o p e n e n d e d

8 August 2008 — 24 August 2008

Mike Ferguson makes work from metal, or form found objects that he manipulates into contemporary sculptures. His work explores the use of a dominant narrative, a variety of methods are employed in the making of his sculptures, one being that of kinetic movement. The work is playful whilst simultaneously taking classic esthetical values as its foundation.

Gary Fisher’s process of experimentation and enquiry is focused around instinctive and investigatory responses to objects, sounds, images and their direct relationship to one’s visual sense of object or place. A variety of strategies are used including collecting and archiving, coaxing and encouraging sound from objects, staging opportunities for sound creation and conceiving sound from a material source.

In an attempt to rationalize the world through sensory investigation, the set of strategies from which the practice is composed present a creative, sculptural, environmental, ambient, spatial, visual or audible event.

Stuart Edmundson makes work that 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 work’s existence, he makes drawings, assemblages, sculpture, paintings and text pieces that have evolved through a detached interest in extended practice and process, alongside historical social developments and “failed” optimisms of utopian and “sub culture” civilizations. Such as Soviet Russia propaganda, Punk, Skateboarding and revolution.

Sarah Hardacre’s work explores the construction of knowledge and the institutional shaping of history and the natural world. Her interests lie in the appearance of a ‘Natural History’ and the evolution of the museum. Works emerge somewhere between sculpture and installation and often appear again, reflected in vanitas like photographic landscapes. Her choice of material references the paradigm of nature and constructs of knowledge, of education, of science and of religion.

Appropriating the forms of arbitrary collecting and the transmutational techniques of taxidermy. Each piece of work presents a rupture, a momentary disturbance, questioning the clichés of chronicle and examining the gap between rational reasoning and irrational influence.

Magnus Quaife’s paintings are concerned with a relationship between painting, sculpture and photography; from painted proposals for imagined monuments that will never exist, through to intricate watercolour representations of Polaroid photographs that depict sculptures (sometimes found and sometimes constructed from the detritus of his painting practice) and oil paintings made from photographs of public sculptures.
Each time they are concerned with translating the monumental into the historic
Into the current. The variety of painterly approaches is an attempt to prevent the viewer settling on any specific notion of style or technique in the work.

Some attempt to mimic the speed of the lens through painstaking brushwork, whilst others replace the imposing stance of much public sculpture with a gestural immediacy.
In Maeve Rendle’s practice the idea belongs to sculpture but manifests itself as a sequence of snap shot photographs or film. The working process is synonymous with the work itself. She makes distinction between work and production.
A photograph is taken of the sculpture/ installation at every stage of making. Rather than bringing the process to a deliberate end, it stops with the presentation of the photographs. The sequence of photographs presented, demonstrate the making or manipulating of an object that is left in a cyclical suspension without the presence of a ‘finished’ sculpture.

o p e n e n d e d is part of Castlefield Gallery’s Project Space scheme.

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