Artist in Residence - TonbridgeArts Brochure Copy

Rosemarie Powell is a sculptor. She has her studio on Ashdown Forest. Initially working in stone (marble and alabaster) and bronze, she found herself re-embracing clay, the medium that had led her into sculpture at the outset. Working with clay, no longer simply as a starting point for a maquette or subsequent casting in bronze, but for the material itself, the fascination and pleasure in exploring and understanding its properties and behaviours, the endeavour to bring the spirit of the material to life and investigating the possibilities this opens up. Some years and several exploratory paths further on, she currently works mainly in black and white clay which she fires to varying temperatures to achieve authentic expression of material.

Her language is the abstract form. She seeks purity through paring down to the essence. Together with integrity of material consciousness of form and integrity of process constitute the mainstays of her practice. 

Rosemarie will be Artist in Residence in the Tunnel Gallery during the Michaelmas term. She sees this residency as an opportunity to explore further the connections Art brings between people - something she considers one of the great joys of Art - and seeks to do so in two ways: in addition to sharing her thought and work processes with the students, Rosemarie seeks to explore further the possibilities of actively involving the Tonbridge School community in creating a sculpture installation, a project she terms ‘social sculpture’, extending beyond the visible material to include the invisible (social) materials and addressing such questions as what is sculpture/3D form, what does the concept of installation entail, how might a blog enhance a project of this kind. 

Why Are These Artists of Interest? ...

... Because of their approach, their process, the materials they use, and the way they use them; as per the highlighted and larger font sections in the texts.
Always of interest to me, but particularly relevant now that I am beginning to think about my upcoming residency at a local school.
I shall be logging my thought processes and ideas on this blog ...

Artist of Interest II - Eileen Agar

henry-moore.org - eileen-agar-natural-ready-mades

Eileen Agar: Natural Ready-mades

Institute exhibition
27th May 2015 - 30th August 2015
Gallery 4

Eileen Agar
'Marine Object'
1939
Terracotta, horn, bone and shells

© The Estate of Eileen Agar
Photo: © Tate, London 2015

Eileen Agar (1899-1991) sought out sculptural forms in nature, combing the shoreline for natural ready-mades that she choreographed into collages and sculptures. Natural Ready-mades explores Agar's finely tuned observation of sculpture in nature through seven works made between 1935 and 1939.

Permeating her photographs and assemblages is a strong sense of visual pleasure, playfulness and wit, as shown by 'Marine Object' (1939) at the centre of this focused display. This sculpture combines a Greek amphora that Agar purchased from a French fisherman, who found it caught up in his nets in Toulon, with a ram's horn, picked up by the artist in Cumbria, a starfish recovered from sea mud, and a marine skeleton.

From the 1930s onwards Agar was an avid beachcomber, her shoreline bounty used as material for objects and collages.  Alongside  'Marine Object' two collages reveal Agar's incomparable sculptural eye. One, the earliest work in Eileen Agar: Natural Ready-mades, is an exquisite, vibrantly coloured box made in 1935, deftly combining a sea horse with coral, placed against a backdrop of a watercolour to form an underwater stage set. The other is a framed work on paper, where a sea creature cut-out is pasted on to a photograph sourced from a 1940s publication on classical sculpture.

In 1936 while on holiday in the Dorset coastal town of Swanage, Agar met Paul Nash (1889-1946), where he was compiling The Dorset Shell Guide for Shellmex. Through this friendship, Agar received a studio visit from Roland Penrose (1900-84), who invited her to show her work in the ground-breaking International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. Although Agar never saw herself as a surrealist, she described in her 1998 autobiography that 'Surrealism for me draws its inspiration from Nature...you see the shape of a tree, the way a pebble falls or is framed, and you are astounded to discover that dumb nature makes an effort to speak to you, to give you a sign, to warn you, to symbolise your innermost thoughts.'

Directly after the exhibition, Agar travelled to Ploumanac'h and Berros-Guirec on France's Brittany coast where she was struck by the coastal rock formations. These she described as seeming 'as if nature had arranged a show of sculpture in the open air.' Seeking out a camera, she set about creating an incredible series of photographs showing how the wind and sea sculpt nature. Four examples are included in this exhibition.

Born in Buenos Aires into a family of British industrialists, Agar moved to England in 1906. In 1990 she was recorded talking about her life for Artists' Lives, a British Library oral history project that is developed in partnership with the Henry Moore Foundation. Here she describes how as a child she was intent on becoming an artist. Agar began her studies in 1920 with Leon Underwood (1890-1975) at his Brook Green School of Art. Underwood's pupils also included Henry Moore (1898-1986) and Gertrude Hermes (1901-83). After graduating from the Slade School of Art in 1924 Agar worked in Paris with the Czech Cubist Frantisek Foltyn (1891-1976). She returned to London in 1930, and the next year was involved in founding the, now extremely rare, journal The Island, organised by pupils of Leon Underwood with her husband Josef Bard (1892-1975) the editor. The three issues of this journal are held in our Research Library, and will form a concurrent Library Display, along with the recording of Agar. Sculptures and archival material by Hermes, Moore and Underwood are included in the Leeds Museums and Galleries sculpture collection, which the Henry Moore Institute manages in a unique partnership that has built one of the strongest UK public collections of British sculpture.

Within our exhibition programme, Eileen Agar: Natural Ready-mades is paired with Carol Bove / Carlo Scarpa in Galleries 1, 2 & 3 from 2 April. The New York-based artist Carol Bove (b. 1971) cites Agar as an important reference point, both creating assemblages from naturally occurring materials. In the Upper Sculpture Study Galleries, Garth Evans: Sculpture Photographs also explores how sculptural thinking has been addressed through the photographic medium.

Artist of Interest I - Gareth Evans

henry-moore.org - garth-evans-sculpture-photographs

Garth Evans: Sculpture Photographs

Institute exhibition
2nd April 2015 - 12th July 2015
Upper Sculpture Study Gallery

Garth Evans
'British Steel Photographs'
1969-71

Courtesy the artist and Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery

Garth Evans (b. 1934) is central to the narrative of British sculpture, his work experimenting consistently with the possibilities of medium, form, weight and scale. Sculpture Photographs presents two bodies of work from the late 1960s and 1970s, 'British Steel Photographs 1969-71' and 'Portals 1977'. At this time Evans moved away from formal composition and adopted a more open-ended approach to making work, focusing on process, texture and other material qualities. Evans used photography to re-examine sculptural thinking, providing a catalyst for change in his broader object-making practice.

'British Steel Photographs 1969-71' comes out of Evans' Fellowship at the British Steel Corporation, a nationalised industry formed in 1967. This was brokered by the Artist Placement Group (APG), an organisation founded in 1965 that placed artists in government, commercial and industrial organisations. Evans spent his time observing the human and industrial processes of the changing steel industry, reflecting on how this production related to the studio activities of the sculptor. He produced a series of photographs taken at major production facilities, framing groupings of objects and materials. From a mass of images taken by Evans during his fellowship, he has selected 164 vintage prints for display in the gallery. Also on display is related archival material, including the 1970 publication Some Steel, a now iconic book in the history of British sculpture, held in the Institute's Research Library, in which some of these photographs were first published. All this material was acquired in 2014 for the Leeds Museums and Galleries sculpture collection, which the Institute curates and manages in a unique partnership that has built one of the strongest public collections of British sculpture.

'Portals 1977' is a colour slide-work made in 1977 that has never been previously exhibited. It projects a succession of images of things found in and on the ground in six cities - Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco and London. Evans regards these images, which encompass grates, grids, manhole covers and doormats, as 'raw material' made by others and found by the artist. Each image is projected for four seconds, before being replaced by another. Representing speculative enquiries by the artist into sculptural possibility, these works provide a window on to his creative process.

Garth Evans studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1957-60). From 1965-79 he taught at St Martin's School of Art, and then moved to the United States. Since the 1960s, he has exhibited widely across the UK and USA, including in the influential group exhibitions British Sculpture '72, Royal Academy of Arts, London (1972) and The Condition of Sculpture, Hayward Gallery, London (1975). In 2013 artist Richard Deacon curated the survey exhibition Garth Evans at Yorkshire Sculpture Park which coincided with the release of Garth Evans: Sculpture, Beneath the Skin, edited by Ann Compton, a major publication reviewing his career to date. His work is represented in numerous collections, including Tate, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Victoria & Albert Museum and The British Museum. He has taught at the Slade School of Fine Art, The Royal College of Art, St. Martin's School of Art and Yale University. He currently lives and works in North East Connecticut and teaches in New York, where he is Head of Sculpture at the New York Studio School.

On Wednesday 1 July 2015 Evans will be joined in a gallery discussion by artists Richard Deacon and Phillip King, with Lisa Le Feuvre (Head of Sculpture Studies) and Jon Wood (Research Curator) of the Henry Moore Institute.