BLUSH | Exhibition

Skin reddens, the heart beats faster, breath quickens, stomachs lurch and gurgle – everything we feel has a bodily response. Blush celebrates the connections between love and lungs, anguish and intestines with sculptures on living in a body.

Five women artists who make work with bodily themes are making sculpture based on what it feels like to inhabit a body. Art often views the body as something to be looked at from the outside, a smooth exterior. Blush explores our interior world and its connections between how we feel emotionally with how our body reacts to these feelings and exterior stimulations. Tactile forms portray the materiality of the body, its sensations and textures and its interconnected systems. Natasha MacVoy wanders along the nervous system collecting stories and thoughts which she presses into delicate ceramic drawings. Johanna Bolton explores the roller coaster of digestion through materials from twisted metal to undulating ceramics. Giota Papakyriakou’s wall mounted soap dishes evoke feelings of tension and care through the physical act of washing. Sandra Lane takes the inside outside with undulating arches, gut flora and shoes with tongues. Gloria Sulli takes a deep breath and holds it for us…

Bios:

Natasha MacVoy makes work about the activity of looking and alternative non-visual ways with which bodies perceive. Drawing on personal experiences and observations, her work explores the limits of sight and site. The gap between revealing and concealing offers fertile working conditions as she layers found, heard and personal stories into a physical visual language that withholds as much as it shares.
Natasha lives on the edge of the Cotswolds where she supports her 12-year-old twins with child-led learning from home and working alongside one another in her studio at Spike Island, Bristol.
Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include; Artist Moving Image Commission with Exeter Pheonix, 2022; tibrO yalP, g39, Cardiff, 2022; My Kid Could’ve Done That, The Edge Arts, Bath, 2021; OUTPOST Members Show curated by Catalyst Arts, OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich, 2021

Sandra Lane’s materials take the imprint of her fingers and moods, she is interested in in-between feelings, ambivalence, optimism and failure, and works these transient feelings into multiple forms. The placing of the objects, their combinations, the contrasts between materials, shapes and colours are all important. She finds memories pop up with clarity, coloured and patterned, and they often appear in her work as more precise figurative elements. Her work is informed by the time and place she grew up in, the women in her life, films, fashion magazines and their contrasts with the surrounding nature.

Sandra currently has work in the RA Summer Exhibition and has recently shown work in If These Walls Could Talk curated by Stephanie Ruth, Smoke Smoke Smoke (that cigarette) at Nadir Project Space and 2020UKUS at M Gallery in Washington US. She is an alumna from Slade MFA Sculpture 2017.

Johanna Bolton is a Swedish artist living in London. She works across sculpture, installation, photography and performance to build up archives of human presence and movement left behind in material form. These can take the form of discarded elastic bands, scrunched up paper or the fabric folds in clothes.

Johanna received the 2021 Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors, and a residency at metal fabricator Benson Sedgwick in 2022. Previous projects include a residency at Kew Gardens Herbarium, a commission for the Bomberg Archive at London South Bank University and exhibitions at Gerlesborgs Konsthall in Sweden and Edicola Spoleto / MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy. Her first solo show was in 2018 at Borough Road Gallery, London South Bank University.

Giota Papakyriakou is an artist working between Athens and London. She studied at the Slade School of Fine art in London. (2017)

Her practice is mainly sculpture and video and is about space, domestic environment, human relations and sports. She re-creates familiar objects that form according to the direct contact with human body and it’s energy.

Gloria Sulli is an Italian artist living in London. The artist’s research explores our relationship with the natural world through drawings, sculptures and installation, investigating concepts of expansion and contraction, movements that regulate the breath. Her art practice spans from drawings on aluminium foil to small ceramic to inflatable and installation work where she crafts a sense of movement and reverence for the natural world

Sulli exhibits between Italy and the UK: at the Winter Sculpture Park in Bexley London, currently in a group show Scuola Abruzzese at YAG/Garage Italia. She is working for an upcoming solo show in Pescara.