angellspace

Helen Angell-Preece - Sculptural Installation and Print Artist

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void) 2014

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void)

The body, and what it feels like to be in it, is the first architectural framework we learn to use. Its symmetry, balance and sense of space are not just the equivalent of all the doors it will walk through and all the windows it will look out of. It is also a dynamic spatial-sensing device that sees a space to be long or wide, but measuring and feeling it simultaneously.

Coates, Nigel. 2003. Guide to Ecstacity, London: Laurence King Publishing, P193

‘Let Yourself Fall’ – an invitation – a request from the artist to the viewer to take part in a physical, bodily sensation on entering the Installation.

In this exhibition, Helen Angell-Preece continues to explore her fascination and research into how we experience Architectural Space and Place, and to what extent the built environment gives us a sense of ourselves. This new series of works sees the artist moving away from the practice of creating an enclosed space to enter into, but now playing with the signifiers of our built environment in a series of cardboard and Reboard structures.

These temporary materials – cardboard packing boxes, string and unfinished / overlaid patches of painted colour – are most usually associated with movement and migration – here however they take up a dynamic presence and habitation of the gallery. The distinction between wall and floor, between the stability of the horizontal and the vertical is blurred as these sculptures make a fragmented, rhythmic journey, undermining the perpendicular white planes of the gallery ceiling and walls to rewrite their own form of language – somewhere between the Solid and the Void.

 

 

Let Yourself Fall (Between the Solid and the Void) 2014

Reboard, Cardboard boxes, Acrylic Paint, Packing string, Cup hooks.

Tunnel 2001

Tunnel

The work is driven by a fascination with the issue of our ‘Being here’; of our awareness of ourselves as existing ‘within’ the world.

Temporary architectures are created by tensioned fabric sculptures, installed to disrupt the viewers’ journey, forcing them to negotiate and become acutely aware of their own passage through space and time.

In Tunnel, screen-printed dyes are embedded into soft plastic fabric, marking its skin with signs – real and imagined - left on the landscape by human presence. These are made three-dimensional, referencing architectural motifs, and drawn across the space with taut wires to create a rhythmic, intense passageway. The colours and formation encourage the reading of a ‘route’ or journey being followed.

At once both playful and unnerving, the artist’s concern is to evoke an intensified awareness of self and environment using contrasting materials to disrupt/reorganise everyday spatial relationships.

 

 

Tunnel 2001

Screen-printed soft plastic, tension wires. 6 x 2 x 2.5m

Mirror 2002

Mirror

Mounted on the wall of a staircase, just before rounding a sharp corner, a circular ‘Mirror’ is angled at eye-level, as if to reflect and warn of oncoming traffic coming the other way.
However, this mirror doesn’t reflect it’s own immediate surroundings, or an image of ourselves, instead it reflects back the texture of cobbles from outside in the street - albeit softened and distorted by printing in neon pink.  To what extent does the built environment stay with us, define us - give us a sense of ourselves as ‘Being here’?

 

 

Mirror 2002

Screen-printed Acrylic Sheet 35cm diameter

Grass 2002

Grass

The green colour and curved lines of the screen-printed grass panels were chosen to engender a relaxing effect within the technological atmosphere of the computer library in which they are sited. The grass motif also references ideas of making yourself at ‘home’, creating a personal space for yourself to inhabit.

 

 

Grass 2002

Screen-printed Acrylic Sheet 6 x 1m

Self 2002

Self

Self creates a personal space for the viewer. Behind the privacy of an opaque wall, a circular mirror angled downwards towards you confirms your presence while reflecting the red dot marker painted on the wall behind you – “You are here”.

 

 

Self 2002

60cm diameter mirror acrylic sheet, angled bracket, acrylic paint 3 x 1 x 2m

Welcome 2002

Welcome

This work explores the issue of how we experience space, how we relate to our surroundings. In the construction of walls and the laying down of borders a sense of our own ‘Being there’ is also established.

Welcome begins to draw out a personal space for the viewer to inhabit. 3 vertical walls delineate a minimum human space – the dimensions relating to a shower cubicle or phone box.

A circle on the floor marks the spot:
‘You are here’.

However, alike to awareness of one’s own presence, this architecture is only temporary and contingent.

Red pathways signal elsewhere. The transparent walls are distorted by light and the image of cobbles – that material most usually solid and stable beneath our feet.

It is this duality of attraction and apprehension experienced in a new place, intensifying a feeling of self-awareness, that the artist wishes to communicate in the work.

 

 

Welcome 2002

Screenprinted Acrylic Sheet 3 x 3 x 2.5m

Red Ring 2002

Red Ring

The warmth of the red and orange coloured acrylic is employed to create an inviting central point to the vast low ceilinged computer library in which it is situated. The ring form and lozenge shape can also be seen to represent the individual mental learning space of the computer user within the room, in the same way as a red dot often marks the spot ‘you are here’ within a map.

 

 

Red Ring 2002

Coloured Acrylic Sheet 3 x 2m

Chaos 2002

Chaos

chaos n.   non-coherence, decomposition, disunion, discontinuity, random order, amorphism, unstructured, formlessness, scattering

To what extent do our surroundings give us a coherent sense of ourselves?

Do endless cuboids and delineated pathways of streets, corridors and roads construct a feeling of our being here?

In chaos, the artist subverts the image of cobblestones, a material most usually stable and enduring beneath our feet, rendering it sheer and unreal as it is screen-printed onto clear acrylic ‘walls’.

Instead of ‘supporting’, these walls move and sway, casting shadows and creating a disorientating yet alluring space for the viewer to enter; where their reflection distorts and slips reappearing again within the textures of the cobbles.

Shades of sheer cobalt blue and fluorescent orange act to dispel the reading of the image, referring instead to the emotive repel+attraction of a WARNING! sign.

 

 

Chaos 2002

Screenprinted acrylic sheet, acrylic paint 7 x 3 x 2.5m

Step-up 2007

Step Up

proprioceptive adj. relating to stimuli produced and perceived within an organism.  esp. relating to the position and movement of the body.
[Latin proprius ‘own’ + RECEPTIVE]

Kinaesthesia (“the feeling of movement in all skeletal and muscular structures” ) is the first of 3 methods of proprioceptive signal generated and received by the body to give us our sense of self-awareness, of ‘being’.

As we look downwards into the viewing box of Step-Up, we experience abstracted images of body movement – shifting weight, balance, stepping, lifting and placing of feet. This hypnotic and rhythmic formation gradually induces a sympathetic reaction in our own limbs, the sensations of kinaesthesia.

Yet the movements we see performed within a formalised stage-like space are not clear and continuous, but are cut, shortened, repeated and distorted by reflection, becoming more akin to our own inconstant and fragmented awareness of body movement and of self, throughout the day.

In Step-Up we see a continuation of the artist’s on-going fascination with, and research into proprioceptive triggers. Her trademark manipulation of spatial organisation and integral movement is apparent, to create a fleeting sense of ‘being here’ now within the viewer.

 

 

Step-Up (Installation views) 2007

DVD (3 sequences 5min looped), plywood, paint, acrylic sheet. 50 x 65 x 70cm

Impression – a small space for you 2007

Impression - a small space for you

Delineated rectangular walls, the warmth of diffused light filtered through fragile, skin-like paper textures create an inviting space for the viewer to enter. Reminiscent of Japanese paper shoji screens, these walls however, are punctured and impressed with anamorphic body shapes.

Printed lines of paper clothing patterns hint at the intended body presence and shape.

In this installation, the artist explores the ways in which we inhabit spaces, making them our own, leaving our ‘impression’ and delineated markings on our surroundings, whether they be real or imagined, in our wake.

‘Impression’ can be said to be a structure of ‘being here’. An articulation perhaps of how it feels to ‘be’ in the world - sometimes a fleeting impression - momentary, fragile, passing and diffused.

The artist’s intention is to imbue the viewer with a sense of body awareness, rhythm, movement, ‘being here’.

 

 

Impression - a small space for you

Tracing, pattern & greaseproof papers, bias binding, acrylic paint, steel wire, bulldog clips. 

2.5 x 2 x 3m