Welcome to Issue 6 which this month explores the body as landscape.
We have been overwhelmed with some wonderful, challenging creative work and opinions and thank everyone that has contributed.
We are constantly evolving Haus-a-Rest and have added a featured artist to the mix. Each month we will showcase their work and gain an insight into their practice and journey. This month we are featuring Laura Greenway who has shown her work at the Venice Biennale and has a wonderful way of conveying often difficult topics within her work.
As we worked on this issue, w wanted to explore the topic too. As both practising artists we thought we could test Instagram as an on-line exhibition platform with our interpretation of Body as Landscape so do pop by to see (click here) our show.
A big thank you. Jenna and Nichola
Our featured artist this month is …
Laura Greenway
Title: Rebirth
Media: Black ink hand stamped on Fabriano paper with nude body (photograph)
Description: Rebirth is an exploration of mental illness and mental health management through medication. Surrounded by 2682 hand stamped pills, my naked body lays in the fetal position, a symbolism for the rebirth, growth and a second chance at life that I experienced from starting life saving psychiatric medication just over seven years (2682 days) ago.
Instagram: lauragreenwayartist
Artist name: Paul Blenkhorn
Title: rho 38
Media: Acrylic on canvas
Description: When I read your description, this was the work that first came to mind. Maybe the words "ephemeral, ethereal" were what caused me to think of it. Maybe it was the word "disconnected"?
Instagram: @sensoryarthouse
Artist name: Marketa Senkyrik
Title: Emotionally Unstable
Media: Crayons on paper
Description: My body, I like it, fight with it, take care of it, forcing it to serve me in a better way and for longer. I hate being achy. I can’t stand the limits it imposes on me. I know it’s wrong,
I should be more in union with my own physicality, accept body weaknesses and ageing.
But I find it very hard. I meditate on it. But I carry on fighting. Every new wrinkle I see on my face, every ache, every little cold scare me. In reality, I am terrified of the finite, deterioration, lost of senses and libido…
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Falling asleep is a bit like dying Letting go. Step out of the space we call reality.
That’s why it is easier after few drinks. Then, what is happening after? Where is The Reality?
Is it fine to sleep with your ex lover or kill your mother in a dream? Where is the border between the two worlds? Are they two or one or multiple worlds I inhabit? And why do our bodies feels so different in our dreams? I am interested in the human body; the limitations and the latitude linked to our own physicality. The transformation of our perception of it at different stages of life (like before and after girl’s first period, mothering or menopause; childhood, youth and old age) and different situations (for example dreaming and being awake) is remarkable. My body is a situation - ever changing organic organism with my life story written in it, The landscape I often walk through in my dreams The first landscape I see every morning. “The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project”. Simone de Beuvoir // The Second Sex
Instagram: marketa_senkyrik
Artist name: Teona Yamanidze
Title: Private happenings
Media: oil on canvas
Description: “Temporary Shelter” is an ongoing project that started during the pandemic. It is the reference to the current state of mind as I have found myself locked in my Tbilisi apartment. Though most of the images may represent my surroundings I am adding the fictional component to what is seen inside the rooms.
Instagram: @teoyamanidze
Artist name: JL Maxcy
Title: Madonna of the Waves
Media: Acrylic on canvas
Description: In my series 'Childfree Madonnas' I took the figure and transformed it into a landscape (sea scape). The inspiration for this piece comes from a desire for others to see the land and all of Earth's resources as our offspring, our legacy; we must nurture it in a maternal way.
Instagram: @jlmaxcyart
Artist name: Pippa Ward
Title: Beautiful in a sick kind of way
Media: Textiles - stitch on canvas
Description: This piece was made as a response to the brief 'the body as site'. I have stitched microscopic images of the herpes virus onto canvas and behind that, some very poignant thoughts of people who suffer with the perpetual and cruel virus. Like much of my present work, it appears beautiful on the surface but has an underlying sadness or unpleasantness.
Instagram: pippaward1
Artist name: Amy Guilfoyle
Title: The waves of life
Media: Photography
Description: This is an image of my mother's leg, it has all the markings of age, almost like waves in the sea. It's very difficult to accept the natural breakdown of the human form, unless we can admire the true close up beauty that it is. This was a difficult piece to create, as I had to face the wrinkles and ageing skin of my mother's leg, to really see, what I hadn't seen before and to accept what I would rather not accept, the body reflects like a mirror the lifestyle lived and breakdown is natural as breathing
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a.g.e.g_conceptual_artist_
Artist name: Emily Self
Title: People in Trafalgar Square
Media: Fine liners and Pencil for line work, colour is added digitally.
Description: The illustration focuses on the people rather than the location, taking them out of their surroundings and using them to recreate the scene. The piece was intended to make people think about how we interact as a society and act within the urban environment.
Instagram: illlustrationbyems
Artist name: Estelle Woolley
Title: Home
Media: Oak leaves and acorns
Description: Over lock down, Estelle has been producing a series of photographic self portraits wearing face masks composed of delicate and ephemeral natural materials. These have been collected from her daily walks, where she has been homing in on her immediate surroundings, paying close attention to the plant life as it comes in and out of season. The village where she is from is named after its many oak trees, and these materials represent being at home for the artist.
Instagram: @estellewoolley
Artist name: Catherine Ryan
Title: Selfie at the Beach
Media: Rope, plastic, glass, acrylic and glue on driftwood
Description: This piece was made as a lighthearted response to the shock of 2020 , which caused much contemplation about the fragility and brevity of our lives. Long walks and beach combing were a great help to process all that was happening. It began with an interesting plank of driftwood, with the fishing rope celebrating my red hair, thinking about how humans emerged from the sea and will eventually return to the earth, like stones on the beach.
Instagram: @catherineryanart
Artist name: Jennifer Weston
Title: Body in the Earth
Media: Digital
Description: When I rest on the earth in remote woodland I settle into a depth that is not present ordinarily.
I dip into some mythic world of non-ordinary reality where I feel big calm, relaxing away from hubris into the damp compost of leaves, sludge and bugs. Enveloping, the boundary called skin, rubbing, poking, scratching its way onto the vast realm of other.
Instagram: @jenniferwestonuk
Artist name: Bill chambers
Title: Awash - plastic bottles
Media: Cyanotype photography
Description: This is one of a series of large cyanotype prints created using objects collected after a storm. These things are the products of our throw-away society, accumulated in drifts on our cities' streets and as much a part of our environment now as the leaves in Autumn. We each carry within us our own perceptual map of the world and I am interested in how collections of objects can carry hidden meaning and become ambiguous indicators of individuality, a suggestion of the personal and political as well as the tangible landscape that we inhabit.
Instagram: @billchambers66
Artist name: Francesca Giuliano
Title: Collarbone with Shoulders
Media: Charcoal, pastel, graphite, coloured pencil on paper
Description: I use touch to feel the bone structure of my body and draw what I feel, the nook in my collarbone being a particular favourite. I draw in the direction I am touching which causes things to appear in strange places like a shoulder going up instead of down. I use colour palettes based on Google Earth searches of land expanses like the Sahara or the Arctic. The difficulty is avoiding drawing what I have learned is there instead of actually what my fingertips are sensing.
Instagram: @francesca.giuliano.here
Artist name: Parker Shatkin
Title: Divine Intestine
Media: Digital colour photography, nylons and polyester stuffing
Description: This is Divine Intestine. Divine Intestine is the length of a 5’4” female’s small intestine. Divine Intestine is made of sheer nylon tights stuffed with polyester filling. Divine Intestine removes the human body and replaces it with bodily object. Divine Intestine is both repulsive and personable.
Instagram: @packrat_art
Artist name: Alexandra Holownia
Title: Lips
Media: Drawing, collage
Description: The surreal drawing shows the landscape of a mouth placed on a tree or on a tangled network of human nerves.
It presents a combination of nature resembling a plant with a human mouth as flowers.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexandraholownia/
Artist name: Maya Sharp
Title: Summer
Media: Photography
Description: During lock down I have been photographing myself and the landscape I found myself suspended in, summer moorland, and all the nostalgia and anxiety that comes from returning to your roots. A self expressive series developed which visually moves between ideas of maternal love and feelings of buried trauma. I photographed myself as one with the landscape, my body becoming like a boulder.
Instagram: sharp.maya
Artist name: Louise Byrne
Title: Perturbation
Media: Video
Description: The directions of movement my body embodies due to the line are a type of test which informs both the line, the limits of my body’s muscles to perform them and how the body reacts to the physical space in terms of the body in the interaction of the outside material and form. The movement phrases are a response to the space, coming from me as a human, in the combination of the physical and emotional response; within the time-frame which I made the work, while in isolation. The title reflects a certain feeling of restlessness and comfort at the same time.
Instagram: @l.ouisianna
Artist name: Giulia Ricciotti
Title: To be all ways to be
Media: Analog photo 35mm
Description: When in our lives something becomes obvious it loses its importance and our curiosity about that object or event vanishes. Every time we walk on the streets, in the country or in the city, we pass by some tree. Have you ever tried to hug one of them? You will be amazed at how much energy it can transmit. So why we don't try to identify ourself with that tree and take life from the earth, stand up and feel part of that whole? Our body is not something obvious. Our body is strength and vitality like that tree. In these hard times of deep identity crisis it is even more important to re-inhabit our body, feel its power, make it feel alive. My work wants to be an attempt to express this concept and what the body can give in correspondence to nature. I asked to my model to feel free to express this concept, to embrace a tree, to breathe its every form, to incorporate it and with its cover to represent those feelings in order to be part of that landscape too.
Instagram: @giuliaricciotti
Artist name: Lito Apostolakou
Title: Night map
Media: Oil and fabric on cardboard
Description: Tracing the contour of my body on a cardboard structure I have tried to map my material form as it is experienced inside my head - a buzzing, visceral dance of particles constrained by space - a fluid anatomy. The work ended up resembling Ana Mendieta's earth-body Siluetas. It also became a map of a space whose borders are recognisable but its internal depths unreadable.
Instagram: @inklinks
Artist name: Jing Su
Title: Give 2
Media: HD Digital video
Description: GIVE, is a meditation about mediation, what it means to be embodied as a meaning inside a gender, through a series of moving image installation which explores the artist’s body as both a landscape and also as a site of praxis. She appears to be giving birth to a duplicate version of herself, or perhaps a new version which had been struggling to come into existence. The clean and sparse installation elegantly examines our basic binary conditions as animals with a symmetrical perceptual system, one which invariably impacts our conceptual frameworks as well.
Link: https://vimeo.com/430780825
Instagram: jinggsu