Jacques Derrida in the 1970s asserted that there is not one single intrinsic meaning to be found in a work, but rather many, and often these can be conflicting.
In this issue we ask artists to explore our approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. Deconstruction has become a postmodern practice to break through the limitation/illusion of fixed identity or structures in favour of a more open less defined self. In purposefully breaking down constructs we are creating a state of chaos or crisis, a disturbed yet fertile field where fragmented parts may re-construct into new links and emergences.
Throughout the 20th century and the freeing of concept art, thanks to surrealists such as Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), and the multiple crossing of artistic disciplines have fostered so much diversity in our means of expression that it can be challenging for contemporary artists to find their own unique innovative voice. Today art is a language to communicate ideas and messages about our world as much as a way to re-invent it. Deconstructing and re-constructing our artistic process is a practice that can help us break through the known, through pre-conceived ways and ideas to uncover fresh innovative possibilities.
Postmodern deconstruction, a theory originated by philosopher Jacques Derrida (Difference, speech & phenomena 1967) is a line of inquiry that unveil the fleeting and illusionary nature of identity, personal & collective, created/embedded/limited by the metanarrative language of our culture. In the last 15 years, the emergence of a global contemporary culture of “everything” seams also to exacerbate the fragmenting of identity. Identity becomes a collage, a mix of reference points tying tradition and modernity originating from a diversity of cultural references.
We always ask that each submission includes a short statement to provide context and this is even more vital for this open call as your words can affect the meaning of the work. This is your response, a wonderfully diverse interpretation that enables a discussion …
Jenna and Nichola
Artist name: Tamir David
Instagram: @tamirdav
Title: ”Overdose” Ink gouache and gesso on paper 2021 23cmx33cm .My art is dark . It is the inner workings of distress: cultural , personal , existential.
Although I am drawn to the idea of transcendence, I mostly dwell in the underwater.
My works point towards an alternative reality where the Inside is out and deep scars are allowed to be worn with pride. I find it where the inner world meets reality, where culture meets nature and when life meets death. I draw from personal experience of post trauma and displacement and by viewing my environment. I work from life or from visual references, either current or historic. I seek improbable heroes in unexpected places as subjects. The end result is a hybrid of the mental and physical realms coinciding. I use acids , solvents , asphalt, ink, pencil and gouache on paper or wood . My techniques aim at fusing the media with the material used rather than painting on it. This process of fusing calls for unorthodox methods which I explore through trial and error. Much error.
Artist name: Catherine Palfreyman
Instagram: @catherinepalfreymann
Title: ‘Why do I keep finding your hair everywhere’ Expanding foam, repurposed chair, hair extension, crocheted pillow, pears soap, gloss
I have just handed in my final work for my degree in BA Hons Contemporary Art. ‘a light is on but nobody’s home’ is a contemporary installation I have created that focuses heavily on the themes of vulnerability, distortion, sensory overload, humour, femininity and flesh. My aim, to create a space which plays on the juxtaposition of comfort and confusion. A space we all know, a dressing room, filled with items created using textures, sights, colours, materials etc that then make the space then feel unusual, yet uncanny. As an artist, I intend for my art to be consumed personally by the audience, however I hope my rejection of stereotypical femininity shines through the work.
Artist name: Charmagne Coble
Instagram: @coblefinearts
Description: “Toxic vessel” ‘Relapse and Recovery’ explores life after one has experienced trauma, the scarred memories and the reality of “living with ghosts”. The series emphasises on societies impact on mental health, domestic abuse and grief through a use of household mediums and broken sculpture. Inspiration from philosophy and poetry is interweaved finely as paper writing and erasing confront the distressing topics through stains, fragments and metaphors. By using symbolic materials contrasted with hazardous chemicals, an intense and metaphorical process of breaking and repairing gives a glimpse into the distressing journey of mental health. The objects are permanently transformed and though some are no longer recognisable they are able to function; they continue to survive
Artist: Jacqui Jones
Instagram: @jacquijonesart
Website: https://www.thelonelyartsclub.org/jacqui-jones
Description: “Connection 3” Fragility, strength and human intervention. This is the final photograph of a series in which I took pine chairs into pine forests. The image marks the end of a chapter but not the end of the story.
Artist name: Nohone
Instagram: @nohone
Title: “Summer vibez” I get asked about my paintings and what they represent, what are they about. Graff..the whole foundations of all of my work is graffiti. It’s just broken down into raw forms without the boundaries of a letter structure. This painting started out as a concrete wall. I wanted the texture of a bare wall. Then comes the colour. The bricks. The bubble cloud, the highlights, the movements, the drips. The structure of graffiti. Title “summer vibes” 100cm x 100cm canvas. Acrylics, oil markers, solid markers.
Artist name: Or Williams
Instagram: @beatricevonmillhouse
Bio: Artist Or Williams explores the image of the middle-aged woman through Digital and New Media, code, video, and performance.
Williams is currently undertaking her MFA at the University of Reading.
Concept of the work: A conversation between the old and the new, analogue and digital. Through tearing and assembling, hiding and revealing I challenge social-political properties such means of production, subject matters and status that are attached to the different technologies, and to generate images that require to look again.
Artist name: Brut Carniollus
Instagram: @carniollus
Description: “Lost in thoughts”. Digital collage based on original photography, an ongoing series of urban portraits in a form of photographic digital collage with a working title Faces of the city. Researching different aspects of urbanities reflected through intertwined images of humans and urban landscapes. Searching for the illusive identity of both humans and the metropolis.
Artist name: Katarina Balunova
Instagram: @Katarinabalunova
“Counting time by hammer” Bratislava is a city that is not able to appreciate the authenticity of the architecture, prefers demolition and thus the erasing of its own history. Demolition works took place in the middle of the 20th century to build modernist buildings which are demolished nowadays. According to historian Carol Krinsky, the relationship of the public to the modernist architecture can be concluded in three words: "Photographed, described and demolished." The House of Trade Unions, Technology and Culture - Istropolis, an exemplary architecture of socialist realism and brutalism, was built between 1956-81. For its construction, the Berchtold Palace from 1832 was demolished. The authors of the project were Ferdinand Konček, Iľja Skoček and Ľubomír Titl. The complex was projected with a several extraordinary interior spaces and was decorated by important artists. The sale of the building to a private investor was the first step towards its liquidation. Developers are not interested in preserving values or in a greener approach towards the reconstruction and revitalization, they are only interested in a quick profit. The video performance took place in the front of Istropolis in the time when the initial phase of its demolition began - the Cuban stone marble cladding was removed. It has passed 66 years since 1956, when construction of Istropolis began. The artist describes by hand 66 times the circle counter clockwise as a symbol of flow / return in time. The use of the hammer refers to the political ideology of socialism and is a symbol of building and demolition at the same time.
Artist name: Nigel Dawes
Instagram: @nigeldawesart
Description: “Petvac5”. This sculpture, like many of my more successful mutations didn’t have much of a strategy or end game in mind when it was developing. I try to let the shapes take me with them as they reform into something new. There is a fine line taken between robotic machine and organic lifeform, and here I hopefully have kept both interpretations intact. I was thinking about the Borg from Star Trek, the way that the computer network attaches to the victim , forming a new symbiotic relationship where the host and invasive hardware become fused into a new organism. Well, I didn’t get too far along those lines, but there are still distant vacuum based elements visible within this mutated creature, and signs of sentient life within perhaps.
Artist name: Lilia Ziamou
Instagram: @liliaziamou
Description: “PROBABLE IMPOSSIBILITIES: THE BONE AS HIPS” (2021), Cement, pigments, cold wax 16x14x10 inches – 41x36x25 cm. My subject is the female body, my interest: the material and ideological constraints that shape or limit its exposition. I engage these constraints to challenge conventional categories imposed by the gaze. For me, the rhetoric of sculpture begins with the classical ruins of my native Greece: I have always understood the fragment, not as a remnant of destruction, but as a vessel for story.
Artist name: Stef Will
Instagram: @StefWillArt
Description: “Construct’” Explores perception and invites the viewer to question the traditionally perceived nature of reality. Via the algorithmic gaze of the far-infrared thermal lens, a new way of perceiving is offered, as the work makes traditionally invisible energy fields assessable to the human gaze. This new way of seeing necessitates a complete re-evaluation and reconstruction of our view of the world, as we now see it ‘with different eyes’. While daylight photographs are preoccupied with the objects’ visible surface (the inversion here alluding to the inverse nature of images on our retina), infrared images look beyond the visible and touchable surface, free the object from traditional judgement (deconstruct it, referenced by pixilation of the images) and suggest an alternative nature of reality, inviting the viewer to start with a ‘blank canvas’.
Artist name: Judith Ornstein
Instagram: @jornsteinart
“AN70”, 2022, 7" x 12" x 10" using detritus materials from the ‘Amazon Generation’. of honeycomb, fluted and flat corrugate cardboard the familiar by-products of our throw-away society. This is a material that is not usually used for sculpture as it deteriorates. The throw away quality reflects an almost organic life span from development thru deterioration. Cardboard imbues my wall sculptures with the conflict of permanence and impermanence. This humble material brings up the issue of what gives art value. My sculptures reveal themselves in time and their deterioration adds to a process that mimics biological life. Their complexity critiques the notion of modern simplicity. I work with forms, shapes, that have meaning because they contrast with other shapes. The process is a living experiment forming a bridge between knowing and doing. It is a process that overwhelms my thinking and instinctive reasoning.
Artist name: Beth Barlow
Instagram: @bethbarlow13
Description: “Several unpickings”, The work was created on the death of her Father. At her Grandmothers death she was confused about how a person could be so solid and present one minute and then gone. Through reading the book "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra she came to understand things in terms of moments in time. One moment we are tightly bound individuals and after death we are deconstructed and our energies and particles go on to other ways of being. After her Father's death she had a strange and unrepeated experience where she felt herself physically falling apart, She had been stitching works about waiting as her Father died and created this series of photos and a video of the unpicking of a piece of fabric. Its structure tightly bound seemed to represent how hard it had been for her Father to give up life, it wasn't always so easy to die. As the threads loosened it became easier until nothing but an unrecognisable ball of thread was left. Impossible to put back together, best understood as a new thing.
Artist: Katie Stewart
Instagram: @katiestewartmadworld
Description: “Glassea (Side B)”, 2021, Mixed media on double glazing unit, 60.5x96x3.5cm. The concept of narrative as collage is inherent to my practice, with emphasis upon layering and deconstructing thoughts and themes. I am drawn to found objects and images and the ideas of their unknown histories and the natural multiplicity of narrative, despite the normalisation of mono or binary perspectives. The difficulty of retraining the psyche to view existence as infinitely multifaceted is reflected in the repeat images in varied contexts and sometimes literal double sided works.
Artist: Mary Rouncefield
Instagram: @maryrouncefield
Much of my work centres around my feelings about Mathematics – a life-long interest of mine. I have been reflecting on the feminine identity as a social construct and also more fundamentally, the extent to which mathematics is itself a cultural construct also. The starting point for each of these works has been one of my prints based on a mathematical curve; generally also with a female figure restricted by the curve in some way, signifying the intellectual and cultural restraints imposed by the discipline of mathematics. Each image has been deconstructed by cutting, and reconstructed. Sometimes the reconstruction ‘makes sense’, sometimes it does not. Some of my mathematical knowledge has, after some years, been misremembered, deconstructed and then reconstructed, possibly into something altogether different.
Artist name: Susan Plover
Instagram: @susanplover7639
About: From gaining a First class honours degree in Fine Art 10 years ago my practice has evolved and grown to extensive showings in the UK and Internationally. The pandemic has given me the freedom beyond gallery spaces and my pieces are now in online curated shows and increasingly in zines.
“Another Place”. A conceptual experiment to deconstruct a traditional portrait. My creative aim was to reduce it to constituent parts to subvert the traditional and allow the viewer to reinterpret it .
Artist name: Nina Fraser
Instagram: @ninafraserartist
Description: “TALES OF TURBULENCE AND TULIPS”. Fragments of magazines are cut, ripped, pasted and décollaged in a frantic and expressive manner, blurring boundaries between mediums (painting and collage) and the photographic image. The work contains a physical dimension, in its size, representing a tidal wave of torn magazine imagery, a ‘media storm’, exploring the dichotomy between the individual and the collective. Created with the assistance of a studio intern, the process of collaboration opened up my practice considerably, questioning authorship and the idea of sharing, not retaining, artistic experience.
