Halo Nevus
SWAB Art Fair, Barcelona
7 - 10 Oct 2021
Christian Newby / Sin Park / Jacqueline Donachie
Christian Newby
Christian Newby, Raspberry-Jail, 2020, Tufted yarn on cloth, 135 x 290 cm. Unique. Photo: Keith Hunter.
Newby incorporates techniques from industrial textile production into a drawing practice that aims to subvert the assumptions pertaining to value and skill within fine and applied arts practice, as well as challenge the design principles and craft rhetoric commonly associated with carpet tufting.
The works we are presenting at SWAB, titled ‘Raspberry-Jail’ and ‘Maersksealand’, are made using a handheld industrial carpet-tufting gun and created through a process of improvised drawing. Newby is currently looking at the carpet-tufting gun as a case study in how the roles of artist, artisan and fabricator are determined by terminal belief systems in productivity and commodification. His unique technique of ‘drawing with carpet’ redirects the manufacturing function of the gun and instead explores its capacities as a mark-making tool, while observing it as a fundamental equivalent to the pencil, spray can, paintbrush and tattoo needle. His works carry an awareness of the anonymity of globalized commercial production and mass labour, in direct contrast with the skillful mastery equated with artisanal handicraft.
Christian Newby, Maersksealand (detail), 2019, Tufted wool on cloth, 285 x 135cm
Unique. Photo: Keith Hunter.
Christian Newby was born in Virginia Beach, VA, USA and now lives and works in London, UK. He graduated with an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (2009), following his BA (Hons) in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University, London.
Selected exhibitions include: Boredom> Mischief> Fantasy> Radicalism> Fantasy, Collective, Edinburgh (2021); The drum, the chime, the scrape, the splash, the jerk, Patricia Fleming, Glasgow (2021); Brick-Wall-Spider-Web-Post-It-Note, Beers London (2019); Yo Compro Calidad, Matadero, Madrid (2017); Tetracontameron, Space Between, London (2016) and Le Club des Sous l’Eau, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). He has been an artist in residence at Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU, Hong Kong (2019); Matadero Madrid El Ranchito exchange with Arthouse Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria (2017); URRA/Gasworks Residency, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015) and Triangle France Artist in Residence Programme, Marseille (2010). He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2016) as well as the Converse/Dazed & Confused Emerging Artist Award shortlist in association with Whitechapel Gallery (2013).
Sin Park
Sin Park, Drawing From Isolation 1, 2021, Marker pen (posca) on paper, 14.8 x 21 cm
Primarily a painter, Park approaches her work intuitively, through a process of improvised actions. Her practice is concerned with the perception and recollection of the sensory and the notion of memory. The works are built in careful, instinctive layers of colour in which shapes and smears and angles, lines and drips and swathes generate their own processual logic.
For SWAB we are presenting a collection of 12 drawings titled ‘Drawings From Isolation’. The works are part of a series of 200 drawings, which record every day and night between 24 March - 1 July 2020, during the first Covid 19 lockdown. Indicative of an emotional and physical state, each drawing is a capsule of time and space with a narrative intimate to the artist. Like window views that revitalize with colour and movement, each drawing was created as a portal for the artist to both situate herself and escape.
Sin Park, Drawing From Isolation 2, 2021, Marker pen (posca) on paper, 14.8 x 21 cm
Sin Park was born in Seoul, South Korea and currently lives and works between Glasgow and London. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art. She completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London in 2017, and a BFA in Painting from Ewha Womans University, Seoul in 2012.
Recent exhibitions include: A cabinet of Curiosities, Brownsword Hepworth Gallery, London (2020); Open Window, Square Gallery, London (2020); Annual Show, The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (2020); Elephant Lab, Colart, London (2020); Crocodile Tears, Greenpoint Open Studios, New York (2019); Skip-Ad; Play, Savoy Center, Glasgow (2018); Odyssey, Summerhall, Edinburgh (2018); The Arrival, Square Gallery, London (2017); The Abstraction of Continents and The Continent of Abstraction, Lychee One, London (2016); Royal Institute of Oil Painters, Mall Galleries, London (2016). She has recently completed a residency at Elephant Lab (2020).
Jacqueline Donachie
Jacqueline Donachie, In Possession of My City 1-2, 2021, Aluminium,
7,5 x 4 x 92cm (left), 6,2 x 4 x 76,7cm (right)
Donachie’s work is rooted in an exploration of individual, family and collective identity and the structures, platforms and spaces (both actual and conceptual) through which it is constructed and supported. Her work encompasses sculpture, installation, photography, film, drawing and performance and is research-based, collaborative and participatory. Drawing is key; she isolates and records familiar urban objects as a means to illustrate similarity and difference. Recently she has also been working in print, using both digital processes and etching. Her sculptures in metal or concrete inhabit space indoors and in public spaces, and are intended as sites of rest and activity.
The works presented at SWAB were part of her recent solo exhibition STEP at Govan Project Space for Glasgow International 2021. Created as a response to the often challenging access for buildings and venues, Donachie used inventive research based on the simple step, alluding to both the limits and access they provide. By exercising an overlay of the temporary solutions we often see when adapting old buildings for the public, in particular the use of ramps, Donachie considers how we travel to and access buildings both physically and conceptually.
Jacqueline Donachie, STEP, 2021, Govan Graving Docks. Public work commissioned by
Govan Project Space, Glasgow International 2021.
Jacqueline Donachie was born in Scotland and lives and works in Glasgow. She completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York in 1996 after graduating from Glasgow School of Art’s Environmental Art department in 1991.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Beautiful Sunday, commission for Creative Folkestone Triennial (2021); STEP, Glasgow International, Govan Project Space & Govan Graving Docks, Glasgow (2021); Right Here Among Them, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2017); Deep in the Heart of Your Brain, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2016); South (Oslo), public commission, Aker Brygge, Oslo (2015). In 2017 she was the winner of the inaugural Freelands Award for her exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery. Her work is part of a number of public and private collections including Tate and Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow.
