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'STABLE STATES'

Opening night: Thursday 16th February, 18:00-21.00
Then from: Friday 17th - Wednesday 22nd February

CULTIVATE is open from 11.30 - 18.00, Thursday to Sunday
(and outside of these days by appointment)


STABLE STATES brings together six contemporary artists working across a range of disciplines and media. Featuring Elaine Johnson, Yasmina Chami, Anna Haward, Mark Rose, Sadie Hennessy and Ben Gooding.

YASMINA CHAMI is an architect whose work with war damaged buildings from her native Lebanon attempts to reconstruct new uses for them by erecting temporary structures that have a transformative effect. Here, she has designed a circus out of the ruins of the countries past.

SADIE HENNESSY's work is concerned with absurdity and nostalgia and operates within the particular cultural framework of an eccentric Englishness. Her practice currently involves creating objects that are unsettling, often utilising a dark humour to illicit a reaction in her audience.

ELAINE JOHNSON's work explores the boundaries of what textile based craft, drawing and sculpture can be, using reclaimed fabrics, human hair, obscure objects and simple thread to create site specific installations. Her work is a detailed, labour intensive and obsessive process which is reminiscent of the history and traditions of the textile industry itself, evoking the lace makers, the spinning of thread, a memento of the left behind.

In BEN GOODING's work there is an abandonment of colour, of gesture, of the expressive, and instead he instates an almost mechanistic methodology that is devised prior to execution and cannot be deviated from during production. The work has a meditative quality, the repetition of a single form synonymous with a mantra, yet there is a stark mathematical edge underpinning each piece. The work occupies a space between a pure reductive detachment of authorship and an acknowledgment of the hand made.

ANNA HAWARD has focussed on the tradition of line drawing, her approach ranging from continuous to blind line drawings and favouring the underappreciated medium of black and blue biro pens. Through her work, she seeks to produce a simplicity of form which describes fragments of reality, where less is more. She likes to draw everyday cafe scenes and to catch her friends and family immersed in introspective activity.

MARK ROSE is fascinated with fractal patterns and the macro/micro iteration of scale that underpin reality. In “Tinnitus Tetrahedron”, this idealized mathematical form has been remade using cotton buds which the artist has obsessively accumulated over several years through a ritualized daily routine. The piece suggests an inner emotional state that contrasts with the outer facade we often present to the world.


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See photographs from the exhibition here