Artquest: PEER FORUM
This programme funded by Artquest aims to assist artists by providing them with the funding, space and resources necessary to establish their own peer mentoring groups. Through PEER FORUM, we provide institutional support and create a space for artists to instigate dialogue and push their work through a peer network opportunity.
The selected group includes Josie Cockram (Lead artist), Anita Delaney (Lead artist), Victoria Adam, Lauren Godfrey, Paul Gwilliam, Mat Jenner, Jamie Bracken Lobb, Amanda Loomes, Richard Lockett, Isabel Mallet and Gabriel Stones.
Josie Cockram works primarily with photographic print, moving image, sculpture and sound. Images are recordings of actual, rather than imagined, people and events. But, there is slippage between objectness, imageness, sound and space that disrupts the language of documentation. It might be synaesthesia or simply sensitivity. Images, sounds and objects grapple with the instability of touch, nomadic relationships and the trouble with trying to understand (each other) directly. Ideas of mastery, cohesion and efficacy are in question (how do you get out from under those?) Works value experiences of the peripheral, equivocal, helpless, frustrated and distracted. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2015 and was awarded a 2015-16 Land Securities Studio Residency with Bow Arts Trust.
Anita Delaney is interested in how intellectual and material experiences are filtered through the flesh. Working mainly in moving image but also text, sculpture and installation, her work seeks to form a certain language – one that may speak of how to live as a weakling. She is desirous of her audience and wants to speak intimately with them. Delaney graduated with a BA Fine Art from IADT 2006 and an MA Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art in 2011. In 2015 she was the recipient of an Irish Arts Council Bursary Award which allows for the research and development of new work. She has recently shown work as part of Selected V at CCA, Glasgow, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham and the Whitechapel Gallery, London and is showing new work as part of the upcoming Rotterdam Film Festival 2016.
Victoria Adam makes sculptures intended to be experienced close-up and that draw people into their intimacy. The work borrows from the world of the health and beauty aisle, domestic space and contemporary anxieties. Adam is based in London and graduated from Royal Academy Schools in 2015. Recent exhibitions include Leks at Marian Cramer Projects, Amsterdam, middensat Kingsgate Workshops, London, and ( ゜_゜)彡 at Caustic Coastal, Manchester.
Lauren Godfrey’s work spans sculpture, performance, film and printmaking, simultaneously exploring the relationship between the spoken and written word; the tension between imagery and text, employing an approach to making like the formation of a sentence in the mouth – on the tip of the tongue. Godfrey’s sculptures often take the form of domestic scaled objects, quasifurniture or the almost useful. With a sweeping arm that gathers deco, Memphis and hieroglyphs under one armpit and Seinfeld, Nigella and Matisse under the other; borrowing shapes from Gio Ponti and stealing titles from AA Gill, the brow remains neutral. A fusion of high and low, past and present, crude and tasteful, coming together to graft an inquisitive and propositional space in between.
Paul Gwilliam’s work includes sculpture, performance, painting and writing. During 2015 Gwilliam presented Out For A Duck at Catalyst Arts, Belfast and A Portrait of a Lynx at Grove House, London, exhibiting sculpture with creative writing that explored the effects and slippage of the objects integrity when confronted with written narrative. Gwilliam is also part of the collective UA that attempts to exist on the boundaries between art practice and religious tradition through the practice of group ritual. He completed his MA from Slade School of Art in 2013 and co-founded Copenhagen Place Project Space that ran between 2010-12.
Mat Jenner works across drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, ephemera and sound. Recent exhibitions and projects include aMAsS_A_mAsS, Kunsthall Bergen, Norway, Days, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland, Dreams Time Free, Grand Union, Birmingham, Wish you were here, ATTIC, Nottingham, and FOAM, Project Number, London.
Jamie Bracken Lobb‘s work is concerned with the hierarchy and display of objects from museums to the pound shop, with particular attention on use and function. Consisting of sculpture, installation and video, Jamie’s work is informed by his collecting habits, personal interest in areas of esoteric study and scientific research. Recent shows have included Daily Ablutions, Lima Zulu Project Space, A Sense of Things, Zabludowicz collection and Desktop Residency for V&A x Art Licks.
Amanda Loomes works with the digital experimental documentary form, imbuing materials with the abstracted stories and personalities of the people they were made by whilst reflexively considering her role and responsibility as artist. Informed by her engineering background the works often have a formal or abstract quality, but any borrowed authority is frequently undermined by the voices of the workers that shine through. She graduated from the RCA in 2006, was shortlisted for Jerwood Open Forest in 2014 and was co-commissioned by HOUSE and photoworks as part of Brighton Festival in 2015.
Richard Lockett’s work proposes the viewer to cast a different eye on the familiar and on the magic of the mundane. His abstract drawings can be perceived as emotional and meta-linguistic thought patterns refusing a one dimensional reading. Their most crucial aspect is the rhythmic deconstruction of the forms established in his sculptural work. Most striking about Lockett’s artwork is his attempt to reconstruct subjective experiences in a sculptural and spatial manner. Lockett’s materials are drawn from his domestic surrounding – found objects such as a clock or venetian blind mingle with symbolic, technological and manmade elements. These allegorical arrangements form a fragile visual language connect different memories and scenarios for the artist. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Follow The Trail, Marian Cramer Projects, Amsterdam and Entre el tren y el andén, Metro Polanco, Mexico City. Richard Lockett holds an MA in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths College and is a graduate of The Slade School of Fine Art.
Isabel Mallet makes un-authored sculpture from a tangle of text, images, noise, objects and materials. Her work is a kind of activism; direct action without planned conclusion; a transformation of energy; a geological process. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2012 and has since exhibited nationally and internationally under various pseudonyms. She is responsible for the online magazine FORM IV, an ongoing archive of the ‘anarchic combat style of NOW’. She is currently collaborating with artist/filmmaker Sasha Litvintseva on The Stability of the System, a film exploring spiralling geological time, fossilised agency, submerging and emerging land and the death of artist Robert Smithson.
Gabriel Stones is an artist living and working in London. His practice relies on an analytical approach to art and literature. He works with computer graphics, animation, installation and text. Current work, formally driven by software physics engines, sets out to test autobiography and diaristic writing as a means towards production. Recent solo presentations include Dig Yourself, Laure Genillard Gallery, Joe Brainard Fan Fiction, Plaza Plaza and Meat Eater, Outpost Gallery, Norwich. He graduated from the Royal Academy Schools in 2014.
These selected group of artists receives an all-inclusive award of £1,800 to run 6 peer mentoring sessions over a 6 month period with a regular group of 8-12 other artists and a space provided by Camden Arts Centre where the peer mentoring sessions can take place.
