The Hepworth Wakefield in partnership with ourselves and our friends from across the Pennines, Creative Tourist, is delighted to invite you to their very first blogger exhibition preview.
This special evening event offers bloggers the chance to enjoy a sneak preview and short tour of the forthcoming spring exhibition, which opens to the public 11th February. The exhibition features four contemporary British artists – Heather & Ivan Morison, Ben Rivers and David Thorpe.
More about the exhibition
Heather & Ivan Morison, Ben Rivers and David Thorpe use film, sculpture, installation and performance to pose questions regarding our relationship to nature and what happens when man-made and natural worlds collide. These exhibitions explore utopian beliefs and practices and an impending sense of apocalypse.
Heather & Ivan Morison will present a new body of work that draws on the life and works of 20th century British novelist Anna Kavan (1901-1968). Kavan, born Helen Woods, produced a large body of elusive and strange work that operated somewhere between biography and science fiction, drawing on her own turbulent life. Anna is an allegorical piece of object theatre that tells a brutal tale of love and loss set against the approaching threat of ‘the ice’. Performance and puppetry will play out the story, connecting the objects and the story to our experience of The Hepworth Wakefield. Anna considers our understanding of the world through myth, and how meaning comes to us through storytelling. This new exhibition will complement their outdoor commission for the gallery, The Black Cloud, 2011.
Ben Rivers is one of the most notable artist filmmakers working in the UK today. His films focus on marginal places and individuals, often those disconnected from the world. Rivers uses a hand-held 16mm camera, and processes the film himself, controlling every element of its production. Slow Action is a post-apocalyptic science-fiction film that exists somewhere between documentary, ethnographic study and fiction, with soundtrack narratives by American novelist and critic Mark von Schlegell. Continuing Rivers’ exploration of unusual environments, Slow Action applies the idea of island biogeography – the study of how species and eco-systems evolve when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitats – to a conception of the Earth in a few hundred years where the sea level rises to absurd heights, creating exaggerated utopias and possible mini-societies. Rivers will also exhibit a series of photographic portraits, entitled Somerset Clade. Watch Ben Rivers talking about Slow Action
David Thorpe’s sculptures and paintings are ornately detailed and meticulously rendered using labour-intensive artisanal techniques. Thorpe reinterprets the lost spirit of utopianism present in England at the end of the 19th century. He draws on the Arts and Crafts Movement and the writings of William Morris and John Ruskin that promoted a return to hand-craftsmanship and to the creative independence of individual craftsmen through artistic and social reform. In collaborating with skilled craftsmen Thorpe researches and uses pre-industrial methods of paint production, carving, wood-turning, ceramics and leather-cutting. Each of these works of art stand as a manifestation of the endeavour and care with which they are made and, as in the time of the Arts and Crafts Movement, act as a riposte to today’s cheap, industrialised, production techniques.
PLEASE NOTE: This is a unique ‘behind-the-scenes’ preview of the exhibition and works will be partially installed. Consequently, not all works within the exhibition will be able to be viewed fully. To attend the exhibition preview evening on Friday 10 February, 6-8pm, please contact Naomi Roberts naomiroberts@hepworthwakefield.org)
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