Breakout

 Despite working in different fields– painting, photography sculpture, and performance– we have in common  personal practices that are deeply immersed in academic research. Feminism, science, psychology, philosophy, and process may inspire, but all under the umbrella of creativity.

 

Carmen Alemán’s practice spans photography, film, installation, performance and activism.  Her work focuses on the social and political contexts of women’s rights. Carmen also expounds an eco-feminist philosophy, examining the connection between the exploitation of the planet’s ecosystems and the subordination of women, while exploring themes of gender, power, inequality, violence, entrapment, repetition and transformation. These themes  oscillate between utopia and dystopia; between the crude realities of life and the paramount desire to build a better world

 

 

                                Carmen Alemán, Missing Eve II, performance and living sculpture- ongoing, 2018

Carmen Alemán, Missing Eve IV, detail  2018

Mary Crenshaw, inspired by Linda Nochlin’s “The Body in Pieces”, began depicting anatomical fragments as a way of alluding to social collapse and renewal. Her own experience as a foreigner and encounters with displaced people planted the desire to bring contemporary collective realities into the scope of her art practice, with the belief that migrants contribute to positive cultural transformation. With chaos and confusion reigning in her paintings, prints, and ceramics, Crenshaw interprets the seismic waves of loss and regeneration.   

Mary Crenshaw, Rubin's vase, oil, mixed media on canvas, 215 x 200 cm, 2020

Mary Crenshaw, Cup, glazed earthenware, 30x30x8 cm, 2021

 

For Ali Darke, making waves reflects an aspiration to create work that moves, disturbs and inspires. She draws attention to the more dystopian conflicts inherent in human ‘being’ in the world. In researching her family history and the legacies of displacement and migration, recent work has explored ideas of ‘haunting’ to express concepts of trauma, loss and shame, transmitted across generations. Her sculptures suggest a hinterland between the mind and the body where the unconscious leaves a trace. Working with discarded objects, fabric and natural materials, she creates hybrid bodies, evoking that which dwells beyond the body, and experience beyond words. 

Ali Darke, Beastly, mixed media, 2020

Ali Darke, The Herd, nails, linen, 2021

Suzi Morris’ paintings explore the connections between the body, painting and advanced medical science. Through harnessing the unconscious, she makes visible how being in the world, following Merleau-Ponty’s theory of phenomenology, is a phenomenon felt by all the senses – through touch, taste, smell and hearing, not just through vision. Hence, her practice is a process of sensory discovery through the substance of oil paint and its material formulation. Developing an understanding of the potential utopia of gene editing set against the dystopia of inherited disorders from edited germlines, and misdiagnosis by artificial intelligence feeds into Suzi’s notion of a Viral Sublime.

Suzi Morris, The Bulky Gene, oil on board, 30.5 x 25.5 cm

Suzi Morris, Brave New World, oil on canvas, 30 x 30, 2020

Yanghwa has been interested in the notions of memory, utopian spaces, and the subjective memory we ascribe to different places, since leaving her hometown Jeju island and moving to Seoul and then London. Having to move her studio three times within a year due to redevelopment, and walking past a construction site every day inspired Yanghwa to consider gentrification as a utopia of modern society. This led to developing paintings of construction sites combined with paradise-like dwellings, where people are fabricating their dream homes.

 

Yanghwa, Temporary Paradise, acrylic on linen, 80.3 x 116.8, 2020

Yanghwa, A safe zone: nowhere, acrylic on linen, 53 x 72.7 cm, 2019