29 Apr 2015

Continuous Material at Durham Castle UNESCO World Heritage Site and Drop City, Newcastle

Continuous Material is an exhibition by Eleanor Wright and Sam Watson with six invited artists and collaborators, commissioned by University College and the Centre for Visual Arts and Cultures, Durham University. The exhibition explores the sites of Durham Castle, Durham UNESCO World Heritage Site and the contemporary art gallery Drop City in Newcastle through the practices of all eight contributors, their individual approaches to objects and storytelling, formally and conceptually and how the artworks they produce suggest narrative worlds each with their own set of rules and parameters.

Manoeuvring through two sites in two cities visitors encounter a series of subtle relationships between place and narrative, the exhibition and the personal, and the role of the artist as producer and storyteller in a continuously historicised and reinvented world.

In the first venue, Durham Castle, a host of found and crafted objects are arranged amongst existing artefacts within museological display cases and bespoke exhibition furniture. This sequence follows a principle of repetition and development that runs through their work as a whole. The second part of the exhibition, displayed in the gallery space of Drop City, contains a series of new works including the photographic series A Gradual Stiffening, depicting existing works, objects and exhibition arrangements and re-arrangements recorded in process − alluding to the virtual connections between apparently isolated events and objects.

Remixing recent and distant history alike, the moulding and reshaping of history forms a quiet backdrop to a series of new and existing works in the exhibition. Manoeuvring through two sites in two cities visitors encounter a series of subtle relationships between place and narrative, the exhibition and the personal, and the role of the artist as producer and storyteller in a continuously historicised and reinvented world.

Wright and Watson are interested in how both situations of Continuous Material (Durham Castle and Drop City) can provide certain modes of experience for the audiences. The exhibition features a number of new and existing works by Wright and Watson and invited artists that function between sculpture, photography, architecture, literature and curation; sculptural objects by Eric Bainbridge presented amongst historical artefacts; the film work Embarkation by Sini Pelkki; a spatial light design by Aleksandra Konopek; and Ralf Brög's Isolations, which are here re-worked into a series of collaboratively designed integrated display objects, developing a relationship between artwork and display, collaborator and curator.

Alongside two main physical exhibitions of artworks, there are a number of elements which are spread across and beyond the specific sites and timescales of the exhibition. Paul Becker's The Opposite of A Pulpit is a newly commissioned text based around a series of real and fictional walks through the city of Durham, where he lived, partly in secret, between 2008/9. Like much of Becker's work, the writing is concerned with the crossovers between literary fiction and art making. The ambiguous and liminal figure of the artist/writer embodies some of these parallels. The writing produced for this project will also form part of a guided walk through the city of Durham, whilst Josh Wilson's Place and Pace takes on the role of critical essay, exhibition hand-out and text piece which is to be distributed across both venues in the form of a map. This newly commissioned piece discusses the formal and analytic connections between the artwork included within Continuous Material, and considers the language that circumscribes exhibition making, playing with the displacement of patterns, urban or otherwise.


Events
Paul Becker 'The Opposite of a Pulpit', Durham Castle – 1st May, 6.30pm
Public Opening, Durham Castle – 1st May, 7.30pm-9.pm
Opening, Drop City – 7th May, 7.00pm-9.00pm
The Late Shows 2015, Drop City – 16th May, 7.00pm-11.00pm


Eleanor Wright/Sam Watson
Working together since 2013, artist Eleanor Wright (b. 1984) and curator Sam Watson (b. 1987) have set out to form a dialogue around the agency of exhibition making. Using choreographed arrangements of both constructed and curated elements, their work makes visible the patterns between design, people, material, object and architecture - addressing existing perceptions and hierarchies that exist within the exhibition. They are interested in treating their individual practices as a collaborative praxis, developing a framework that is built through collaboration and dialogue with others.

They approach exhibition making through an understanding that meaning is constructed by the spectator in the space, which includes the accompanying texts, the discourse generated by the show, and its representation. An acceptance of this wider situation as material, as something to relate to and deal with, is key to understanding Wright and Watson's collaboration.


Continuous Material is commissioned by University College and the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, Durham University working with Dr. Hazel Donkin and is kindly supported by Arts Council England through Grants for the Arts, FRAME Visual Art Finland, and Oppenheim-John Downes Memorial Trust.

Drop City is generously supported by The Institute for Creative Arts Practice at Newcastle University
and Clouston Group.

For further information please visit www.drop-city.net
or contact post@drop-city.net