. From 1972 to 1975 she attended Cape Town University, where she studied for a BA in Visual Arts. She then completed her studies in Haarlem, in the Netherlands.

She has lived and worked in Amsterdam since 1976. From 1978 she has exhibited internationally, and is one of Holland's most widely admired artists. In 1995 she represented Holland in the Venice Biennale, and in 1996 the Tate Gallery exhibited a selection of her works on paper.

In the past Dumas produced paintings, collages, drawings, prints and installations. She now works mainly with oil on canvas and ink on paper. The sources she uses for her imagery are diverse and include newspaper and magazine cuttings, personal memorabilia, Flemish paintings, and Polaroid photographs. The majority of her works may be categorised as 'portraits', but they are not portraits in the traditional sense. Rather than representing an actual person, they represent an emotion or a state of mind. Themes central to Dumas' work include race and sexuality, guilt and innocence, violence and tenderness.

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Artist page for Marlene Dumas (born 1953)

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Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity.

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Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice, bringing a collective dimension through performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. It challenges us to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders.

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Carolina Caycedo makes work that addresses the commons, environmental justice, just energy transition and cultural and environmental biodiversity. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity.

Process and participation are central to Caycedo's practice, bringing a collective dimension through performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of environmental memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. It challenges us to understand nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders.

For Caycedo's first survey exhibition in Europe, BALTIC presents an overview of her artistic practice over the past twenty years, alongside a new commission inspired by the River Tyne, which expands her ongoing River Book series. The exhibition will feature works from major series including Be Dammed (2012-ongoing), a multimedia project that examines the impact of hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects on communities and the environment.

Caycedo was born in London to Colombian parents. She lives in Los Angeles. Her recent solo exhibitions include: Ballroom Marfa, Texas (with David de Rozas) (2021); MCA Chicago (2020); Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario, Canada (2020); ICA Boston (2020); Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2019); Orange County Museum of Art, California (2019). She has participatd in numerous group exhibitions including 15 Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador (2021), We Are History, Somerset House, London (2021); LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo de Barrio, New York (2021); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019; the 45 Salón Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019). Caycedo is the 2020 Inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands-Arizona State University and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics; and the 2021 Inaugural Latinx Artists Fellow. U.S Latinx Art Forum, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellow Foundation.

Get involved

Carolina Caycedo invites you to contribute to her work Museo de la Calle / Street Museum (1998/2022) by bringing in a hand-made object to BALTIC between 20 July-28 August, which will be displayed as part of the work. Objects will be on display until January 2023, when their owners will be able to exchange them for different objects brought in by someone else. Find out more here.

Accessibility

We are committed to making our exhibitions as accessible and inclusive as possible. Below are resources and alternative ways to explore Carolina Caycedo: Land of Friends. You can find out more about accessibility at BALTIC here.
Visual Story
Find out what to expect when visiting Carolina Caycedo: Land of Friends with this Visual Story guide - a guide with words and pictures. It is sometimes called a Social Narrative.
Website
You can use Recite Me, a web accessibility and language toolbar, across BALTIC's website to make web pages, text and documents more accessible for you. The Recite Me toolbar includes text read aloud or translated into 35 different languages. You can find Recite Me on the top left corner of the page, click the 'Accessibility Tools' button.
Exhibition guides
Download the exhibition guide here

Download a Large Print version of the exhibition guide as PDF here or Word document here
Audio Descriptive Text
You can download the Audio Descriptive Text document here. You can play the text aloud by clicking the green play button in the top left hand corner, or the grey play button that appears in the 'Recite me' pop up when hovering over the text. Here you can also play the text translated into 35 different languages.

If you need any help while visiting the exhibition, please talk to one of our friendly and knowledgeable Crew team. They will be present in the exhibition room near the entrance.

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Housed in a landmark industrial building on the south bank of the River Tyne in Gateshead, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art is a major international centre for contemporary art. BALTIC has no permanent collection, providing instead an ever-changing calendar of exhibitions and events that give a unique and compelling insight into contemporary artistic practice.

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"Big Hello" (2021) Beaded uppers, cell phone cases; 112 pieces, Dimensions variable Installation view at SAW Gallery Nordic Lab, October 2021

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researching Saville's paining style.

Jenny Saville is probably best known for her large scale oil paintings of fleshy, obese female figures. Saville’s work invokes a deep fascination in the palpability of flesh, extremities of anatomy, and the grotesque combined with a masterly and yet intuitive instinct for the handling of paint. She graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1992 and was appointed as lecturer at The Slade School of Fine Arts, London between 2000 - 2006.

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Jenny Saville | Artist | Royal Academy of Arts

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Jenny Saville is probably best known for her large scale oil paintings of fleshy, obese female figures. Saville’s work invokes a deep fascination in the palpability of flesh, extremities of anatomy, and the gr…

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view of work after final install, showing the film and the installation

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'Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a
dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone
persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world.
It informs the imaginary of peoPles, their varied poetics, which
it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realised.
Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought
but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures
infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity diversity.
Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge
becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to
transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in
standing still, boast about. '

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being able to see through the installation, this allows the viewer to view the relationship between the multiple figures depicted.

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why do I, as a woman feel so compelled to assert dominance in my landscape

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!!!!!

A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don't stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

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A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

I think of the work as a balloon into which I keep blowing air. What one sees is just the skin of the balloon that keeps stretching. But at some point if I don't stop blowing air into it, that balloon will burst. What I want to do with the work is to take you to that point right before, from where you might start to anticipate the bursting of the balloon.

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A disorientating and absurd world, where the boundaries between fact and fiction blur, and the undercurrents of hysteria, rage, euphoria and violence lurk beneath the surface, erupting in ever more frequent outbursts. The Lost Head & The Bird explores a frighteningly fast-changing, post-truth world where actions are fuelled by appeals to emotions and facts are increasingly ignored.

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Throughout this project I explored my own identity through nostalgia and memory. This project explores the intersections between self-realisation and self-destruction, this theme has manifested into an installation work. My use of a tent refers to my memories of adolescence and childhood. Using memory and imagery from my home in Scotland. This work explores my challenges growing up on a farm as a mixed-race queer woman. I explored my identity within the Anthropocene beckoning the question, where do I belong?

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Tracey Emin’s expressive and visceral art is one of disclosure, dealing with personal experience and heightened states of emotion. Frank and intimate but universal in its relevance, her work draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief, unravelling in the process the nuanced constructs of ‘woman’ and ‘self’ through probing self-exploration. ‘The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at’, she has remarked.

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Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self but also the very impulse to create. Unfiltered, irreverent, raw, she draws on the fundamental themes of love, desire, loss and grief in works that are disarmingly and unashamedly emotional. 'The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it's really painful to look at', she has remarked.

Self-portraiture and the nude run throughout her practice, which Emin has described as being about 'rites of passage, of time and age, and the simple realisation that we are always alone'. Her earliest works refer to her family, childhood and chaotic teenage years, growing up in the seaside town of Margate and leaving home at the age of fifteen. What happened next is explored, in a manner that is neither tragic nor sentimental, in drawing, painting, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, neon and writing, as the vicissitudes of relationships, pregnancies and abortions intersect with her commitment to the formal disciplines of art. Most recently, the artist has experienced her body as a battleground, through illness and ageing, on which she reports with characteristic fearlessness.

The playful title of Emin's first solo exhibition, My Major Retrospective 1963-1993, suggests the artist felt, despite being at the beginning of her career, significant things had already happened. Her obsessive assemblage of personal memorabilia included tiny photographs of her art school paintings that she'd destroyed, a 'photographic graveyard' that revealed an admiration for paintings by Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch. She details this 'emotional suiside' in Tracey Emin's CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), among several early video works that give further insight into her formation as an artist, highlighting moments of epiphany through the use of first-person narrative. 'I realised there was the essence of creativity, that moment of conception,' she says in How It Feels (1996), a pivotal film in which she tells the story of her abortion. 'The whole being of everything... it had to be about where it was really coming from'. Speaking to camera while walking through the streets of London, she concludes that conceptual art, as an act of reproduction, is inseparable from the artist's inner life. Developing this connection, the haunting film Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) shows the artist on the pier near Munch's house, naked and prostrate in the foetal position, the dawn rising over the water as she lifts her head and screams - a guttural response to great painter's iconic image.

In 1998, Emin created My Bed, an uncensored presentation of her most personal habitat. The double bed has become abstracted from function as it sits on the gallery floor, in conversation with art history and a stage for life events: birth, sleep, sex, depression, illness, death. The accumulation of real objects (slippers, condoms, cigarettes, empty bottles, underwear) on and around the unmade bed builds a portrait of the artist with bracing matter-of-factness, defying convention to exhibit what most people would keep private. The work gained international attention as part of the Turner Prize, entering Emin into public consciousness. Another work that became a byword for her art of disclosure was the sculpture Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963−1995 (1995, destroyed 2004), where the names of all those she had ever shared a bed with - friends, lovers and family - were sewn on the inside of a tent, a crawl-space that invites the viewer to reflect on their own inventory.

Explicitly feminist, and acknowledging the influence of her friend and collaborator Louise Bourgeois, Emin's choice of medium is integral to the story she tells. In hand-embroidered blankets and quilts, traditionally associated with women's work, she pierces the visual field with words, combining scraps of different material with uneven stitching to spell out statements whose syntax and spelling remain uncorrected. With titles such as Mad Tracey from Margate. Everyone's been there, (1997) or  Helter Fucking Skelter (2001), they register the artist's acute sensitivity to the views of those around her and give a riposte, just as the medium is a riposte to the classification of fine art, for centuries dominated by male artists. As she herself became newsworthy, both nationally and internationally, Emin used the publicity to prick other forms of decorum in the professional art world - such as never over-explaining. In longer form, her memoir, Strangeland (2005) offers an account of her journey to becoming 'a fucked, crazy, anorexic-alcoholic-childless, beautiful woman. I never dreamt it would be like this.' The text is riddled with spelling mistakes that challenge the form and carry through a sense of unfiltered process, as was also the case with her long-running newspaper column for The Independent (2005-09), in which she narrated her weekly goings-on under the title 'My Life in a Column'.

Emin's ongoing series of neons features snatches of text in her recognisable slanted handwriting, elevating fleeting thoughts and feelings as aphorisms: You touch my Soul (2020), I Longed For you (2019) or I don't Believe in Love but I believe in you (2012). Her formulation of statements in the second person has the effect of placing the viewer squarely in the situation, and can encapsulate an entire romance in a pithy phrase, as in I want my time with You (2018), a twenty-metre-wide neon that greets passengers at London's St Pancras Station. A critical part of her practice since the 1990s, the neons evoke the seafront lights of Margate, latent with the sense of dusk and faded glamour. Her birthplace is an abiding subject; it resurfaces in large-scale sculptures, where reclaimed wood and found materials are assembled in jagged structures that allude to the beach, pier, huts and tide markers. Margate's famous theme park 'Dreamland' is referred to in several works, among them Self-Portrait (2001), which recreates the pleasure ground's helter-skelter, and It's Not the Way I want to Die (2005), which recalls the undulating roller-coaster in rickety, worn wood, fragile to the point of collapse. Margate is 'part of me', Emin says, and while looking back she is now looking to the future with the establishment of TKE Studios, a new art school and artists' studios.

Questions of mortality and the centrality of the female reproductive body drive The Mother (2021), one of Emin's most significant public sculptures. Permanently sited next to the new Munch Museum, Oslo, it marks the death of her own mother, and brings her lifelong admiration for Munch full circle. Fifteen tonnes of bronze standing nine metres high, this woman with 'her legs open to the Fjord' is visible from afar over land and water, a monument to the female figure as protector without compromising on her vulnerability or eroticism. By contrast, Baby Things, Emin's accurate rendering of children's tiny lost shoes and clothes in bronze, was installed as if by chance outside the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007) and around Folkestone Triennial (2008), intimate tokens that might inadvertently provoke a range of reactions, from fear for those we love most, to the indifference with which we treat a discarded object.

Most recently, Emin's work has been charged by the seriousness of her medical situation, since in 2020 she was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Self-portraits taken on her camera phone in bed find the artist facing her 'crippling' insomnia in the small hours, and in recovery from extensive surgery. Her paintings of the nude figure have a tempestuous energy. Emin's graphic line, by turn delicate or vigorous, imparts a sense of urgency; with each abandoned and assertive gesture, she is flaying herself open. Drips and obliterations point to the fluidity of the body, as it fluctuates between joy and suffering on its journey between birth and death. Explosions of colour allude to a self that is overcome by feeling and triumphing in sheer sensuality.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK. Emin has exhibited extensively including major exhibitions at Royal Academy of Arts, London (2020); Musée d'Orsay, Paris (2019); Château La Coste, Aix-en-Provence, France (2017); Leopold Museum, Vienna (2015); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2012); Hayward Gallery, London (2011); Kunstmuseum Bern (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2008); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Malaga, Spain (2008); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2003); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002).

In 2007 Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale and her installation  My Bed  has been included in 'In Focus' displays at Tate Britain with Francis Bacon (2015), Tate Liverpool with William Blake and also at Turner Contemporary, Margate alongside JMW Turner (2017). In 2011, Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and in 2012 was made Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts.

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Tracey Emin looks to her life for her primary material. With soul-searching candour, she probes the construct of the self and the very impulse to create.

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stills from film

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What does a lamb symbolize spiritually?The "lamb of god" -- representing innocence, purity, and sacrifice for the greater good -- is a symbol found in all thre

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I wanted my work to have a relationship with the room, specifically the floor, I find the work interacts with the floor in a successful way. The scale of the work demands the views attention in a dominant way, I wanted the essence of dominance to be present as I found myself exploring the theme of dominance within the context of being a woman and what that mean, I found myself having to create a dominant personality type to integrate myself into my farming landscape. As I spent most of my adult life working as a professional Jockey, I found myself again challenging the perception of being a woman. Rejecting limitations that where often pressed upon me.  This work was inspired my artists such as Tracy Emin, Charlotte Prodger and Sohrab Hura, these artists explore identity and the Anthropocene through an interdisciplinary approach, as well as using film and photography to explore their themes. ​

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The fabric consists mainly of recycled curtains. I used a semi-transparent material to allow the viewer to see inside the tent, this refers to memory. This also allows the paintings to be viewed from either side, each painting playing off one another, this refers to the concept of the moving images and the dualities these contain. I aimed to produce a work that the audience can interact with and obtain a level of intimacy when viewing the work to further illustrate the intimacy the viewer obtains by watching the personal footage, conveying my personal memories and experiences. A black sheep was used to symbolise my alienation within my community and family. Outcast from my white family for being brown and from my brown family for being queer. This work illustrates the discourse within my own biography. ​

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Inside That Tracey Emin Tent of Everyone She Ever Slept With | Widewalls

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In 1995, the British artist Tracey Emin made one of her seminal works called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 which is better known as The Tent.

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Prodger mainly works within film, self shooting intimate footage of her surroundings. Prodgers work mainly focuses on her experience living in Scotland and making work as a woman.

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Charlotte Prodger is a British artist working with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time.

Charlotte Prodger was born in Bournemouth, UK in 1974. She studied at Goldsmiths, London and The Glasgow School of Art.

Recent solo exhibitions include: BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail, Bergen Kunsthall; Subtotal, Sculpture Center, New York (2017); BRIDGIT, Hollybush Gardens, London; Charlotte Prodger, Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2016); 8004-8019, Spike Island, Bristol; Stoneymollan Trail, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2015); Markets, Chelsea Space, London; Nephatiti, Glasgow International Director's Programme, Glasgow (2014); Percussion Biface 1-13, Studio Voltaire, London; Colon Hyphen Asterix, Intermedia CCA, Glasgow (2012) and Handclap/Punchhole, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2011). Recent group exhibitions include: Always Different, Always the Same: An Essay on Art and Systems, Bunder Kunstmuseum, Chur; ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE, Chelsea Space, London (2018); British Art Show 8 (2016); Weight of Data, Tate Britain, London; An Interior that Remains an Exterior, Künstlerhaus Graz (2015); A Survey of Recent Artists' Film and Video in Britain, Tate Britain, London; Annals of The Twentieth Century, Wysing Arts, Cambridge (2014) Holes In The Wall, Kunsthalle Freiburg and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013). Prodger received the 2014 Margaret Tait Award and 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award.

Prodger works with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. She has been nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize for her solo exhibition BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail at Bergen Kunsthall (2017) comprising two single-channel videos. Moving image has been at the core of Prodger's work for two decades. Its ever-evolving formats are inextricably bound to the autobiographical content of her work. She has mined the material properties of numerous moving image formats, not just because they inherently get replaced over time, but because she is fascinated by their formal parameters and socio-political histories; the sticky relationship between form and content. Prodger's recent videos set up complex tensions between the body, landscape, identity and time.

BRIDGIT is titled after the eponymous Neolithic deity whose name has had multiple iterations across different geographical locations and points in history. BRIDGIT was shot entirely on Prodger's iPhone, which she approaches as a prosthesis or extension of the nervous system, intimately connected to time, social interaction and work. Body and device become extensions of each other, and the work becomes a unified meditation on shifting subjectivity.

Stoneymollan Trail is named after an ancient 'coffin road' on the west coast of Scotland. A non-linear miscellany of visual material from her personal archive (shot between 1999 and 2015), it traces a history of recent video formats as well as the artist's personal history. Much of Prodger's work looks at what happens to speech - and the self for which it is a conduit - as it metamorphoses via time, space and technological systems. For voiceovers, she frequently asks friends to read out her own diaristic content, while she inhabits other subjectivities by re-speaking the words of people living and dead: friends, anonymous YouTube users and historical figures of influence. The material perpetually shifts around but is locally grounded in its means of production - based in queerness, communality, technology, language and loss.

Charlotte Prodger is 44 and lives and works in Glasgow.

Turner Prize 2018 was at Tate Britain, 26 September 2018 - 6 January 2019.

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Charlotte Prodger is a British artist working with moving image, printed image, sculpture and writing. Her work explores issues surrounding queer identity, landscape, language, technology and time. Charlotte Prodger was born in Bournemouth, UK in 1974. She studied at Goldsmiths, London and The Glasgow School of Art.

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the tent demands attention in a space, this refers to the politicised act if me *(a woman) sheering a sheep in this context

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the use of the tent symbolises nostalgia, and memory, specifically from adolescence.

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This seminar-in-the-forest led by curator and writer Amish Morell will begin at the site of a 600 year-old Iroquois village that sits on the edge of the escarpment, where it overlooks the land of present-day Toronto.

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writing on my edges

"Exit building on 100 McCaul st, Walk north on McCaul St towards Dundas St W 120 meters turn left onto dundas St W 2.5 kilometers turn left onto ossingtin ave 70 meters, Home "

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this work was produced by mounting sheer fabric in an off-white tone, onto a painted white stretcher. I decided to leave areas of the fabric unstretched to expose the stretcher bars. The stretcher bars had text painted around the entire circumference. This text read the directions from my flat to OCAD. This work revolved round the subject of my journey to OCAD and my commute, during this project I was thinking about my conscious and subconscious and my place within a geographical context and a social context. These marks where initially derivative of drawings I had made at the beginning stages of my research; I had made these drawings and marks intuitively while listening to sound samples I had collected while commuting. During my commute I had collected small parts of tar and gravel that had broken free from the roadside. I melted this with wax to enhance the viscosity. I poured this medium into the stretched fabric to create my composition. ​

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In this intriguing sculptural series spanning 2005 to 2014, LA-based artist Walead Beshty packaged his artworks in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the country to exhibitions and galleries.

But unlike most artists who utilize every bit of care to protect and pad their artwork from the inevitable rough handling of mail carriers, Beshty designed his pieces to break.

For his famous FedEx works he constructed laminate glass objects that fit seamlessly within the dimensions of standard size shipping boxes.

Through the “normal” handling the objects would inevitably crack and shatter and it was up to curators and gallerists to carefully remove each piece for display.

The fragile volumes were then given titles that specifically mention the date, tracking number, and box size of shipment.

Not only was Beshty fascinated by obtaining a “fingerprint” of sorts that documented the journey of each package to its destination, but he also found it curious that a corporation has the ability to copyright the exact dimensions of a box, essentially owning an empty shape.

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In this intriguing sculptural series spanning 2005 to 2014, LA-based artist Walead Beshty packaged his artworks in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the country to exhibitions and galleries. But unlike most artists who utilize every bit of care to protect and pad their artwork from the inevitable rough handling of mail carriers, Beshty designed his pieces to break. For his famous FedEx works he constructed laminate glass objects that fit seamlessly within the dimensions of standard size shipping boxes. Through the "normal" handling the objects would inevitably crack and shatter and it was up to curators and gallerists to carefully remove each piece for display. The fragile volumes were then given titles that specifically mention the date, tracking number, and box size of shipment.

Not only was Beshty fascinated by obtaining a "fingerprint" of sorts that documented the journey of each package to its destination, but he also found it curious that a corporation has the ability to copyright the exact dimensions of a box, essentially owning an empty shape. He shares in a 2011 interview with Mikkel Carl:

The FedEx works [...] initially interested me because they're defined by a corporate entity in legal terms. There's a copyright designating the design of each FedEx box, but there's also the corporate ownership over that very shape. It's a proprietary volume of space, distinct from the design of the box, which is identified through what's called a SSCC #, a Serial Shipping Container Code. I considered this volume as my starting point; the
perversity of a corporation owning a shape-not just the design of the object-and
also the fact that the volume is actually separate from the box. They're owned
independently from one another.

Furthermore, I was interested in how art objects acquire meaning through their context and through travel, what Buren called, something like, "the unbearable compromise of the portable work of art". So, I wanted to make a work that was specifically organized around its traffic, becoming materially manifest through its movement from one place to another.

Here's a brief video of Beshty explaining the project during the 2008 Whitney Biennial. (via BoingBoing)

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Artist Walead Beshty Shipped Glass Boxes Inside FedEx Boxes to Produce Shattered Sculptures - Colossal

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In this intriguing sculptural series spanning 2005 to 2014, LA-based artist Walead Beshty packaged his artworks in FedEx boxes and shipped them across the country to exhibitions and galleries. But unlike most artists who utilize every bit of care to protect and pad their artwork from the inevitable rough handling of mail carriers, Beshty designed his pieces to break.

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Though the waves leap, soft will ye sleep
Ocean's a royal bed
Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head

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This artists use of found objects has been executed in a successful way. playing with the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture.

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Sarah Sze – ‘You Mark Time Through Objects’ | Artist Interview | TateShots

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Gifford plays with the idea of canvas and paint, Blurring the lines between them both.

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Lydia Gifford, Born 1979,United Kingdom. Lives and works in London. Graduated from MA Fine Art (Painting), Royal College of Art, London in 2008. Exhibitions include: Midsection, solo, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2016), I am vertical, solo, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, Ile de Vassiviere (2016), Valerie Beston Artists' Trust, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2016), To. For. With, solo, Laura Bartlett Gallery, London (2015) , Drawn, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2014). Awards include: Valerie Beston Young Artists' Prize (2008).

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Lydia Gifford, Born 1979,United Kingdom. Lives and works in London. Graduated from MA Fine Art (Painting), Royal College of Art, London in 2008. Exhibitions include: Midsection, solo, Micky Schubert, Berlin (2016), I am vertical, solo, Centre International d'Art et du Paysage, Ile de Vassiviere (2016), Valerie Beston Artists' Trust, Marlborough Fine Art, London (2016), To.

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Oleva
At the performance entitled `Walking Home, while the participants will be walking towards the place where they describe as “home” in Istanbul, the artist will accompany each partner within one-to-one sessions from London by connecting via phones without the presence of an audience. In order to designate the starting point of the walking, a map that reads the city through the locations of historical and forensic figures, artefacts and events related to women will guide the participants. In these traces there are such as; the Sultanahmet Square in the remembrance of Halide Edip Adıvar’s  activist and political speech in 1919, Yıldız Park in memory of Gürdal Duyar’s sculpture that represents Istanbul in the form of a woman’s body,  Fındıklı park where Füsun Onur’s 50thyear sculpture that got removed by the city hall crew during the organisation as well as selected places such as Süreyya Opera.

With the following questions; “If I ask you to walk me home, where would you take me? Does home mean feeling safe? What makes you feel like at home? Is it where you live now or a different place? Or is it not even a place? Now, it is time to walk and find home!", the artist is searching for the answer of what could be the meaning of the notion of “home”. She invites women* living in Istanbul to share her footsteps within that journey. The notion of “home”, that may refer to different meanings such as the nest, safe space, family, escape, indefensible area, self-reflection, is at the centre of the Walking Home performance. The artist will ask several questions to the participants in order to get a response to the meanings of “home”, as a result it could lead to various descriptions such as an actual home; a park, a seaside, a library or a place which reflects that feeling or a person and an object. On the other hand, her questions could also  remain unanswered...

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For women* living in Istanbul

Performistanbul'dan performans sanatçılarına özel

misafir sanatçı programı (2020):

Sanatsal Gelişim Programı:

İlk edisyonun teması "Ev"

Performistanbul, 2020'in Şubat ayında, British Council'ın #KültürdeKadınGücü Destek Programı sayesinde Live Art Development Agency (LADA) iş birliği ile başlattığı performans sanatçılarına özel yapılan açık çağrı aracılığıyla, dört haftalık sanatsal gelişim ve proje geliştirme atölyesi (Londra, 2020) ile on günlük misafir sanatçı programını (PCSAA - Istanbul, 2020) kapsayan sanatsal gelişim programını hayata geçirdi. Açık çağrı, Birleşik Krallık'ta ikamet eden ve kadın*/kendini kadın olarak tanımlayan performans sanatçılarını, canlı sanat pratiğine bir limit koymadan, "ev" kavramını bir oluşum ve yaratma mekânı olarak geniş bir çerçeveden araştırmaya davet etti. Programın ilk edisyonunda yapılacak çalışmanın kavramsal çerçevesi; "ev" kavramına dair, ait olma hissi, yer değiştirme, kimlik, cinsiyet, umut, aşk, göçmenlik gibi nosyonları ele alıyordu. Açık çağrı, LADA, Performistanbul ve Türk sanat sahnesini temsil eden bağımsız üyelerden oluşan dokuz kişilik bir jüri aracılığı ile yürütüldü. Geliştirme projesi her iki şehirde sanatçının çalışmasını sergileme/sunma fırsatı ve birçok alanda sanatsal pratiği ilerletmek odaklı imkân sağlamayı amaçlıyordu. Programın Londra'da gerçekleşen ilk kısmı, açık çağrıyı kazanan sanatçıya özel buluşmalar, proje geliştirme seansları, LADA'nın arşivine erişim ve araştırma desteğini kapsayan bir mentorluk sürecinden oluştu. Programının ikinci kısmında sanatçı, Türkiye'de 10 gün boyunca PCSAA binasında konaklama ve araştırma imkânlarından yararlanarak projesini geliştirip sunmak adına davetliydi. Covid-19 nedeniyle dönüştürülen program kapsamında açık çağrıyı kazananı sanatçı Alisa Oleva, ilk olarak 11 Mayıs'ta Evde CANLI Kal (Stay LIVE at Home) kapsamında "Tracing the Inside, A collective action" adlı çevrim içi bir performans gerçekleştirdi. Üç aylık çevrim içi sanatsal gelişim programı kapsamında zamana ve çeşitli mekânlara yayılarak devam eden süreçte sanatçının geliştirdiği Walking Home projesi ise Ekim ayında katılımcılarla gerçekleştirilerek Kasım (2020) ayında izleyiciye sunulacak.

Sanatçı Hakkında

Alesa Oleva (Moskova, 1989), Londra'da çalışmakta ve yaşamaktadır. Goldsmiths Üniversitesi Performans Sanatı Yüksek Lisansı'na sahip sanatçı; kentsel koreografi ve kentsel arkeolojiyi, şehirdeki izleri ve yüzeyleri, sınırları ve şehre ait nesneleri, aralıkları ve sessizlikleri, pasajları ve çatlakları ele almak için kenti stüdyo ve kentsel yaşamı da madde olarak ele alır. Çalışmaları; etkileşimli durumlar, hareket serileri, birebir ve samimi karşılaşmalar, yürüyüş parkurları ve atölyeleri ile sesli rehberli yürüyüş serileri hâlinde / formatında ortaya çıkmaktadır. Şimdiye kadar birçok farklı şehirde mekâna/şehre özel çalışmalar yapmıştır, bu şehirlerin arasında Londra, Manchester, Leeds, Berlin, Belgrad, Pori, Minsk, Kiev, Dnipro, Moskova ve Norilsk bulunmaktadır.

Alisa Oleva hakkında bilgi almak için lütfen tıklayınız.

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Fore more information about Alisa Oleva press link

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For women* living in Istanbul Performistanbul'dan performans sanatçılarına özel misafir sanatçı programı (2020): Sanatsal Gelişim Programı: İlk edisyonun teması "Ev" Performistanbul, 2020'in Şubat ayında, British Council'ın #KültürdeKadınGücü Destek Programı sayesinde Live Art Development Agency (LADA) iş birliği ile başlattığı performans sanatçılarına özel yapılan açık çağrı aracılığıyla, dört haftalık sanatsal gelişim ve proje geliştirme atölyesi (Londra, 2020) ile on günlük misafir sanatçı programını (PCSAA - Istanbul, 2020) kapsayan sanatsal gelişim programını hayata geçirdi.

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my objects i found on the street, before melting them down to create my media

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melting my tar and wax to create my 'paint'

making my own medium allowed me to become more familiar with its limitations

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the intersections between self realisation and self destruction

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the intersections between self realisation and self destruction

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Sculpture is everything physical outside of the mind's eye. Painting is a sculpture. The digital is a sculpture. An image is a sculpture. They are sculpted with the senses: eyes, ears, mouths, fingers-all of them. The senses give form to these things, which we collect in order to build our imagination, memory, dreams-the nonphysical. Sculpture is a lens, a portal, not a medium.
-Sarah Sze

Gagosian is pleased to present Sarah Sze's first-ever exhibition in Switzerland. This is her third exhibition with the gallery, coinciding with Art Basel 2021. Sze's first large-scale outdoor video work will be a key feature of this year's Art Basel Parcours.

A peerless bricoleur credited with "changing the potential of sculpture," Sze gleans from the physical and digital worlds, building artworks of staggering intricacy and diversity that invite minute observation while evoking a macroscopic perspective on the infinite. Activating the borders that separate mediums, she reflects on the overload of virtual experience and the confusion that it creates with our real experience in physical space.

In paintings, sculptures, and video installations, Sze grapples with the ideas and matter of time and entropy, underscoring the precious and precarious nature of materiality. The works on view transform the galleries into a unified, image-laden expanse, allowing viewers to grasp the formal and conceptual breadth of Sze's practice. Cast sculptures Wider Than the Sky and Deeper Than the Sea (both from the 2020-21 series Fallen Sky) are directly related to Sze's landmark installation that was inaugurated at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York this summer. Inspired by ancient architecture and the language of ruins, they catch passing light and shadow, appearing as if already disintegrated.

Skulptur ist alles Materielle ausserhalb der Fantasie. Ein Gemälde ist eine Skulptur. Ein digitales Werk ist eine Skulptur. Ein Bild ist eine Skulptur. Sie werden alle mit den Sinnen modelliert: mit den Augen, Ohren, Fingern. Die Sinne formen diese Objekte, die wir sammeln, um unsere Fantasie, Erinnerungen, Träume - das Nichtmaterielle - zu modellieren. Skulptur ist eine Linse, ein Tor, kein Medium.
- Sarah Sze

Gagosian ist erfreut, Sarah Szes erste Ausstellung in der Schweiz präsentieren zu dürfen. Dies ist Szes dritte Show bei Gagosian - dieses Jahr zeitgleich mit der Art Basel 2021. Szes erste monumentale Freiluft-Videoinstallation ist einer der Höhepunkte des Art Basel Parcours.

Die unübertroffene Tüftlerin, der zugeschrieben wird, "das Potenzial von Skulptur zu verändern", greift Elemente aus der materiellen und digitalen Welt auf und schafft daraus ausserordentlich filigrane, vielförmige Werke, die zu einer aufmerksamen Detailbetrachtung einladen und gleichzeitig eine Makroperspektive der Unendlichkeit vermitteln. Sie überstrapaziert technische Grenzen und schafft damit neue Denkanstösse, angeregt durch die Reizüberflutung virtueller Erfahrungen und die Konfusion, die diese bei der echten Wahrnehmung im materiellen Raum hervorrufen.

Sze verarbeitet die Idee von Zeit und Entropie in ihren Gemälden, Skulpturen und Videoinstallationen und unterstreicht die kostbare und prekäre Natur der Materialität. Die ausgestellten Werke transformieren die Galerie in eine einheitliche, bildreiche Fläche, in welcher die Besucherinnen und Besucher die formsprachliche und konzeptuelle Breite von Szes Schaffen erfassen können. Die Gussskulpturen Wider Than the Sky und Deeper Than the Sea(beide aus der Werkreihe Fallen Sky von 2020-21) weisen direkte Bezüge zu Szes bahnbrechender Installation auf, die diesen Sommer nördlich von New York im Storm King Art Center eingeweiht wurde. Mit Anklängen an antike Architektur und die Formensprache von Ruinen fangen sie durchströmendes Licht und Schatten auf und wirken, als seien sie bereits zerfallen.

Seit einigen Jahren beschäftigt sich Sze wieder mit Malerei und passt dabei den Prozess des plastischen Modellierens an das zweidimensionale Medium an.

Die reich befrachtete Oberflächenstruktur ihrer Bilder, bei einer gleichzeitig eher losen Bildkomposition, bewirkt eine Vermengung von verschiedenen Formen aus dem reichen Fundus möglicher Bildtechniken - was entsteht ist ein dynamisches Ganzes. Abwechselnd trägt sie - oft deutlich sichtbar aufgeklebte - Papierschnitzel und Farbe auf und lässt Kompositionen mit weiten Bögen, rhythmischen Linien und schimmernden Diagonalen entstehen. Durch die freie Kombination von fotografischem Bildmaterial und malerischem Farbauftrag evozieren diese unruhigen Darstellungen die digitale Welt mit ihren fliessenden Übergängen, wobei die Wirkung des Analogen und Handgefertigten erhalten bleibt.

Lichteffekte locken die Besucherinnen und Besucher aus dem hinteren Teil der Galerie, wo die neuste von Szes Timekeeper videoinstallationen gezeigt wird. Die eindrucksvoll betitelten Travelers by Streams and Mountains besteht aus strukturellen Komponenten und beweglichen, klangerzeugenden Teilen. Ein Pendel schwingt an einem improvisierten Gerüst und zeigt über einer salzbedeckten Arena unaufhörlich Zeit und Raum an, um die während der Arbeit angefallenes Ausschussmaterial angeordnet ist, während abstrakte Videobilder den Raum wie Suchscheinwerfer ausleuchten.

Für den Parcours durch die Altstadt von Basel hat Sze Timepiece (2021) geschaffen, eine monumentale Videoinstallation im Freien, die bei Nacht die Fassade eines vierstöckigen Gebäudes zuoberst am historischen Rheinsprung in eine Wolke voller bewegter Bilder verwandelt, die augenscheinlich aus ihrem Rahmen entlassen worden sind. Eine Vielzahl von zufällig kodierten Videosequenzen - ein Mond, ein Kartentrick, ein elektrisches Gewitter und vieles mehr - erscheint in der Dämmerung, steigt auf, verpixelt, glitscht und löst sich schliesslich auf. Wie die Natur scheinen sie ein unvorhersehbares Eigenleben zu führen. In diesem digitalen Vexierspiel vertieft Sze ihr ursprüngliches Konzept, wonach Zeitmessung den ausschlaggebenden Rahmen schafft für Wissen, Sinn und die Aufzeichnung von Leben. Dieses Projekt wird von Gagosian unterstützt.

#SarahSze

Presse

Neutral Zurich AG
Inna Schill
isc@neutral.plus
+41 79 896 59 83

Gagosian
pressbasel@gagosian.com
+41 61 262 00 80

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Sarah Sze: New Works, Basel, September 20-November 13, 2021 | Gagosian

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Sculpture is everything physical outside of the mind's eye. Painting is a sculpture. The digital is a sculpture. An image is a sculpture. They are sculpted with the senses: eyes, ears, mouths, fingers-all of them. The senses give form to these things, which we collect in order to build our imagination, memory, dreams-the nonphysical.

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evokative
transparent

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Copper Etching plate.

Once etched and prof printed. I will think about what new materials would be relevant to print on.

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Thinking about how i can used found materials and objects to create a body of work

Parrott uses a range of techniques to document her research and subject throughout her projects. so also uses a range of media when producing a body of work

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I’m In The Bath On All Fours — Flora Parrott

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Sara Barker's skeletal wall constructions, freestanding, and tabletop sculptures occupy the interstices between painting and sculpture, opening a space between abstraction and representation. Barker's works articulate painting as a space to be inhabited, thus the titles of her works often draw from the tradition of modernist poetry and literature.

Sara Barker (b. 1980, Manchester) lives and works in Glasgow. Solo exhibitions include Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; and BALTIC, Gateshead. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Tate St Ives, Cornwall; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Saatchi Gallery, London; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow; and Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen.

#SaraBarker

Exhibitions at carlier | gebauer

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Sara Barker's skeletal wall constructions, freestanding, and tabletop sculptures occupy the interstices between painting and sculpture, opening a space between abstraction and representation. Barker's works articulate painting as a space to be inhabited, thus the titles of her works often draw from the tradition of modernist poetry and literature.

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Looking at google maps, I had found myself looking at google maps images both before and after moving to Toronto

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Prodgers way of documenting her experience is very successful, I have used her methods of research throughout

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Charlotte Prodger | Turner Prize Winner 2018 | TateShots

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Looking for reoccurring patters shapes and lines within these images

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experimenting with a range if fabrics, I wanted to find one that allows the stretcher to be exposed

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Making audio recordings to document a time and place.

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Open call for contributions – Hearing point – What do you hear from your window? This article is...

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areal view of my commute, Trying to visualise my journey