It was clear that students at Oxford Brookes had been encouraged to think on their own terms, taken heed of this and moved swiftly onwards. The show was characterized by the adventurous and individualistic. Often one finds, as is natural in any community, that certain influences become predominant, and at Brookes it was clearly influence rather than rule: there was a high frequency of book-based works and an interesting bent towards the multi-disciplinary but each artist’s presentation was personal. The general impression of the presentation of the show was haphazard, giving it in an agitprop freshness, almost defiantly not emulous of a gallery setting, though the individual spaces were well curated. In a similar way few artists had left vocabularies and styles (or trends) of art unabsorbed and undigested.
Jenny Wylie made productive use of the department’s undistinguished setting by altering the visitor’s perception of the entire space and experience in her dizzying multi-media installation clothed in the most banal of aesthetics – post-it notes, information posters, two laptops, website-building software and the ghastly graphics of self-help literature. The particular symptom to be resolved in this case was time-management and the artist played on this in both the objects she presented and in person. Most intriguing was silent footage of the artist merely listening mutely to the viewer, nodding in acquiescence here and there, oddly hypnotic by making making one feel very special.
While Wylie treaded the possibility of endless deferral, Eleanor Greenhalgh explored the deferral inherent in narrative with her collaborative piece ‘Open Sauce’, which explored sexuality and the boundaries between the collective and the individual, by inviting us to participate in the unfolding of a piece of erotic fiction. At the risk of seeming blindly determined by the necessity for graphics like the BBC, I have reproduced one of the sites of Greenhalgh’s work here.
Nearby Jade Rankin made a quietly immersive space which contrasted themes of transience and endurance, intensity and fragility in her treatment of the myth of Alcyone and Ceyx, using paper works, audio and a beautiful suspended sculpture “I Will Not Live Without You, I Will Not Try to Live”. The sculpture is composed of over 700 individually hand knitted feathers, and was affecting for its cross between the delicacy of knitted feathers and the harsh Francis Bacon-like hanging carcass, a soft feathered rib-cage.
This multi-disciplinary confidence was prevalent. Cheryl Barrett presented an enigmatically titled piece called “What would it mean if I could see your dreams?”, based around the body and made up of a sculpture and etchings. The initially unremarkable etchings, required a little investigation to emerge as extremely intricate, making use of that most everyday of detritus: hair.
Anne Wright presented sophisticated work, Minimalist in aesthetic, that incorporated performance, sculpture and sound – digital as emitted from a beautiful oak speaker and made from a violin bow applied to a glass disc, in the act of which a settled and inanimate spill of dust seemed to summon itself momentarily into an emanation, a strange spirit. It was a rare opportunity to witness a resurrection. I wonder if she has read Robert Douglas-Fairhurst on the Victorian preoccupation with dust in Victorian Afterlives.
Robert Ridley-Shackleton also used humble materials in his cross between Art Povera and DeStijl, transfiguring them into a wall sized canvas.
At Brookes even the photography could be immersive, with Sarvin Shamsbod showing her large scale black and white works in a darkened room only made viewable by carefully positioned lights. Shamsbod’s work seemed to explore the determining influences of inheritance while measuring the distance across generations, particularly when cultural differences are involved also.
While Shamsbod registered distance in her photographs, Ruby Connor-Dixon explored in a few of her works the subject’s attempt to shake of the definition of the camera’s gaze.Pippa Chamber’s simultaneously ethereal and nocturnal installation of translucent hanging shoes was eerie and affecting. So often the poignancy of shoes, the way they register a physical presence, has been to do with drawing out the way in which they have been discarded, as for example in the famous photograph from the Holocaust of the heaped masses of shoes. Here they were ghostly pendant presences, or absences.
Childhood and psychoanalysis proved to be rich theme for many artists in the show. A particular favourite was an installation by Nina Hurel, whose work was unmatched in its extreme delicacy – this was also in part its subject. Presented alongside a book work of phrases ‘My mother always told me…’, and raised sensitively off the ground, Hurel’s installation was a poignant visual pun, beautifully realized.
Childhood revisited took on a surreal and nightmarish turn in Lisa Prettyman’s fantastic reproduction of a child’s bedroom where patterns in the bedcovers seem to crawl and creep into patterns of the wallpaper, where the orderly was disrupted, and erupted into imagined encroachments. Sheer terror occasioned by an attention we rarely give ourselves over to as adults.
Nia Walling also created a childhood bedroom of another age guarded by two chairs like miniature sentries. The artist projected images in unusual ways, onto the blank square of a cot or in the water of a washing bowl. The cot proved a very effective image of smothering. Walling’s work was not subtle, a medicinal spoon lay ready with dried flower buds lanced through with needles, but it was not trying to be, her visual metaphors were persistent and over-determined, giving a wry humour to the Sisyphean work of psychoanalysis. There was also a cut out a keep “Make a Wish or Dispelling House”, to either dispel unwanted memories or release a wish. Walling quoted from Anais Nin in the catalogue:
“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
Hannah Sothern reached back into the centuries tunnelling her way through the exterior of the Brookes art department to create a camera obscura which she twinned with portraits, in ink and etching on slate.
In the context of so much spatial and multi-disciplinary work it must have been something of a stand to present only 2D works. Charlotte Stainer created really fresh, layered, textured and engaging cityscapes – photographs do not do them justice.
There was not a great deal of painting, but one room devoted to two painters was noteworthy. Frederick Coppin’s work made up of blocks, expressive brushwork and architectural lines in counter-intuitive colours, was like a Klimt for a digital, sampling age. Figures ascending from the most pared back surroundings.
Jacqui Phillips created a series of portraits titled after Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”, presented in such a way as to imitate encyclopaedic entries, except these were images of washed-out politician types, with paint gaining and gathering in substance when applied in a thick impasto to depict grotesque protheses.
Phillips extended this trope of the extension and the additional in two other large scale paintings using masks to foreground the eyes as the only point of trustworthy contact, whether emerging from a face composed and uniform in make-up, or peering out from behind a gruesome Freddy Kruger-style Halloween head.