Group critiques
The audio for each critique will be available on the HOARD SoundCloud soon.
Ryan Thompson
Artist statement (as stated on HOARD website)
Contemporary Artist Ryan Thompson is based in Leeds, but is working throughout the country. His work transverses several mediums including film and performance, more recently leaning towards live and participatory art forms. The focus of his practice is based around fairytale culture – an umbrella term including local and global folklore, legends, mythical creatures and story telling. Appropriating these into his artistic universe helps to develop and communicate understandings of their use in forms of escapism and how their narratives and illusions work and affect us.
Jade Montserrat
Artist statement (as stated on HOARD website)
Accumulation & The Archive.
These words crop up throughout research I am undertaking as one of the resident artists at Crescent Arts, Scarborough.
I process imagery, creating an archive. This process involves printmaking, embedding images in hand-made paper, making books, performance, writing and creating sculptural objects and installations.
My participation in Hoard will allow the work to develop by transferring solitary and intimate actions performed in the studio into a space intended for exchange.
Anna-Karin Lilleengen
Artist statement (as stated on HOARD website)
Drawing on ideas from Walter Benjamin on the aura of the art object and how the era of mechanical reproduction has altered the nature of the work of art, Lilleengen creates unique pieces that express the effects of time on the physical via a camera and technique that are in themselves considered almost as transient: antique, deteriorating and, speaking of handcrafting as a process, something now almost obsolete.
Exploring the boundary between subjective and objective, she creates images that embody her inner experience of the tension, on the one hand, between the transience of the physical and, on the other hand, the perceived permanence of internal experience and aspects of the sub- and unconscious.
The forest features heavily as a setting, being a place where the safe, known personal can merge into more expansive and instinctual experiences of being. Alluding to symbols from the unconscious, such as fairytale or the magical, routes are created into a more ambiguous but perhaps more enduring sense of reality. Here transience and impermanence join with wider elemental forces that are self-renewing to form a source of solace in what is an increasingly digitised, commoditised world.
The forests of Värmland are a place where year on year Anna Lilleengen has spent time, and as such is a natural setting for her work: here the forests are reclaiming their elemental status as people move out and the wild (wolves, bears, boar) move back in. Aspects of pictorialism can be seen in her work that draws inspiration from the wet plate collodion techniques of Sally Mann. The sense of heritage and honouring history is a major strand in the work: physical heritage (the place, the body, the object) and also the spiritual legacy of family/ancestors/culture that one could say is often intuited, rather than reasoned or ‘known’.
Lilleengen creates work that requires you to look closer, reflect and navigate your own way through the darkness of the forest.
