Traces
Exhibition Dates
June 22nd 2017 — July 17th 2017
Our lives are the sum of millions of moments colliding to make up the past, present and the future. But what traces do these moments leave behind and how do they impact the people we are?
In Traces 17 multidisciplinary artists that attend the peer group at the Free Space Project explore who we have been, where we are now and who we would like to be. The artist peer group is a monthly event for artists that are exploring health and wellbeing in their practice, often covering complex and emotional experiences.
Exhibiting Artists:
Alessandra Rinaudo, Andy Wiener, Antonia Attwood, Cina Aissa, Christopher Kelly, Daniel Regan, Julia Schuster, Marcus Boyle, Maria Trimikliniotis, Naomi Woddis, Nicola Jayne Maskrey, Paloma Tendero, Rebekah Dean, Silvia Gentili, Sisi Burn and Tessa Cooney.
Organised and curated by Daniel Regan, with help from Antonia Attwood.
With a special choreographed performance on the opening night by Paola Napolitano.
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Alessandra Rinaudo is a visual artist working with photography and text. She
explores themes related to the self, identity and family dynamics. Seasons is a personal journey and response to an illness that affected her emotional life and identity, leaving traces on her physical appearance.
Andy Wiener has combined a career in photography with a career in the NHS as a consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Clinic. The Family is the introductory photograph to his series Visitation Scenes. He is wearing photographic masks of members of his family, most of whom he never knew, but they are nevertheless part of his identity. He made the masks from old family photographs.
Antonia Attwood is a photographic and moving image artist whose work explores the phenomenology of mental health experiences. In this series she turns the camera on herself to explore her own anxiety. Attwood looks at the way in which the body is affected by the mind throughout periods of anxiety and the constant battle to navigate anxious thoughts.
Cina Aissa is a community artist and musician who works with performance and mixed media. Her work is autobiographical and explores themes of separateness, difference and familiarity. Her project, Shape Shifting Family looks at enmeshment and merging identities in close relationships.
Christopher Kelly is a designer and creative exploring how images are shared in the 21st century. He poses the questions: What if you never shared your photos on social media? What if your photos had gained no likes or comments? Would your photos still have any value? In For Now, Forever Kelly explores ways to subvert the modern obsession with instant sharing through placing images in time capsules to be hidden across the UK.
Daniel Regan is a photographer and the director of the Free Space Project. His work explores complex emotional experiences. Regan is currently working on a project with suicide prevention charity Maytree, exploring the complexity and taboo of suicide and mental health.
Julia Schuster is a recent graduate from The Royal College of Art with an MA in Ceramics (2016). Her cross-disciplinary work is anchored in material specific making with clay but also places itself in an expanded field, using video, performance, and writing. Julia’s body of work Who I was, Who I am, Who I will be depicts three letters written to herself about the past, present and future.
Marcus Boyle is a visual artist whose work with documentary forms of filmmaking explores ideas of consent, ethics and exploitation. In this short film, Amends, Boyle makes amends to a mate he hurt over ten years ago but things don’t go as expected.
Maria Trimikliniotis is an artist inspired by the process akin to ‘call and response’ between ‘the making’ and ‘the made.’ As a consequence, she works with materials, media and ideas as they present themselves to her, either by chance or circumstance.
Naomi Woddis is a photographer and writer. She is particularly interested in online participatory projects and the links that can be made between image and text. Everything I Know Now is a series of overlapping portraits of her mother’s hands. “As she ages I have become fascinated by my mother’s hands. They say something about her determination and engagement with life, as well as the inevitability of the ageing process.”
Nicola Jayne Maskrey is exhibiting her series Cornish Roads (hedges), in Flow. An abstract study of colour, movement, and the flow-state, captured in the vibrant hedges that line Cornwall’s twisting ancient roads. Shot entirely on an iPhone this series explores the connections between people and the land, and in particular the land’s influence on art and emotional states.
Paloma Tendero is a visual artist that explores the physical and psychological relationships that springs from biological determinism. We are made from others, and we take and receive qualities from each other. Part of our inheritance is a mixture of all the experiences we had, of all the people we met and those who have left their mark on us. Tendero is the current artist in residence at the Free Space Project.
Paola Napolitano is an Italian-Swiss independent artist with a dance background. Her dance piece SELphOBiA talks about one’s perception, showing a crossroad of possibilities between deterioration and resolution. Far from being a chronological telling, the performer transitions in between states of mental confined space trying to make her body invisible and foregrounded fascination to herself and others.
Rebekah Dean is a live and visual artist living and working in North London and currently a selected artist in the CREEKSIDE OPEN 2017. The Silicon Valley Walk is a photo taken on the Paint and Performance workshop during London’s 2016 Creativity and Wellbeing week.
Silvia Gentili’s practice explores stories that belong to the personal and political realm. The intimacy of a strange being is a series of self-portraits that explores the frustrating and disarming experiences of life trying to find a way not to vanish. It is an act of resistance to overcome the unbearable sense of melancholy.
Sisi Burn is a London based photographer who has been working within the performing arts since 1994. These images are part of her on-going process of working through grief. They are not only a mirror of her own feelings but a continuous process of reflection and provide a way in which to come to terms with and understand all that she has lost and the situation she is in now.
Tessa Cooney is a multidisciplinary visual artist using her life experiences to inform her art practice. Her work encompasses the human experience, emotions and healing. Her piece, Breath, suggests the dual experience of both anxiety and panic attacks.
