artranspennine08 – Stuart Edmundson, Proposal #35

20 June 2008 — 15 August 2008

More on artranspennine:

Artranspennine is a large scale cross-regional exhibition with an array of emerging and established artists working in a variety of disciplines. Artists will be placing work, staging performances and creating interventions at a variety of locations across the transpennine route.

Artranspennine runs from June 13 – August 15 2008. For more information on participating artists and locations please go to http://www.atp08.blogspot.com or email atp08@hotmail.co.uk.

More on Stuart Edmundson’s work:

I make work which questions the conditions of practice and its ability to exist in the world out side of the studio and gallery space. Questioning the viewer’s duty in the works existence, I make drawings, assemblages, sculpture, paintings and text pieces which have evolved through a detached interest in extended practice and process alongside historical social developments and “failed“ optimisms of utopian civilization

Using the viewer’s presence in the meeting/understanding or creation of work I enable the viewer to consider their own duty within the development and creation of practice. For instance in works such as “Prototype for a Mountain #45 & 48” an object which seems to depict a model of a mountain made out of cocktail sticks stands on a cardboard box as if it has just been taken out of, and placed onto what is now its plinth, on looking closer you understand the cardboard box is actually to small for it to fit. This along with its title, questions its validity within its surroundings. Are we looking at a piece of work or is this actually just a model or proposal for a piece on a grandeur scale?

Other works include instructions of how to make a piece of work, these either exist as projected drawings which are full of idiosyncrasies through the slight movement of the over head projector in their creation, or printed posters placed within a cities existing “fly poster” aesthetic. The works exist to allow a piece to exist either without the funds or space to create them. Placing the instructions, come, proposals within the public realm then questions the relevance of the individual pieces. The posters themselves mimic the communicative methods and simple aesthetic of the student uprising of ’68, and although I am not proposing a revolution I try and inspire the audience in a similar level of direct action by making them implicit in the creation of the work, placing them at the centre of its existence, as if the work was to be created in the second person.