Not Nothing Nowhere
blink : filmo and steel rods, variable size,1998.
bluff : second hand synthetic rug and plasticine, 3ft x 3ft x 2ft, 1998.
blind : wool blankets, mohair wool and synthetic hairy material, 16ft x 6ft x 2ft, 1998.
Not Nothing Nowhere, The Master Shipwrights House, Watergate Street, Deptford, London, UK, 1998. Group exhibition, Phyllida Barlow, David Cheeseman, John Issacs, Johnathan Callan, Leila Galloway, Elizabeth Rosser.
Using the formal architecture of the house, the three works existed over two floors and five rooms. I wanted all the titles to begin with the letter b - blink, bluff and blind - lots of words beginning with b have Viking origins - thinking about how we feel/think through our eyes.
“...Pressing itself to the steps, sloshing and thudding again the slime green brickwork the Thames tries entry to Watergate Street. Beside the steps, the dilapidated and forlorn waterfront houses of the former Royal Naval Dockyards at Deptford are looking to the future.Hidden behind high walls their existence has remained forgotten for 100 years or more but the energy and meticulous eye of Chris Mazeika and William Richard’s is about to bring new life. With their architectural project well under their belts - the transformation of a rundown garage into a striking home: Zen meets modernism - the renovation of Mastershipwrights House is on the starting blocks. A mess of history, tastes and styles, the buildings miss their floors and expose their structure with plaster fallout, swollenness timber, packed earth pits, pocked walls and a grim range of crazy peeling wallpapers. The labyrinth of rooms is a maze of close detail as neglect creates its own artwork.Wanting to announce the re-emergence of the houses before renovation, Mazeika and Richard’s invited sculptor Leila Galloway to make an exhibition on site as found, to respond to their manifest physicality. Both were interested in her obsessive enjoyment of the tactile, the sensual, her generous play with materials and Galloway in turn asked 5 more sculptors to join her. Idiosyncratic in their practice, using all manner of ways to put work together, all six artists enjoy making and share a commitment to sculpture carrying its life through a dialogue with materials. They also share a concern about ways of talking about sculpture. Generously, and as an informal setting for conversations about contemporary practice, Mazeika and Richard’s have been hosting ‘dinners-in-progress’ looking from their own background in theatre for any linking connections with the state of their own arts.Barlow, Callan, Cheeseman, Galloway, Issac’s and Rosser, working on site individually and in collaboration, are weaving a rich mix: interpreting and articulating diverse content through shifting perspectives and an intelligent manipulation of the physical, the sensory and the sensual...”.
Press release, 1989.
