LONDON, ENGLAND.- Camden Arts Centre presents exhibition "The Way We Work Now: some attitudes to materials and making", on view through 11 September 2005. This group exhibition at Camden Arts Centre presents new and recent work from seven London-based artists interested in the materials or stuff from which art is made. It includes painting, sculpture, installation and animation by both emerging artists as well as more established names. Following in the tradition of Camden Arts Centre’s "Camden Survey" shows of the 1960s, ‘The Way We Work Now’ brings together disparate and contrasting practices in an exhibition which tests the temperature and texture of current art-making.
All the artists share a playful, studio-based spirit of research and a curiosity about materials and their transformation; a ‘thinking through making’. Their varied subjects of reference include anthropology, architecture, craft and art history.
The gestural abstraction and simple shapes of Stuart Cumberland’s paintings offer a fresh take on 1950s modernism, whilst Rachel Kneebone’s delicately-crafted porcelain figures combine traditional references – seventeenth-century Meissen figurines or Bernini's marble sculptures – with the unexpected: on closer inspection her figures appear consumed by plants, morphing into one another in a state of transformation.
Ian Kiaer’s carefully arranged groups of objects, include paintings and architectural models. These are shown alongside Adam Gillam’s dense accumulations of found images supported on handmade wooden structures, in which painting moves away from the wall into three-dimensions, and Karin Ruggaber’s sculpture combining tactile surfaces and architectural form. Francis Upritchard’s anthropomorphic adaptations of existing objects, including new sculptures made in Camden Arts Centre’s ceramics studio, are presented in a theatrical installation in the Central Space. Finally, Roger Hiorns, who frequently works in mutable or impermanent media, shows a group of new photographs alongside a series of ceramic sculptures which spill foam onto the gallery floor.
