Show See Say: March Castlefield Gallery Associates Session

For Castlefield Gallery Associates only

Show See Say are regular events in the CG Associates programme, providing members with the chance to present their work, test ideas and get critical feedback within a supportive group of peers. Members can either do a ten-minute Show and Tell presentation to the whole group or have a more in-depth half hour crit showing recent work or work in progress to a small group.

For this, our first online session, we will be having short Show and Tells from Olivia Rowlands, Lynn Shaw and Andy Smith. There will also be some time to share how we the Covid-19 situation is affecting us and discuss how to respond.

The narrative practices of compulsive or automatic drawing and writing form the basis of Olivia Rowlands’ work. She focuses upon the process of self-narration as a means of navigating anxiety, identity, and the tension between self-construction (or projection of self into character) and shifting notions of ‘authentic’ experience. Intensive, graphic mark-making and wordplay (comprising a fluid interplay between fragmented prose, puns, slogan and anecdote) are central to this practice, operating with dark, playful humour and absurdness. Her animated GIFs connote a hyper-accelerated singular moment stuck on a loop whilst the drawings tackle an unfolding, unravelling, an untying and re-tying oneself into knots in attempt to articulate.

Lynn Shaw’s work stems from a collection of archived, paper material and the subject matter evolves from her process of working from a starting point of not knowing or an idea sparked by a fragment in her collection.

Andy Smith will show work relating to his attempt to navigate iconography and understand hierarchies. He has spent the 4/5 years since graduation repainting and reconfiguring my MA project in an attempt to reduce a mash of styles and subjects into a practice language or central theme that could provide a recognisable vehicle for a more focused development.

He now realises the impossibility of achieving the personal discipline this requires and simply embrace a random and eclectic approach to the variety of issues that arise daily in the post-metanarrative digital age.

Uniquely processing the universe through the individual IS the language – the common thread.

Image: Andy Smith