Alina Skorohoda’s artwork explores the notion of woman’s duty to the world. She responds to the feelings of obligation that haunt women everywhere, using domestic objects in her work; through altering these objects, she questions attitudes, fears and unwritten rules which have formed a hostile environment for women and their behavior within it, and the division between private (domestic) and public spheres.
She explores the problem of the lack of health warnings around the marketing of products dangerous to women’s health. Using heavy materials she creates a feel of heaviness to visually represent the heaviness and burden of wearing stereotypical women’s clothing and shoes. These objects are not everyday wear but the tools for social communication that are worn to impress, not for comfort.
Her work focuses on the unfamiliar term “topophobia” in relation to domestic space, referring to a fear of a specific space; in the context of this practice the fear of place is examined through feminist art practice which explores the power structures within domestic situations.
She employs the phrase ‘mental load’ as a means to describe the increasing pressure on female identity to strive for both equality and the feminine ideal. The phrase mental load has culturally been used to describe the mental pressures males experience at work and therefore appropriating this phrase becomes an interesting method to deconstruct this patriarchal association.
Skorohoda’s works use mixed media, video, installation, and everyday housekeeping objects to evoke the burden of meeting the expectations from others of stereotypical female appearance and behaviour.
Through Alina’s skillful work, particularly in photography and film, I can experience the feelings of being ethereal, unreal, ghostly, filled with foreboding, carrying strain yet barely existing, gliding through a world where everyone seems busy and there are so many tasks to do, so many places to go. Alienation and insignificance seem to be the lot of the woman, yet the connection to simple practical implements like brooms and mops anchor her in a world in which she barely belongs and from which she may not be able to escape. Like the women she portrays, who venture across urban landscapes, country roads and wide seas, I can want to yell out, to take my own power, to act on the environment. But bound into the muted silence of my own existence, I will find satisfaction in the spirit-life. Not sure if this is the way Alina wants us to see her work – I suspect it can bear being viewed through different prisms. I like particularly the way the sea comes into the foreground, the incoming tide resplendent no doubt with symbolic meaning.
Mae gwaith Tomos yn archwilio’r hyn ydyw i fod yn ddynol. Trwy baentio, arlunio, cerflunio a dulliau eraill, mae’n archwilio perthynas dyn â’i gyd-ddyn, â’r byd, â gwrthrychau, â’i hunan ac â Duw. Ei nod yw dal y gwrthdrawiad rhwng y gweladwy a’r anweladwy, rhwng realiti a’r hyn nad yw’n real.
Gellir gweld rhagor o waith Tomos ar ei wefan: www.tomossparnon.com ac ar ei gyfrif Instagram: @tomos_sparnon
Triptych, 2016-2017
Detail of installation at GS Artists, 2019
“Ac wedi elwch, tawelwch fu”, 2018
Mam-gu, 2020
Study of a head, 2017
Detail of sculpture from degree show, 2018
Tomos’ practice is an exploration of what it is to be human. Through different media including painting, drawing and sculpture, he explores man’s relationship with his fellow man, with the world, with objects, with himself and with God. His aim is to capture the conflict between the visible and the invisible, between reality and what is not real.
More of Tomos’ work can be seen on his website: www.tomossparnon.com and on his Instagram account: @tomos_sparnon
Tess Wood’s practice aims to express and further deepen her own understanding of human interaction and social control, presenting performances to her audience in an attempt to offer them an opportunity, to experience and contemplate feelings towards topics such as gender, sexuality, power and the moments of fear, love, passion and frustration that reside within these in the contemporary day.
Jumping Mawr Resonator
Currently focusing on the underpinning of a collective frustration with social control, power structures and theories regarding the relationship of body to architectural public space. Within the last month her work has taken a more reflective sentiment relating the current lock down situation that we are experiencing to her time spent in Japan in 2017.
Make noises when you can’t comprehend it at all…
The images shared here are stills from three separate performances in which the artist uses her body to express personal emotional and physical frustration with the world. Using these landscapes and architectural spaces she utilises public and private spaces as a place where one can easily express themselves immediately. This series of performative actions is an ongoing project spanning the last five years.
Delapidated Dance, 04/03/2020 – Swansea High Street, Wales
It is a mechanism that drives me to create work. If I am told something is to be a certain way, that I must abide by a certain set of rules, I am wired, I am totally wired to understand why.
Jeremy Gluck mainly works with contemporary strategies. By rejecting an objective truth and global cultural narratives, Gluck creates work in which a fascination with the clarity of content and an uncompromising attitude towards conceptual and minimal art often collides with ambiguity and concealment. The work is aloof and systematic and a cool and neutral imagery is used, obscuring a subtext speaking to process as practice.
Anja Stenina‘s show ‘You Know What I Mean‘, appealing to the intellect but also evading it, is apparently cerebral. Posing many questions beyond its name, the show embodies a fundamental challenge: You Know What You Are? The latest expression of a body of work that is as engaging as it is deceptively elusive, its theatrical and performance elements are grounded in an earthy and even sometimes matriarchal matrix, feeding back life, love and an arch wisdom and insight into the human condition.
Stenina’s work, by turns literate, literal and articulated in popular tropes, in this case is cast in a low, blue light to emphasise its marine themes, and employing the renowned sea shanty, What Do We Do With a Drunken Sailor, as a platform for undermining and investigating assumptive perspectives. You Know What I Mean is, literally and figuratively, a delightful, compassionate and enlightened collision of ideas, light and Jungian shadows.
Anja, interviewed here, supplies context to what is a growing body of work deserving reflection.
GS Artists: Question one: What is question zero?
Anja Stenina: ‘What should we do with a drunken sailor?’ questioning the influence of the authority of collective judgement. The fundamental conceptual question is: how in control are you? It is a progression of my work in a wider sense that explores our relationship with society. That traces back to my BA Degree exhibition in 2016 ‘Are you in control?’, where I explored how power structures manipulate us quite blatantly just below the superficial skin of our everyday lives. In the installation I would draw out the stage directions to life on the floor, but using invisible ink which could then be discovered, piece by piece, by the audience using black light torches. I also wanted to present the physical metaphor of the whole process – that the audience is surrendering themselves to my authority when they come in, yet they are still entirely in control of their lives – they always have a choice – they can turn the torch off at any point, or simply choose to stop following the instructions.
The revision within the Drunken Sailor song is an exploration between different standpoints. It specifically raises questions of judgement and morality, how opinions are arrived at and how often do people actually consider where their opinions are coming from. The idea connects to Barthes’ idea of the encratic language of authority and to what goes without saying.
I employ a dialectical approach to create a reflective environment for the observation of shifts of perspective. I’m not passing judgement; I am just creating a space for the unpacking of ideas, locating elements of control.
You Know What I Mean – Photograph by Tomos Sparnon
GS Artists: What are the chief elements of control?
Anja Stenina: Fashion and style. The style of social protocols and social rituals that are dictated by the dominant culture. With the metaphysical personifications of the Ages of Aquarius and Pisces, I am presenting two fashions, two standpoints. The viewer, therefore, is free to try on each of the ideological perspectives. My show is, basically, a changing room.
You Know What I Mean by Hywel Edwards
GS Artists: And in that room, what changes?
Anja Stenina: Who knows? It’s a private space.
I would only hope that the fitting helps one to engage critically with the dynamic between opposing standpoints and that the naturalness/comfiness of a certain garment aka certain established social construction is reflected back to the visitor and perhaps the dominance of one style is questioned by the alterations of the new style. Dominant trends/positions can be switched to more transgressive standpoints. I’ve presented opposing cultural constructions for the individual to try on and I hope that, as with the dressing room mirrors, the reflective experience of the self ‘wearing’ the different forms can influence one’s value judgments.
My work creates a potential space for change, it is the viewer’s reflections in the dressing room that complete it.
GS Artists: What is this “self”?
Anja Stenina: The knower; the chooser of the outfits; the one that catches the reflection.
GS Artists: In the simplest language, starved of any elaboration, what is your practice and what is your art? Is it necessary?
Anja Stenina: I am a poststructuralist and semiotician in my process and I am a conceptual mixed media installation artist. I work with elements of morality. Is morality necessary? Necessity is a question for the critics.
You Know What I Mean – Photography by Hywel Edwards
Please join us at GS Artists on Friday January 10th at 6 pm for the opening of our next Artist at Work project. Rhythm, a solo art show by local Swansea based artist and GS intern ‘Fraser’, explores the comfort of familiarity and altered memory. Depicting universally recognised forums and disrupting the familiar via syncopated rhythms of light and sound, utilising the inherent, faint, buzz of her contemporary medium.
The show includes LED installations, box television sculpture, video, mixed media sculptures adopting everyday commonplace materials, and UV sensitive drawings.
The show continues until January 17th. Open 12-4pm everyday except Sunday.
AbigailFraser is a twenty-year-old Welsh artist, currently studying a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art at UWTSD Swansea. Fraser’s artwork is an unreliable, dreamy, psychedelic exploration of memories appertaining to previous events. Her mixed media sculptures and installations evoke a response to light on the senses, projecting a sense of self and an inquisition of reality. Frasers’ work often contains simple LED drawings of universal forms, exploring how the energy of light permanently surrounds us all in a very personal manner. Endeavoring to harness this energy and penetrate our mass consciousness through her artwork, Fraser portrays a seemingly infinite space within the gallery interpreting the inherent attraction to light and being human. In September of 2019 Fraser worked as Artist in Residence at The University of Rio Grande, Ohio.
Download the full Craig Wood In Conversation with Fiona Banner PDF here.
Following is a section of one of the studio conversations recorded by the artists and transcribed at their discretion. The venue was Bethel Chapel (Craig’s studio) on April the 7th, 2019.
Craig Wood These are these early polythene water pieces that I made.
Fiona
Banner Oh yeah, you were talking about them.
CW Which kind of put me into the installation world, using architecture as
the context. They mirrored the format of the floor.
FB Where is that?
CW That’s in the crypt of
St. George’s Church in
Bloomsbury.
FB Wow! That was way before you had the chapel?
CW Yeah. So, I’ve always had a
little bit of a sort of atheistic love of ecclesiastical buildings. That was a
sort of breakthrough piece, because from being an object-maker at college I
then used architecture as a context.
FB It’s very beautiful.
What is that material?
CW It’s just ordinary
wrapping polythene – like the stuff you
get poly bags made from. It’s very iconic.
FB But what have you done with it to make it solid?
CW I’ve heat-sealed it.
It’s full of water so it’s not solid, it’s liquid, with a stain in it.
FB How amazing! It looks beautiful.
CW And then I removed the stain, because I realised it was much more about
these two materials. A kind of so-called organic, so-called natural material…
like synthetic and non-synthetic.
FB Yeah.
CW That was Modern Medicine –
the
show after Freeze.
FB That was the big kind of BritArt… was that the thing that Damien
[Hirst] organised that was like the beginning of that whole scene?
CW Freeze preceded this, which kind of kicked it BritArt off; Modern
Medicine kind of consolidated it. This was in a biscuit factory (appropriately enough).
When I see this image, I think of the smell of custard creams, because that’s where they used to make custard creams. This
was now reduced to a kind of conversation between plastic and water. At the end
it was pumped out and the plastic was recycled. It’s kind of very ephemeral.
FB And that was part of your thinking around the piece from the top – that it would disappear back into its natural
state at the end?
CW Yeah. I think it was very much like, I was interested in the…
CW I was quite a conceptualist. I quite liked the political side of
conceptual art, that it was non-marketable – or at least difficult to market.
FB And to then reconstitute the materials at the end…
CW Yeah, you just return back: the water goes down the drain; the plastic
goes back to the company I bought it from, who could re-melt it and re-use it.
But I wasn’t like anti- the
other artists in the show. I was thinking they do what they do; I do what I do.
I wasn’t extremely militant about it,
that was just the way I was wanting work to be: ephemeral, site-specific.
FB But I think a lot of people use the word ‘ephemeral’ but they don’t go so far as to actually disappear the materials
back into their natural source at the end. So that’s a very strong narrative around the work, a very
strong attitude towards ephemerality. It’s beautiful. Could you walk on that?
CW No, no. It was really fragile. So it had a lot of contradictions to
what we think of as sculpture as well. Kind of more like ephemeral dressmaking
the way it was made, because it was more like a stitching process with heat
from patterns.
FB Did you make it yourself?
CW Mm-hmm.
FB Wow! If you made that now would it mean something different?
CW Hmm… yeah, I think so. I
don’t think I really understood or
wanted to understand everything about it. At this stage it was still exciting
me as to, ‘Wow! I’m making this work. I don’t really know it, but I’m intrigued by it.’ I made maybe ten of these in different venues until I
realised it was sort of repeating itself. Then I just stopped forever. And each
time I made it I would kind of understand other aspects to it.
FB Would you remake it now if the right opportunity came up?
CW Part of me doesn’t want to.
FB Why? Because it’s a hassle?
CW Well, it’s a hassle that
kind of going back. But then having said that, we’ve just been at the Laugharne Weekend – musicians for example don’t have any problem about playing their old sixties
hits. And why not?
FB And what joy it is!
Father and Son, Craig Wood
CW What joy it is. And why deny yourself that? I’ve always wanted to be going on and on, and move on
and on, sort of restlessly looking for new excitement in art. But maybe I’ve reached a point where I will recap.
FB Would be nice to see that. But I’m just thinking that now we’ve all got to think
about what an object means, what substance is, what material is, because the
planet’s sinking and, you know, there’s a next generation. So, it’s quite prescient work in that regard. And to
me, looking at it now, it speaks to some of those things. But those things were
obviously not on the agenda at the time for the common man.
CW They were around but they weren’t as mainstream as they are now (or should be now).
FB We didn’t realise about
global warming and stuff like that so much. Or did you?
CW Yeah, I did. Because I remember in Edinburgh being really interested in… when I was young being interested in what was
called the Ecology Party which was pre-Green Party. I remember when I was at
school discussing with my mates their policy of having zero economic growth and
thinking how exciting that was, and how you could make things better – that you could make better cars, better
everything, better jobs – but you wouldn’t be obsessed with the notion of constant
economic expansion.
FB So it’s anti-capitalist
work?
CW Yeah, there’s a lot of that in
it. Or at least a really serious desire to fundamentally reform capitalism.
FB What’s it called?
CW I was just about to say… I was just about to
come out with a Marxist quote. It’s not called anything;
they were all untitled.
FB Okay. What’s the Marxist quote?
CW I don’t know!
The Bastard Word, Fiona Banner, 2007
FB [Laughs] Add that one in later. Well it’s very exciting to see… I mean my god they’re beautiful!
CW They were sort of a really… they could burst like that. It was like
putting a pin next to a balloon, it was almost tempting its own demise.
FB Is it always moving as well in some way?
CW If you touched it you would have a ripple bouncing backwards and forwards
almost infinitely.
FB Awesome.
CW And so they’re cut to almost
the exact format of the slabs…
FB Right.
CW So the format of all these works are sort of determined by builders.
FB Yeah, who in turn are informed by the engineering…
CW Yeah, and the practicality of how much concrete you can cast…
FB How often you need a pillar…
CW How wide is the linoleum? – this little annoying cut.
FB So what are we looking at here? Because they are almost invisible these
things.
CW This was a piece at Laure Genillard’s gallery on Foley Street.
FB I wondered if it was – I sort of
recognised that floor.
CW So it’s like three big
slabs with that one. Again using the format of the floor.
FB And does that create an impasse? Because it’s then an area that you can’t enter.
CW Exactly, yeah. Again this became much more of a sort of minimalist
work, whereas the other ones had much more sort of poetic and phenomenological interpretations, as
it became very cold in the gallery. I didn’t do many in galleries; I didn’t think they really worked. That was in Castello di
Rivara in Italy – thousands of
terracotta tiles going through this doorway into the back. You couldn’t get into these rooms – some secret rooms that you could only see through the
window.
FB Really? So, you made the installation in rooms where it couldn’t really be seen?
CW Exactly. And it went through the whole floor of this castle. I put some
ladders against the walls so from the outside you could peer in.
FB Oh, how lovely! I guess invisibility/visibility is sort of embedded in
the project at large anyway. I mean water is this thing that is not…
CW I’ll move on a bit. I
used to work as an archaeological draughtsman, and in-between doing these
installations I would do archaeological drawings of everything I was throwing
out, every plastic object.
FB Really?
CW So that’s like a little
yogurt pot.
FB That’s very satisfying.
CW So it’s dot drawing.
These are lines of dots.
FB Is this a physical drawing made with pencil?
CW Yeah, with Rotring.
FB Oh my god, the beloved Rotring.
CW This was a little piece I dug up. All of this stuff’s really been dug up because I’ve been doing this publication. I haven’t looked at any of this for years. So this is a
piece I found that must have been a trowel. This is a Superdrug bleach bottle.
So these were based on archaeological and architectural drawings… both jobs.
FB How do you make the dots so uniform?
CW It’s almost like a
meditation… to get my breathing
right before I start.
FB My god! That’s incredible!
Because the spacing is so uniform as well.
CW I got better at it as well, actually.
FB Is this better? Is this not better?
CW No, no. I got to the point where I got ridiculously… What I tried to
do was to record something in the most caring way of an object that gets the
least care culturally, the thing that’s in the bin after one second.
FB Did you show these alongside the water installation?
CW No. They were kind of another body of work that I introduced later,
once I’d stopped the installations.
FB Quite cool that it’s actually going to
be seen alongside in the book, isn’t it?
CW Yeah, I know. It’s going to be incredible
that.
FB Also, as I said before, I’m having to go back
and look at all this after me kind of shutting it out. ‘Next context, next project’, you know? So now in my mind it’s all sort of mixed up for the first time, because it’s all been dug out to be collated and cleaned
and classified and published. These are holes in
the wall.
FB Now this work I have seen.
CW You might have seen that. This is Laure Genillard’s gallery. She’s down there. Remember that?
FB Yeah, I once had a drawing of a Chinook helicopter like there on that
wall.
CW Yeah. That was probably the first time I saw your…
FB It was folded up like a map. I remember delivering it and it was A4
size and Laure was like, ‘What the hell? I
thought you were bringing me a like A0 drawing?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I am’, and unfolded it. That’s beautiful. So,
tell me about the number.
CW These are the
numbers… that’s probably the code
that’s on the bottom of one of
these bottles. It’s like
manufacturers’ code, manufacturers’ language, that we don’t know what it means. They do… some batch numbers.
It’s ubiquitous but it’s not our business to know, as it were.
FB That is quite scary in a way.
CW It is! And it’s kind of funny
that we’ve never challenged it or
enquired. I remember phoning up a few times to ask what these numbers meant and
was treated with massive suspicion. What does ‘UN-3H1’ mean? I still don’t know to this day.
FB What does it mean? What does it mean in
terms of the dent in the world and the contribution to the world? It’s highly relevant, but it’s all part of the invisible shit that we don’t look at or think about.
CW Yeah, sort of multinational stuff. And we’re probably putting these things on our bodies and in
our bodies. They’re very intimate
some of these products: cleaning things and deodorants, and air fresheners I
used a lot of.
FB Yeah, I remember that.
Fiona Banner in her studio, London. 7 January 2010. Photograph by Dafydd Jones
CW Isn’t it funny, you know, you mentioning that drawing and folding maps? And looking at your work yesterday at the Laugharne weekend and seeing sort of connections with things that I was doing at the same time. But at the time I thought everybody was completely different. But now looking back I see sort of Rachel Whiteread’s work or Marcus Taylor’s, and I think, ‘Oh yeah, we were all kind of very connected’.
FB There were concerns to that generation we weren’t aware of.
CW I didn’t see it at the
time. Yeah, I thought everybody was working in their own unique ways. It’s quite reassuring that, that things were
connected. But I didn’t see it at the
time.
FB Yeah, it’s quite a privilege to be in it for long enough and to be able to look back and see that.
Artist Biographies
Craig Wood was born in Edinburgh in 1960 and has been based in South Wales since 1982, where he initially worked as a draughtsman for Dyfed Archaeological Trust.
He completed a Foundation Diploma at Dyfed College of Art,
Carmarthen before studying a Fine Art BA at Goldsmiths College, London, in the
late 1980’s.
Wood was a part of the initial Young British Artists generation, exhibiting in shows such as
Modern Medicine. His practice explores the spectrum of site specificity and
collaboration.
Wood has been a recipient of the DAAD residency in Berlin and is a former Gregory Fellow with the University of Leeds. He has exhibited widely within the UK and abroad.
Currently he has a fractional post as Senior Lecturer in
Conceptual Art at Swansea College of Art, UWTSD and continues to exhibit widely
both nationally and internationally.
Fiona Banner
Born 1966, Merseyside, England
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender,
collections, and publishing through a practice spanning forms as varied as drawing,
sculpture, performance, and moving image. Her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’
or ‘still films’ – blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature
films, (whose subjects range from war to porn) or sequences of events. These
pieces evolved into solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size
as a cinema screen.
Banner later turned her attention to the idea of the classic,
art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form
in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films. Often using parts of
military aircraft as the support for these descriptions, Banner juxtaposes the
brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and
alienation. Whilst her current work encompasses performance, sculpture, drawing
and installation, text is still at the heart of Banner’s practice. In 1997 she
started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, which has been the
backbone of her work ever since. Banner toys with the snobbery inherent in the
title by publishing posters, books, objects and performances that deploy a
playful attitude and utilise pseudo grandeur.
Banner came to prominence in the 1990s with her
wordscapes, written transcriptions of iconic films retold in her own words. THE
NAM (1997) is a 1,000 page book that details, scene-by-scene, six Vietnam
War films — including Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now — in such
a way that they blur into each other. The outcome is, in the artist’s
words, the literary equivalent of a “gutting 11 hour supermovie”.
In a recent collaboration with the Archive of Modern
Conflict, Banner commissioned a Magnum photographer to take pictures of
London’s financial district as if it was a war zone. The resulting work
uses Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as a filter through
which to read the tribal behaviour of those in the business of finance, an
environment of weary survivalism combining competitive trading floors, corporate
art collections, manic drinking cultures, luxury shopping and strip clubs.
Axe Head Collective celebrates its GS Artists internship with a show opening October 18th, running until October 31st.
Formed in 2017 by four UWTSD Swansea College of Art Fine Art artists, Alina Skorohoda, Demian Johnston, Jeremy Gluck, and Melissa Rodrigues, to considerable aplomb Axe Head’s self-directed debut show, ‘Axe Head to Everything’ opened in March 2018 at Volcano Theatre, featuring in total nine UWTSD undergrad fine artists. The following November the four curated a show of their work exclusively for Creative Bubble, ‘Studio 95 – Promote Harder’. And in March 2019, the second Axe Head to Everything Swansea College of Art group show, subtitled Cut & Run, opened at Volcano, featuring ten artists.
Melissa Rodrigues
With diverse, contrasting work featured, the Collective see exhibiting at GS Artists as a fantastic step forward, presenting a body of work pushing forward their already restive style.
“The Recording of Thinking” by Jeremy Gluck Photograph by Dylan Fyodor Monk
Instagram
@axeheadtoeverything
Axe Head Collective Artist Statements
Alina
Skorohoda @skorohodalinaart
Alina’s
artwork explores the notion of woman’s duty to the world. She responds to the
feelings of obligation that haunt women everywhere. Alina uses domestic objects
in her work. Through altering these objects, she questions attitudes, fears and
unwritten rules which have formed a hostile environment for women and their
behaviour within it.
Demian
Johnston @demonstuff
Demian’s
practice looks to develop internal mindscapes involving multiple symbols and
thoughts to bridge the physical process and mental or spiritual state, and
individual and collective consciousness. Building on a growing body of work
featuring dynamic installations with energy concentrated by their confinement,
his work is rarely figurative, encompassing dimensions of unpredictability and
naturalness.
Jeremy
Gluck @nonceptualism
Working
as a fine artist in digital art, film, installation and mixed media, Jeremy Gluck’s
uncompromising works confront the viewer, encouraging a physical, sensitive, or
conceptual experience of each. Radical artistic engagement is the mission
statement.
Melissa
Rodrigues @missbalencantefineart
Rodrigues’ work uses a variety of materials to explore issues of displacement, belonging, and cultural identity. Addressing issues concerning the movement of people across the world, immigration, sense of belonging, cultural identity and the rhetoric of otherness are the bases from which Rodrigues’ work blossoms.
Axe Head to Everything IV at GS Artists, October 2019
Axe Head to Everything IV at GS Artists, October 2019 Photographs by Evelyn Wolstenholme
