Mutant materialities exhibition view
Mutant Materialities: Process and experimentation presents the work of five West Midlands based artists who experiment with materials and ways of display.
The works are sculpture-based, textural and performative and explore different meanings of materiality and the relation of technology and objects. Drawing ideas from their practice, the artists will use the space to experiment and build connections between each other’s work, showcasing existing and new work.
Thinking about objects and their relevance to memories, meta-materials, the relation to our environment, and the creation of new artefacts. The exhibition will be a collective effort to invite visitors to observe and rethink structures, textures and their meaning to a post-human reality.
List of artists:
Jacob Carter, Boyana Aleksova, Tod Jones, Mau Samayoa and Tom Tebby.
Finding ways to reach new audiences and build connections with institutions outside of Birmingham.
This exhibition was also a way for me to work with other artists, really consider the connection between different artists practices both conceptually, aesthetically and through similar materials.
I felt that this exhibition helped to push my practice in new and interesting ways. By utilising the main window with translucent vinyl and found that my work become more connected to physical location, bordering on being site specific. This is something I am interested in pursuing further, finding ways of incorporating site, either through referencing locations within the form of my work or in the way and location the work is displayed in. It was also exciting how the work formed a connection with others. The physical materiality of the translucent material allowed light to pass through, causing shapes of orange to be cast into the gallery and onto the floor, as well as on top of Tod's platforms pieces.
Tod Jones, Platforms, 2022
Working first hand with a curator was such a generous experience. It gave me an insight into rigorous exhibition planning. How involving others can allow for thoughts and ideas to be shared. This collaboration worked especially well as both myself and Rafailia have a similar research interest in materiality. As well our differences provided exciting opportunities with myself being interested in physical materials and Rafailia with net art and meta materials. This set the initial interest in involving both physical material play with sculpture, liquids, paper layers with the materiality of projection, playing with bin bags as a projection screen.
'Smear' with Mau Samayoa also formed my first considered physical collaboration. I found this process very intuitive. It worked do to the fact that we both had a good knowledge on each others work, research interests and artists practice/process. We had identified that we shared similar interests in the fragility of materials, surface texture and movement, allowing us to form constructive conversations on where our work could intersect. We also found certain differences such as in Mau's interest I wanting to make his sculptures more fluid, freer and less controlled. This led to me wanting to incorporate my own interest in motorised works, or time based works that undergo a specific function. Using the oil in a drip allowed for Mau's sculpture to undergo a processor transformation: from pristine white, carefully sculpted, to a random, growing puddle of grease.
Smear, Mau Samayoa x Jacob Carter, paper sculpture, drip and motor oil
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