A Red Thread

The series My Hands has evolved from Polly Apfelbaum’s ongoing experiments with glazed ceramics. They take their inspiration from the ‘floating hand of God’ in the mosaics of the basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna that she visited during a residency at the American Academy in Rome in 2013. Apfelbaum was fascinated by this image of the disembodied hand as the symbol of creation and intervention. These works are in fact based on the artist’s own hands and made of glazed coloured porcelain or terracotta. To create them, Apfelbaum used her own hand as a template so creating a relationship to the artist’s touch while also dealing with ideas about craft and making, from prehistoric times to children’s pre-school handprints.

With a static camera Tan filmed the dense, night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her studio location at the Getty Center. Tan made a trio of video works, shorn of a narrative, that are a series of dream-like moving pictures. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. Viewed from afar, these cars, and their red taillights, are elements in a mesmerizing pattern, an undulating surface of pixels or brushstrokes. The vehicles could be stars in a galaxy, a shoal of luminescent fish, molten lava, or glowing fireflies. 

Cornelia Parker's Bullet Drawing is from an on-going series which uses melted down bullets drawn into wire. A bullet’s worth of lead wire is then threaded through paper, where it looks like a pencil drawing, here arranged into a grid echoed with bold red lines. 

Throughout the five decades of her radical career the American artist and activist Nancy Spero (1926-2009) placed the lived female experience at the heart of her practice. In this work Spero pairs a naked running athlete with the famous figure of Liberty at the barricades from Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, commemorating the July Revolution of 1830. As Spero wrote in 1987 she was not interested in setting up an ideal or universal image of woman but rather depicting: ‘Woman in process, never a fixed or stable identity, women as a continuous presence, woman in motion – gesture and movement being the earliest forms of human communication – woman warrior, woman victim. These are female bodies – I use them to speculate on what is possible and to comment upon immediate events – political, sexual, rites of passage or otherwise.'

In Found Postcard Monoprints (Arrostook Potato) Tacita continues to investigate her fascination with vintage postcards. She has used the postcard as a medium in several previous works, changing their meaning through manipulation or re-presentation. These pieces are made using cards from the artist’s personal collection which she has built up over many years. Each work is a unique monoprint, the colour and application of the inks reanimating the vintage imagery.

Mount Fuji has become an icon associated with Japan's cultural past and traditions - a link nurtured by influential artists such as the printmaker Hokusai (1760-1849) and the photographer Felice Beato (1832-1909).

Riddy uses the mountain as a precisely placed point of reference to suggest the sophisticated spatial awareness in Japanese society and the Fuji fervour of modern tourism. The timelessness, evoked by the stillness, the absence of people, the peculiar quality of light and Mount Fuji itself, is juxtaposed against the indications of a modern town with its geometrical power lines, stark red colours, flat signs and parked cars. These images explore the evolving relationship between town and mountainscape, people and nature.

Riddy presents Mount Fuji according to artistic tradition, but by including the town of Shin-Fuji he demands a new perspective, both perpetuating and adding to the myth of a mountain.

Time Measures photographs have emerged from Singh’s long-term interest in the paper archive. Singh discovered these bundles of fabric-wrapped documents in an archive in India. The bundles themselves are of indeterminate age, their contents are unknown. At some stage these papers were wrapped in red cotton fabric, placed on shelves and then forgotten. Every bundle is tied by a different hand with a different knot to seal it. Over the years these stacked bundles have faded and become compressed. The knots, in combination with the forms and faded colours, gives them very tangible personalities, turning each image into a singular portrait. The title of the work takes its name from a poem by German writer W. G. Sebald.

Daniel Silver’s alchemical sculptures are repositories of the artist’s multifaceted interests in classical sculpture dating from the Graeco-Roman period, psychoanalytic theory, and Western modernism. His figurative works, which range in scale from the diminutive to the monumental, always seem in flux – creation and entropy are equally at play. His bodies come to exist in the world / Dasein and thereafter return to a proto-linguistic or proto-historic state. Silver’s new cluster of free-standing ceramic sculptures were made during lockdown at a time of solitude and introspection. Hand-moulded by the artist in terracotta and subsequently fired and freely coloured with oil paints, they appear as totems, pillars, or trees: the axis mundi.

Untitled is from a series that traces the lives of those who have found solace, or refuge, in changing their last names in attempts to assume new identities or detach from former ones (the subjects range from survivors of brutal political turmoil to Bob Dylan). Gupta represents each person through a framed picture that has been sliced in two. The pieces are positioned near enough to their counterpart that viewers can find and understand the whole image, but they are also read as partial, alluding perhaps to the divided fragments that make up any individual’s life.

Callum Innes belongs to a generation of British artists who continue to explore the possibilities of paint on canvas. Uninhibited by, yet very aware of, the achievements of the past and the rise of other media, Innes uses the language of the monochrome, an established format of abstract painting since the 1960s. In this piece Innes uses the simplest of materials to create an image which is closer to conceptual work than abstraction, so that intellect and intuition are powerfully combined. Here he chooses a middle ground between the spare beauty of a minimal aesthetic and the gestural panache of abstraction.

Red-hot pokers conjure up images of lofty flowers found in suburban gardens, or of the cruellest of tortures immortalised in Christopher Marlowe’s, Edward II. In the Red Hot Poker Drawing series, a domestic fireside tool has been made deliberately lethal, then applied with precision to a minimalist grid of folded paper. Due to the unruly nature of fire, the burned holes that form organic shapes, begin to eat away at the grid - thus offsetting its precision.

Banner became interested in pinstripe fabric as the quintessential uniform or camouflage of those who work within the financial bodies of the City of London. The familiar pattern, designed to make the wearer blend in, has an almost op-art quality which Banner exploits here by rendering it in Day-Glo orange. She playfully depicts a bum clad in pinstripe suit trousers and sees a face hidden within it as one might on an ancient tree trunk.