Space | angellspace

Collapsed (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Collapsed (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Helen Angell-Preece creates architectural installations utilising awkward angles, describing a lived space within - at once familiar, yet also uncomfortable, unfinished and unstable. Hybrid wooden structures that could be sections of stud walling or lean-to roofing, create an extended and defined threshold crossing for the viewer to enter and move through.

Standing at this threshold, between outside and inside, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out. A place in transition, from one state to another. We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between hostility and hospitality.

Close attention to choice of materials is important. Contrasting densities of wood, fabric, wool and paint are utilised to exaggerate and enhance the textures of our everyday living. The structures framing our buildings and homes and the more fluid contact and association of our clothes, bodies and furnishings are invoked. These are universal, non-hierarchical materials through which many of us directly experience the world.

Here, soft stretch fabric and seemingly more robust building construction materials are treated in the same way – cut, folded, stretched, woven, torn, frayed, dripped and draped – to articulate a layered and compound-angled aesthetic language.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Growing up travelling between Scotland and England, familiarity and a sense of belonging are found in the non-places such as motorway service stations and explorations through city edgelands. The artists’s practice is a physical mapping of space, using her own body as a measure, to understand and to test out the limits of her own ‘space’ or sense of ‘home’ in the world.

Angell-Preece believes a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. A willingness to take the risk of the displacement of our angle of vision (Bhabha, Homi. 2017) is one that reaps rich rewards, understanding and new ways of thinking and relating with the Other, across fixed, defensive borders and boundaries.

Collapsed (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Wardrobe door, key, wool. 130 x 70 x 45cm (hxwxd)

Cavities (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Cavities (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

Cavities (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

Bendy Plywood, acrylic paint, MDF, CLS wood. 160 x 260 x 210cm

There’s no Place like ‘Home’? (Things Fall, Fall Apart) 2017

There's no Place like 'Home'? 2017

To shelter, to build a sanctuary, establish one’s ‘place’ in the world is a primary human instinct.

Red stains show through as the façade slips, the undercoat and vulnerable underside revealed. Colour, like signals choreograph alternative routes or journeys throughout the space.

CLS wood, door, interior gloss, Perspex, plywood. 300cmx250cmx285cm

Beyond Skin 2016

Beyond Skin 2016

The place where we encounter the Stranger is a threshold.

Metaphorically, we can see “thresholds” defining the the edges of human being in many ways: () at the limits of my physical body, a threshold of pain, of pleasure, a threshold at the limits of one culture and another, one political group and another.

At such thresholds of experience, we stand in an event: an opening onto hospitality. But doors can be opened or shut. Or stand ajar. It may be unclear who or what moves first.[1]

A shelter, an extension of the space of the body made from membranous, skin-like materials.

Awkward angles describe a lived space within, hybrid wooden structures that could be stage flats, sections of stud wall or lean-to roofing anchor dynamic swathes of soft jersey dancer’s fabric.

At once warm and welcoming, this architecture of non-place forces a negotiation of barriers or thresholds, we are unsure whether to enter or keep out.

We find ourselves in the position of the stranger or the foreigner, between Hostility and Hospitality.

Artist Helen Angell-Preece has created this installation in response to the idea of Being in Place, from the position of her own creative practice exploring the sense of being ‘not in place’, not belonging, or in locating and identifying oneself in multiple places at once.

The artist believes this threshold position to be one of value, a place with multiple viewpoints is a position of power. The ability to recognise we are all Strangers, we are all somehow Foreigners, may perhaps lead us to a Place where,

each would take the risk of other, of difference, without feeling threatened by the existence of an otherness, rather, delighting to increase through the unknown that is there to discover, to respect, to favor, to cherish.[2]

[1] Kearney, Richard., and Semonovitch, Kascha. 2011. Phenomenologies of the Stranger New York: Fordham University Press P4.

[2] Cixous, Helene. 1972. ‘Sorties’, The Newly Born Woman London: I. B. Tauris P78.

Jersey Lycra Fabric, CLS timber, packing string, acrylic paint. 2016

There’s no place like ‘Home’?

There’s no place like ‘Home’?

1^st July 2017 marked the 20^th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China from British administration.

14^th, 15^th, 16^th August 2017 mark the 70^th anniversary of the dates of Independence from British rule of India, Pakistan and Partition of the country.

This is a vital time to open up discussion about ideas of Home and Displacement, the importance of incorporating post-colonial dialogues in opening up new angles of vision and of thinking about our own identities and ‘Place’ in the world.

Please join us for an informal discussion and exhibition tour led by Lecturer and specialist in African History Dr Matthew Graham and Reader in Humanities and Urban Theories Dr Lorens Holm with 5 artists of different nationalities exploring just such themes and ideas through materials, space, print, language, paint, humour and sculpture.

Helen Angell-Preece is a Welsh-born, Scottish-raised, London-educated artist with an English family. Continual movement and journeying up and down the length of the country, and the idea of ‘Home’ always being elsewhere inform her spatial and ‘displaced’ architectural installation practice. She believes strongly the threshold or in-between position, a space with multiple viewpoints that allows us to acknowledge the stranger or foreigner in ourselves, is one of power and value.

Hong Kong-born, Scottish artist Jacinda Chan explores the cultural differences, symbolism in Chinese culture, slippage in language and translation and play on words through her sculptural art objects and practice.

Clara Lang-Ezekiel is a dual French and U.S. citizen. Her own experience of belonging to two strong national identities have lead her into an in-depth study and research project on African Histories and their relationship to European and Western notions of Identity.

For Astrid Leeson home is where she was brought up in the isolated Scottish Highlands but she has spent many hours travelling the length of Britain to family in the crowded East End of London and a South East New town. These almost contradictory influences are another of the dualities that inform her spatial walking, drawing, painting and installation practice.

Rishi Srinivasan is a Californian citizen and former active member of the U.S. military, with a close family connection and cultural heritage in South India. His unique background and experience feed into strong graphic imagery and print works.

Thursday 24th August, 1 – 2.30pm

6th Floor Crawford Building

Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design

13 Perth Road

Dundee DD1 4HT

With thanks to Gordon MacKenzie for kindly documenting the event: (info@mackenziefoto.com)

Walk : Don’t Walk

Walk : Don't Walk 2016

My work is driven by a fascination with urban Space and Place – in particular the ‘Edgelands’ or liminal, between spaces of the city where a construction site or derelict building reveals the armature of our dwelling, showing the physical and material aspect of our ‘Being’ in the world.

Drawing upon my own experience and research within city space, I construct interactive installations, choreographing a journey with structure, rhythm, contrasting materials and colour, a physical space for the viewer to experience for themselves.

My intention in creating this kinaesthetic experience, is to put the audience temporarily in the position or role of the ‘Stranger’, or the ‘Foreigner’. In so doing we have a heightened sense of our bodies, of ourselves, of our existence and ‘Being’ within the world.

For the PG Humanities Rebirth conference 2016, I installed within the University of Dundee, Dalhousie Building a ramp and platform walkway constructed using re-appropriated wooden palettes found on the street. This structure, using materials associated with movement of goods and international transit, has been re-formed, painted, re-constructed, re-born to form a liminal threshold space to be negotiated by the viewer.

Wood, palettes, acrylic paint, wool. 1m x 4m x 3m

Horos (My Space, Your Space, Our Space) 2016

Horos (My Space, Your Space, Our Space)

Horos, khoros, choros: a space, a boundary marker, dance,

Many of the man-made structures, buildings and settlements visited on a study trip to Athens and Aegina had a visible as well as tangible, layered, complicated history. Their purpose was multi-functional and has un-definable identities.

Acropolis in Athens (Acro, meaning edge or extremity, polis, meaning, city) functioned as a sacred space, a temple to worship and receive protection from the gods. But it also served as a fortification, for if the city was to be successfully captured by enemy forces, the Acropolis also had to be possessed as well.

Kolona Archaeological Site – layers of time are visible in a series of ten towns each built on the ruins of the previous one during the Bronze Age (2500-1600 B.C.) The architecture of the houses changed and responded to outside attacks from the sea, doors and windows turning inwards, the walls of the domestic home becoming a part of the city wall and fortification.

Kapodistriako Orfanotrofeio Orphanage building has been a refuge for children, housed vast numbers of war refugees, as well as functioning as a Prison to incarcerate Greek citizens during the German occupation of the Island, and later political prisoners post-2^nd World War.

War Bunkers at Perdika Concrete and Iron defences built into the headland of the Island, materials and construction originally carried out by Germans during WW1, they were subsequently used against the allied forces during WW2.

Although not inspired by such painful and traumatic events, this kind of complicated overlapping of space and place, is one I relate to in the aims of my own installation practice.

Making use of boundaries, barriers and edges I am inspired by the Edgelands and non-places of the city to create a space of indeterminate identity, which contrasts and jars with its surrounding environment. The purpose of these experiential installations is to make the viewer more aware of both their surroundings and of themselves ‘Being there’ in that moment.

The physicality of the act of creating these sometimes uncomfortable interventions is important, as is the kinaesthetic sense they instill upon entering. They are a way of exploring a sense of ‘not Belonging’, not ‘Being at home’ in the world, and the mediation between feeling rooted in a place and conversely the freedom, heightened awareness and possibility of movement that comes from being put in the position of the Foreigner, or the Stranger.

These physical installations can be described as embodying the concept of Horos – a space, a non-place, a boundary marker, a choreography – an area defined by movement / action of the Body.

Ehfkhareesto Pollee to Elika Vlachaki, Nancy Avgery and George Mouratides.

Wood, palettes, scaffold safety netting, pattern paper, digital photographs, steel wire, wool. 2.5m x 2.5m x 3m

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

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