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Date of exhibition: Thursday 28 February
to Sunday 1 June
Opening times: 10am to 5pm, Tuesday to
Sunday
Location: Turner Contemporary Project Space,
53-57 High Street Margate, Droit House, Stone Pier, Margate.
Nature is a Workshop, the first exhibition in Turner
Contemporary's new Project Space on Margate High Street, presents
contemporary artworks selected from the prestigious Arts Council
Collection. The exhibition, also in Droit House on the Stone Pier,
features works made over the past thirty years by some of the UK's
leading artists in a range of media including sculpture,
installation, photography and sound.
Artists have always recorded and responded to nature in their
work, from the earliest painted depictions of landscape to Land Art
of the 1960s and 70s, whilst highly topical subjects such as the
recycling and reuse of materials have long been explored by
contemporary artists in different ways. Coinciding with Margate's
contemporary art festival Margate Rocks (3 to 11 May) on
the theme of Art and Ecology, the artworks selected for Nature
is a Workshop share a concern with our relationship to the
environment, whether natural or manmade, and with those things that
we collect or construct in an attempt to make sense of the
world.
Richard Long has been working directly with
nature since the 1960s, making maps, drawings, texts and sculptures
based on his walks in the landscape, often using stones as markers
of time or distance. His sculpture Fourteen Stones (1977)
is one of the first stone circles that Long made for installation
in a gallery and is made up of 61 stones gathered by the artist
from a beach near the Bristol Channel, arranged in a circle on the
ground. It is shown in Droit House alongside landscape photographer
Jem Southam's images of coastal erosion (Birling
Gap, 2000) which document the slow erosion of materials over time
along a stretch of coast near Beachy Head - the longest natural
exposure of chalk cliffs in Europe.
In other works shown in the Turner Contemporary Project Space,
materials are recycled or transformed as in Ian
Dawson's 171 Elements (1998): a large sculpture
in which a tower of coloured plastic crates appears on the point of
collapse, the result of intense heat which the artist has applied
to these ubiquitous mass produced objects. Toby
Ziegler's sculptures combine the hi-tech with the
handmade, as in Portrait of C.L (2006) - an oversized
sculpture of a pineapple, made using computer aided drawings which
were worked up by the artist into a three dimensional form of
interlocking planes of plywood.
In the dystopian sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes, the central
character Taylor lands on a planet which turns out be the earth in
a post-human future, dashing his initial hopes of finding a new,
improved world. Two sculptural installations in the exhibition
appear to provide forms of shelter in potentially hostile
environments. Cathy Prendergast's Land
(1990) is part tent, part landmass while Mike
Nelson's life-raft Taylor (1994), with its
references to the aforementioned film, alludes to the possibility
of survival on another planet.
Janice Kerbel's recent radio play Nick
Silver Can't Sleep is a love story, narrated by the actor
Rufus Sewell, about the impossibility of love between two
botanically incompatible plant species and combines botanical
research gathered by the artist with material gleaned from
interviews with insomnia sufferers. Finally, the logical conclusion
of this failure to propagate - extinction - is embodied in
John Isaac's arresting sculpture Dodo
(1994).
The highly topical issues highlighted in this exhibition will be
further explored in a series of associated events including talks,
workshops and resources for schools. |