Common Ground
Hold
HOLD is a collective of four artists, Susan Bell, Elissa Jane Diver, Gin Rimmington Jones and Eileen White who share a desire to express something that, while ineffable, is held, and felt, and explores their relationship with the natural world.
Using a range of digital, analogue and alternative processes, HOLD brings together work which encounters, engages and feels the landscape, examining our wider relationship with it. All four artists position themselves in spaces where the body physically occupies the terrain, merging, immersing, climbing into the earth or a river, exploring decay and transformation. This alchemical blurring of boundaries between the artists and the natural world creates slippages, where animal, rock, earth, plant and water become entwined.
Matkamuisto
Elissa Jane Diver
Photographs of silver birch bark, paper, birch tar, thread.
Matkamuisto is the Finnish word for souvenir. This work explores how the souvenir and the photograph function by representing a longing for a place that is both distant and in the past.
“The souvenir speaks to a context of origin through a language of longing, for it is not an object arising out of need or use value; it is an object arising out of the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia.”
Susan Stewart “On Longing”
Elissa Jane Diver spent six years in Finland as a child, returning to live in London at the age of 11.
Happenstance
Eileen White
There has always been the instinct to hold onto that which is in constant flight. Instead, all that photography can do is to make a record of time unfolding, lending impermanence some degree of permanence. Eileen has been returning to the same site in her nearby woods, for several years, reentering the past without nostalgia, as a means of illustrating her relationship with change and the natural landscape. Her visual practice centres around the idea of consistency in change and acknowledging collaboration with the rest of the non-human world.
Using a low-tech, DIY approach to image-making, she recycles materials and replaces toxic darkroom chemistry with plant-based alternatives as well as degrading and reintroducing materials to the wider biosphere. This has become her way of paying attention to the provenance and afterlife of materials. It is a way of creating work that ensures a slowness and acknowledges her adoption of a less anthropocentric position regarding her place in the larger ecosystem.
Alongside this, her deliberate choice of using handmade or historical cameras relates specifically to working directly within a space and living materials, allowing for a sensing and bodily interplay. The irregularities in these processes are part of the work and are witness to her ideas relating to control and separation, the significance of labour and ongoingness.
Emergence
Susan Bell
“Emergency comes from the word emerge, which comes from the addition of e- to megere, which means to be within or under a liquid, immersed, submerged […]. An emergency is a temporal border between two states, and all borders are dangerous.” - Rebecca Solnit
Susan Bell’s ongoing project, Emergence, uses the 5x4 camera to explore the spectral landscape of the River Ouse floodplains. The images are captured at dusk as the light is fading. Susan embraces the element of chance in shooting almost blind in near blackness. The light is low, exposure times are long, the negatives are thin, a hint of an image, almost not there.
The images explore our human relation to borderline places, between land and water, day and night, light and darkness, death by drowning and the possibility of emerging into light and life. Emergence.
Between the knowing and the naming falls the shadow
Gin Rimmington Jones
Set in a wild and remote part of Almeria, Spain, these images form part of a wider body of work that support the corner installation piece I am creating for the show.
A barranco is a kind of ravine, a dried up riverbed that snakes its way down hillsides, formed by the action of torrential rain and flash floods.
White wonderland of root and rock, this extraordinary place spoke of bones and being, and aeons old tropical seas.
Notes from the barranco, 7 May, 2019
"I am nothing here,
the I that is I,
insistent, plaintive, wanting, fearful,
is now rock.
The scent of the pines,
silences,
my bones as white as the limestone,
a suggestion of water, of passage, of energy, of flow, of movement
a place that is formed and reformed,
constantly shifting, sliding, grounding.
10- 14 Waterloo Place
Brighton
BN2 9NB
Map
Collectives Hub - Main Gallery
4 October - 17 November
Wednesday 12:00–17:00
Thursday 12:00–17:00
Friday 12:00–17:00
Saturday 12:00–17:00
Sunday 12:00–17:00
