Artists exhibiting in Oudenaarde
Sarah Broome lives and works in Hastings. For the last eleven years Broome has been developing the identity/alter-ego, Mother of Grace. From her first incarnation as a middle-aged woman in a Pembrokeshire B&B, Mother of Grace has moved across time and location, exploring different versions of herself and generating her own unique history.
Greig Burgoyne is based in Hastings and exhibits in the UK, he is Pathway Leader BA fine art at University for the Creative Arts Farnham. In a 1st floor office space in Brandvoeker, Burgoyne presents his installation HUM. This intervention calls attention to a range of socio-cultural issues but essentially HUM is a public consultation. HUM mixes the disparate – dog food advertising and its euphemisms, poorly delivered school teaching styles, Soviet era visions and late capitalism's badly planned well meaning initiatives. HUM is drawing, blackboard, schematics, models and props.
In a 1st floor office space, St Leonards based artist Jacqui Hallum exhibits a body of paintings which represent an open-ended negotiation of marks and colour towards a point where representation is on the threshold of becoming fixed. The fluidity of painterly space is affirmed in richly varied media such as distemper, oil paint glazes and crystal-forming sulphates. Diverse elements combine in each of Hallum's works and each piece is a field of marks which begin to build a coalescence through the carefully worked processes. Her titles are often drawn from literary, academic or journalistic texts, though they never explain or describe the works.
The Royal Academy of Fine Arts is the location for several paintings by Jeb Haward. He lives in Hastings and is Curriculum Leader in the Art Department at Sussex Coast College Hastings. Haward finds that painting is a tricky business and negotiating the logistics of the activity has defeated many artists but maybe this is the stuff of the creative process. Haward finds it is easy to miss the obvious if he gets too entangled in artifice and 'art-making'. The images that survive in his paintings are the result of heaping unlikely things together and then sorting them out until they surprise him.
Sharon Haward is a Hastings based artist whose current practice centreson site-specific interventions which develop from a synthesis of history, memory of place and a more abstract response to the physicality of space. 'An Experiment in Town Planning – Twin Towns' is based on the rich and diverse architectural heritage of Oudenaarde and Hastings. Haward has explored these locations and combined their unique qualities to create a fantasy place of light, shade and a peripheral sensory experience. It raises the question of whether the contemporary built environment continues to appeal to the sensory nature of human experience or is it just a visual encounter that facilitates the swift exchange of commerce?
slave-unit is based in Hastings but works across the South East region. His twenty framed photographic images are a continuation of his work 'Welcome to Fear City – Psycho Geography'. These photographs are informed by anonymous urban spaces in various UK towns and cities, as such they can be seen as representative of UK public space as a whole. slave-unit's work explores the psychological role played by the media and how it affects the way in which we perceive and respond to the night time urban environment.
Andrew Kötting is based in St Leonards-on-Sea and the Pyrenees. His international career predominantly focuses on film but he is increasingly working directly with sound and music, in concert and on cd. Kötting will present a programme of film work that takes 'the nautical' as its starting point and undulates between the coastal and the corporeal.
He will also present an installation 'THIS OUR STILL LIFE' in collaboration with his daughter Eden Kötting. Shown in the ground floor space which was formerly the radio control room, this body of drawings and paintings uses the French Pyrenees as inspiration and catalyst.
Yumino Seki is a Japanese dance artist and Butoh practitioner based in St Leonards-on-Sea. Collaborating with artists from diverse disciplines has given her a broad approach to her movement practice, Seki's work crosses the boundaries of dance, perrformance art and installation. Her interest is in the authenticity of the temporal body and is often site responsive and improvised in nature. Her practice is informed by the cultural depth and diversity of both the UK and Japan. Seki's development in her movement has been a gradual exploration of both her collective and self-identity.
In some of the Brandwoeker's non-spaces, Scott Robertson presents small scale interventions that are deliberately quiet but initimate. His three framed drawings deal with negation, contradictions and the desire to produce an empty work. Robertson will also introduce a text based work which asks the viewer to comment on the relative qualities of his work – are they the greatest or worst works of art ever seen? Exploring the duality of success and failure, Robertson states that “I cannot win, but I cannot lose either”.
In the walled garden of House de Lalaing, Caroline Le Breton presents a 'verdure' carpet, the third in a series of carpet stencils which started in St Leonards Gardens in 2010. Le Breton's vivid green carpet is cut as a stencil and laid upon the lawn. Where light passes through the grass thrives, where it is masked by the carpet, the grass dies leaving only the text visible. 'Verdure' refers to Oudenaarde's traditional 'verdure' tapestries which were characterised by lush green foliage, trees and flowers and were intended to celebrate the pastoral landscape and bring the beauty of nature indoors. Siting her intervention here is appropriate as the building houses the tapestry museum and restoration workshops.
