PV: Saturday, 7 October, 6-9pm
Opening Times: 12-6pm on 1 & 8 October
Workshop 1 : Imagining The Future Past, Sunday, 1 Oct, 2pm to 4pm
Workshop 2: Imagining The Past Future, Sunday, 8 Oct,
2pm to 4pm
Location: Eye to Pencil Studio, Ist Floor (no lift), 26 Exmouth Market, London, EC1R 4QE
Contextual Text:
This project swings between drawing and building. The overarching theme of artist-led network POST is a dialogue between art and place, and the participating artists have come together to investigate these ideas.
More than half a century has passed from the everyday use of blueprints. Today we can inspect their imagery not from a functional perspective, but from an aesthetic one. Artist Mary Yacoob was able to find inspiration in architectural blueprint ‘relics’ and produce her own diagram artworks, freely interpreting the symbolic notations of the drawing to an object of line art.
In doing this, Mary enters into the most fundamental discourse in architectural theory: the question of representation and of language.
Looking at Mary’s blueprint artworks, the language of architectural drawings has not been lost in the transition from the horizontal to the vertical planes, i.e. from the plane on which architectural drawings are viewed to the plane on which fine art drawings are exhibited. In encountering them, architect Aliki Kylika started reading the spatial proposals that Mary unintentionally created. This is where the artists' collaboration started: the blueprint artworks resume their linguistic property and are translated into the physical form they communicate. This process also influenced the creation of the artist Helena Wee's 3D animated video, which will align with a structure designed and built by Aliki and Marco Cali, an artist and writer who previously trained as an engineer.
The building of the project and its exhibition will be hosted by Eye to Pencil, a drawing project run by artist and educator Luci Eyers, a place that invites interdisciplinary explorations of drawing. Those visiting the space will be encouraged to draw from and on the pieces, potentially starting anew a process of translation, transgression and transcription between drawing and architecture.
The blueprint artwork selected for this exercise is ‘Constructor’, a work inspired by the plans of a realised building: the Alexandra Road Estate by architect Neave Brown, completed in 1978.
POST is a peer-led network for artists who respond to place.
Former projects include Canalology, a series of artworks along the River Lea in Tottenham, Parables Displaced at the Whitstable Biennale Satellite, Ta·da, an artist-run space in Copenhagen, and Away Day in Wandle Park, Colliers Wood.
The members of the POST collective participating are:
Aliki Kylika is an architect, a performance maker and an educator, and co-founder of the Viral Istitue of Performance Architecture. In her work themes of the everyday, public space, craftsmanship, language, representation, the user, form, function and deconstruction merge in an ambition to produce emancipating spaces and situations.
Helena Wee is an artist, writer, creative coder and PhD researcher at Birkbeck. She utilises science and technology, investigating algorithmic paradigms through speculative worlds.
Mary Yacoob’s work encompasses drawing, printmaking, large scale vinyl, and lightboxes. She appropriates visual languages from architectural plans, maps, geological and engineering diagrams, alphabets and musical notation. By taking diagrams out of their original context, she seeks to transform them into mysterious cyphers for the imagination, creating connections between disciplines.
Marco Cali is a UK based artist, curator and educator with a parallel interest in writing, cinema and theatre. He works in a number of 2D and 3D forms, looking at how fiction is constructed, and narrative is structured, particularly relating to the English narrative and how he (an Italian by birth) relates to it.
