DYCP: Supporting information
Examples of my work and relevant research
Information on partners, courses and mentors
Press examples
My Work
‘Soft Girls’ exhibition 2021
‘Soft Girls’ performance video, 2021, 00:05:10 (please press play)
‘The New Me’, 3 screen video installation, 2022, 00:02:09 (please press play)
Planned Obsolescence, sculpture, 2022
Planned Obsolescence, performance, 2022
Research images for the project:
Images from left to right: ‘Mollhandy’ (1740) design for mechanical housemade by George Bickham, Scene from ‘Modern Times’ (1936) by Charlie Chaplin, Photograph of sex doll mechanism (2020) by Alastair Philip Wiper, 19th Century automatum artist unknown, Kinetic sculptures (1960s) by Jean Tinguely, sculptural experiments by me (2023).
Partners and Courses
London Sculpture workshop courses
Metal Fabrication for Artists & Designers:
“This two day ‘hands on’ workshop will explore a wide variety of metal construction techniques introducing and understanding the many useful metalworking machines and processes available in metalworking shop.”
Welding for artists:
“This is an intensive three day workshop which will enable you to learn a variety of skills for working with metals. Over the three days you will make your own project to take home.”
Mentors
Rafal Zakjo
“Rafał Zajko’s work deals with issues around the industrial past exploring its environmental impact in relation to working class heritage and queer identities. His sculptural practice incorporates diverse materials and processes, including ceramic, ventilation systems, prosthetics, and performance as a means to examine Polish folklore, science fiction and queer technoscience; placing emphasis on the industrial materials and processes that resonate with and honour his heritage.” Artist website
Trulee Hall
“Trulee Hall’s work presents a surreal geography drawing on motifs of the domestic, the decorative, and the erotic.
The artist’s creative practice spans video, sculpture, painting, audio composition, and choreographed dance. Hall integrates these mediums into immersive installations. These vignettes offer multiple representations of a non-narrative visual subject, replayed through painting, sculpture, and video amalgams of CGI, claymation, and live action performance.” Artist website
Time Out, October 2023
“Rosie Gibbens puts her body on the line in humorous, scathing, surreal attacks on gender roles and femininity. In performances, films and sculptures, she manipulates symbols of domesticity to show how absurd the whole charade is. She gives blowies to a wodge of toothbrushes, twirls nipple tassels with a desk fan, dances seductively with ducks and office equipment, and makes blobby, soft sculptures out of her own body parts. Her art is a bunch of brilliant, visceral, clever, satirical visual gags, and the joke is on us.”
“Tim Spooner works in performance, collage, painting and sculpture. His work uses materials and objects in ways that reveal unexpected properties, aiming to open up perspectives beyond the human scale.
Fundamentally interested in unpredictability, his work is an exercise in balancing control with a lack of it in the handling of the materials he is working with. Since 2010, Tim has created a series of increasingly complex live works centred around the revelation of “life” in material.” Artsadmin profile
“Shana Moulton creates evocatively oblique narratives in her video and performance works. Combining an unsettling, wry humor with a low-tech, Pop sensibility, Moulton plays a character whose interactions with the everyday world are both mundane and surreal, in a domestic sphere just slightly askew. As her protagonist navigates the enigmatic and possibly magical properties of her home decor, Moulton initiates relationships with objects and consumer products that are at once banal and uncanny.” Electronic Arts Intermix
Steamhouse
“Steamhouse offer production and prototyping facilities for technologists, artists, designers, scientists and innovators.
From 3D printers to welders, table saws to sublimation printers, VR headsets to biomaterial incubators, you can access pretty much everything you could ever need to test, experiment and prototype new products, ideas, and artworks in STEAMhouse’s Production Space.
All our workshops are supervised by skilled STEAMhouse technicians who are on-hand to help and advise.” (Steamhouse website)
I have had a meeting with Paul Barlow (senior manufacturing technician) who has assured me that Steamhouse will be an ideal place for this project due to its support for multidisciplinary projects and the technical advice available. Steamhouse is a one-of-a-kind organisation and I’m convinvced it’s worth travelling the Birmingham to work with them.
Tim Spooner
Shana Moulton
Mission Magazine, August 2022
Kicking off the series is Rosie Gibbens, a multimedia artist who experiments with performance art, sculpting, and NFTs to unpack gender norms, consumption under capitalism, and sexuality.
In the interview below, which has been edited for length and clarity, Gibbens opens up about finding absurdity in the every day, unpacking the ‘sex sells’ mindset, and how Instagram places artists ‘at the whim of an algorithm.’
Heath Robinson Museum
“The Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner, Northwest London, showcases the work of the world-renowned artist, illustrator, humourist, and social commentator William Heath Robinson (1872-1944).” (Museum website)
I have had a meeting with Hannah Whyte, assistant curator at the museum. She supports my proposal to collaborate on an event at the museum due to the connections between my work/ this project and Heath Robinson’s oeuvre.
“Robinson's work is steeped in that humour. His name was included in the dictionary from 1912 as a synonym for absurd, ingenious and over-complicated makeshift devices, like the ones he spent his life designing.” (Wired Magazine)
‘Pit Head’ (1930), drawing by Heath Robinson
Simeon Barclay
“Simeon Barclay draws upon a rich vein of pop cultural sources, producing works that activate complex cultural histories, whilst exploring the ways in which we navigate identity, both imposed or self-curated. Combining a diverse range of media, Barclay creates reductive, sophisticated works that engage with aspects of aesthetics, British culture, subjectivity and memory.” Workplace Gallery
Press examples
Re-edition Magazine, Septemer 2022
“The London based artist claims to dissect the mechanisms at work in today’s society - from gender performativity and sexual politics to consumerist culture - through her humouristic, thought provoking approach to art”