Three October art things in Cambridge

What art to see in Cambridge this month:  My quirky picks

1)  Shaggy Dog Stories, by Tom Hackett.  Yellow dogs in wheelbarrows.  On a balcony in the Lord Ashcroft Business building at Anglia Ruskin University on East Road.  More about them on the surrounding walls.  You can touch them!  They feel sort of slimy, like dry soap.  

2)  Kerstin Hacker's haunting photographs of births, babies, midwives and mothers on a Czech maternity ward.  Strange, beautiful, sad, wrenching.  At Changing Spaces, that little gallery next to CB2 on Norfolk Street.

 More here:  http://changing-spaces.org/2015/10/kerstin-hacker-maternity-ward/

Ends 1 Nov.

3)  Oh, and my own talk at the Festival of Ideas on Saturday, 24 Oct, at 2 pm.  :-)  Come along to the Fitz and join me for Power and Resistance in Sculpture in the Aftermath of World War One.




http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/power-and-resistance-sculpture-aftermath-world-war-one

Month: October 2015
Place: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Three drawings at the Drawing Cube

The Drawing Cube, 9 Norfolk St, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB1 2LD, next to CB2.

There's a new little gallery in town, and it's called The Drawing Cube.  See how friendly and cosy it is!

Three pictures

I ambled on in and here are my three favourites from the current exhibition.

Trudi Esberger, work from the series Arrival, 2012, gouache and pencil, signed digital print

I love the mysterious atmosphere, the crisp clean lines, the long shadow, the transparent figures in front of the low wall, the BLUE.  I'm reminded of Edward Hopper and the covers of hard-boiled detective novels. 

Becky Palmer, No Doubt, 2013, watercolour and acrylic on paper

I love images of arthropods (as you may know) so these kooky bugs appealed to me particularly!  There's a whole series of beetles and butterflies but this leaping creature, hovering above its shadow and striving upwards to where another elusive beastie disappears, cropped by the edge, says it all.  Lovely spare lines and colour accents, and a great sense of motion.

Joanne Young, The Journey Home, 2013, graphite on paper

I'm including this because it reminds us all that you don't need a whole lot of complicated equipment to make fantastic art.  All of this is made with just a pencil and a piece of paper.  The varieties of greys, of texture and of line, and the different kinds of light (and even colour) which they evoke, are amazing.

Three artists

All the artists are graduates from the world-famous MA in Children's Book Illustration at the Cambridge School of Art (part of Anglia Ruskin University).

One affordable comic book

While I was in the gallery, I picked up this wonderful comic book, financed by crowdfunding, and full of quirky graphic short stories by the exhibited artists and many more.

Buy it for £3.50 from the Drawing Cube.  Or buy it online via the Etsy shop.

These books make excellent gifts from Cambridge (for those of us tired of yet another pot of local honey or teabags with a picture of King's College on the packet...)

Find out more:

To find out more about each artist:  Click on their name above.

To find out more about this and other upcoming exhibitions at the Drawing Cube, click here: The Drawing Cube

The exhibition ends Sunday 9 June.

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/06/three-drawings-at-drawing-cube.html

Three works from Sub-ti-tled, a Changing Spaces exhibition

We keep seeing exhibitions 'pop up' in abandoned shop fronts and empty stores around Cambridge.  They're organised by Changing Spaces, and their latest show is Sub-ti-tled at 6-16 King Street -- some of you may remember this as the Wallace King furniture shop.

The carpets and parquet flooring of the furniture store are still in evidence, and one living room-style displays recalls the ghosts of former retail.


View of gallery with Melina Juergens' photography among furniture, and Issam Kourbaj's work.

Issam Kourbaj

Issam Kourbaj, Farewell My City of Joy, 2003

Hanging right next to the shop window is Issam Kourbaj's strange work.  At first sight, it looks like an abstract painting, made up of painted rectangles.

But it isn't.  It's made up of bits of books.



Book covers made of marbled cardboard, book covers torn from their volumes, embossed book covers, book covers encrusted with pigment.







In between, there are also book pages, their printed lines of text struggling to remain visible beneath splotches of paint.



And just because we tend to photograph such works from the front which makes them seem flatter (and more 'painting-like') than they really are:  here are some angled views.  See the materiality.  See the depth of the supporting canvas.  See what the foreshortened view does to perception.







Issam Kourbaj is artist-in-residence at Christ's College, and Anne-Claire Morel is one of Christ's Visual Arts' Scholars.  Here are details from her exhibited work:

Anne-Claire Morel

Anne-Claire Morel, Almighty Me, 2013, plaster and clay

These tiny heads remind me of Anthony Gormley's sculpture installation Field.

Mark Box

Photographer Mark Box shows a sample of his large-scale portrait photographs:  floating heads starkly outlined against white backgrounds.  I met Mark in the exhibition, and he told me that the Movember photos took 230 hours to make, from start to finish.


Mark Box, Movember I, 2012, digital giclée print


View of Gallery 616, King Street, with Mark Box's photographs, Lynne Brown's  pastel works on paper, and Issam Kourbaj's assemblage

Sub-ti-tled

11 artists in total are showing at the exhibition.  Four of them are Christ's Visual Arts Scholars -- a fantastic initiative within Christ's College!  They have their studios above 1-16 King Street.

Read one art-history student's thoughtful comments on the exhibition:  Review by Robert Hawkins in Varsity.

Rob Hawkins writes:  "Of course, the difference between making art at Cambridge and making it in an art school is the lacking sense of immersion, of constant criticism and subsequent improvement."

What Hawkins perhaps doesn't know is that Cambridge does actually have a thriving art school:  the Cambridge School of Art.  In fact, two Cambridge School of Art graduates are involved with Sub-ti-tled:  Mark Box (exhibiting his photography) and Anji Main (curator of the show and also director of Changing Spaces).  Both are, I'm proud to say, former students of mine.  :-)

Check out Cambridge School of Art exhibitions at my pinterest board!

Last chance to see it!!  The exhibition ends on Sunday, 24 Feb.

Related posts:

Book art in Cambridge 

Alison Litherland's cows  (another Changing Spaces exhibition)

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2013/02/three-works-from-sub-ti-tled-changing.html 

Paintings of cows by Alison Litherland

Cambridge Cows:  A Changing Spaces Exhibition

"Moo."




Cows are everywhere in Cambridge.  Nature encroaches right into the centre of the city.  You're cycling past a busy roundabout or striding across a footbridge and suddenly: there they are!  Cows!

Cows on the Backs, Cambridge.  Photo:  A.P. Clark.

Cows are also rife in art.  Here are some famous painted cows:

Paulus Potter, The Bull, 1647, Mauritshuis, The Hague
(Wikimedia Commons)

Franz Marc, Yellow Cow, 1911, Guggenheim Museum, NYC
(Wikimedia Commons)

Theo van Doesburg, Cow, c.1917, MOMA, NYC
(Wikimedia Commons)

Now Cambridge has its own cows in a shopfront gallery.  Look carefully behind the columns in the photo below and you will see cows on canvas.



This is Sussex Street, an elegant 1920s pedestrian area in the centre of town.  There used to be a fashion boutique at numbers 5-7 but now the store stands empty.  Changing Spaces are an initiative that uses empty spaces to house art.  So the cows have moved in.

Looking at cows in shop windows on a sunny day means that there are a lot of reflections.  They become part of the experience.





A cow gazing wistfully into a numinous distance.



Cow and calf, walking in parallel.





I like the shaggy Bighorn cow at the end, straight from Scotland.  Its mouth is askew; it seems to be chewing its cud.  No eyes are visible so its face confronts us with bovine stolidness.  The horn juts into a bright blue sky, filled with oil paint that drips into the water below.  It reminds me of the abstract drips in a Jackson Pollock painting.  And look at the tiny cows in the middle distance:  three deft orange squiggles, each with its own cast shadow.  Here the touch of the brush is different from the broad sweep of paint for beach and water.

I like the way this makes us look at both 'cow' and 'paint'.

The artists is Alison Litherland.  You can read more about her at her website:
 http://alisonlitherland.com

For more on Cambridge cows:
Read Useless Beauty's great cow post.