For this next issue we ran an open call asking artists to suggest a theme and Richard Kitchen’s suggested theme was selected. He has written this call out and will be our August featured artist. Thank you Richard. @richardkitchenart // https://linktr.ee/richardkitchen and the theme is ..
//////////////////////////////////// Metamorphosis. //////////////////////////////////// In nature, fossils become fuel; minerals become precious stones; insects grow to adulthood via a series of physical changes, casting off one shape or skin to reveal another. What kind of society are we evolving (or mutating) into? Will the planet need a profound transformation to survive? In the mythology of many cultures, people are transformed (by the gods?) into other, non-human, beings: Narcissus, Echo, Pygmalion’s statue are just a few examples. Sometimes the gods transform themselves to engage with the lives of humans and change them forever. Such tales have been celebrated and interpreted by Ovid, Kafka, Titian, Dali, Angela Carter, Paula Rego, and others through the ages.
In art, an idea or medium might merge with another to create a new manifestation. And let’s not forget our superheroes and monsters, of course! And what about us plain ordinary folk too, who might play a different role several times every day as we encounter different environments and situations…
And here is how you responded …
Artist: Pascal Brateau
Website: http://troisquatorze.fr.nf
Instagram: @pascalbrateau
Description: The concrete sculpture "mue#3" (moult) are based on the unfolding of a house, which gives rise to a new volumetric for home.
Artist: Anja Blau
Website: Blauhaus.co.uk
Instagram: @blauhaus__
Description: My concept is 'Beauty in the Broken'... I take, what is considered 'waste', objects that once had a function and have had lived a life and transform these into vibrant sculptures. Through various processes I bring those objects 'back to life'
Artist: David Ian Bickley
Website: www.davidianbickley.com
Description: DARKWOOD takes the idea of pareidolia within nature and how man searches for symmetry in the abstract, but all of this placed within the idea of the dark wood which itself comes from Dante where he says ''In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to / Myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.''.
Entering the DARKWOOD is a threshold symbol; the soul entering the perils of the unknown; the realm of death; the secrets of nature, or the spiritual world which man must penetrate to find meaning — then it becomes a monomyth which is also very central to my work, the idea the hero undergoing some kind of ritual journey in which they will return changed.
Artist: Cally Trench
Instagram: @callytrench
Description: These drawings show hands from which feathers are sprouting. The hands and feet are not yet wings, but can never go back to being hands and feet. Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' is a collection of stories in which human beings are transformed into trees, animals and birds, sometimes against their will but sometimes to escape a worse fate at the hands of the gods. What does it feel like to be in the process of that transformation? To be halfway between the person that you are ceasing to be and the bird that you are becoming? There is the promise of flight, freedom, an escape to the air, but there is the horrendous loss of human identity and the inevitable separation from all the people that you love.
Titles: Cally Trench, 'Metamorphosis (Duck)' (2021), Pen and ink and watercolour on watercolour paper, each drawing 40 x 30 cm
Artist: Genevieve Emelia Justice
Instagram: @genevieveemelia_art
Description: As a painter, my work usually circulates around skin. In this series, I took everyday natural objects such as this banana and reimagined them as though they were human covered in skin. This is an ongoing commentary on how humans creating mass consumerism are threatening to destroy nature as we know it and how even fruit may be grown in a lab in the not so distant future.
Artist: Mato Enki
Instagram: @m.enki.m.enki.m.enki
Description: “TARANTULA”. Mixed Media sculpture, 2022. This work combined materials from a car engine and a sheet of recycled material. The idea of creating a hybrid of product and solution to environmental issues conjured in me ideas of anthropomorphism, two ideas totally opposed to each other, coming to life as no definable thing.
Artist: Yvonne Clark
Instagram: @yvonneclark61
Description: 'Mitosis' Watercolour depicting cell structures in the process of cell division.
Organic shapes are held together with gold threads about to morph and produce.
Using watercolour as a medium replicates the process of Metamorphosis, by granulating pigments that help to reproduce these cells.
Artist: Martin Williamson
Instagram: @martinwilliamsonsculpting
Description: Transition. Represents the struggle of identity. Was made to challenge the concept that why does the physical form we're born with define who we are.
Artist: Dave Gowers
Instagram: @crocwells
Description: Out of medical necessity, the needle is pushed into the vein, the plastic vials are quickly filled with blood. All that is left is a distant sensation, of a bite, and a microscopic hole. The plaster is stuck on, to stem any further blood loss. It comes off, later in the bath, it is lying on the floor, having changed, delicate, fragile, only retaining a distant memory of its past existence. The work was made in response to a recent long illness and the time i spent in hospital. Being in hospital was unpleasant and not what I would have chosen, but there was much that i experienced and saw that was fascinating and wonderful.
Artist: María X. Fernández
Instagram: @maria_x.fernandez
Description: “Corpus Luris”, Intervened book, Tome of a legal encyclopaedia takes the appearance of a fossilized tree, human law is absorbed by natural law
Artist: Victoria Rotaru
Instagram: @vic.rotaru
Description: She transforms familiar items into fantastical abstract forms. Her art is about continuity of life and the transformation of it. Through this new reality, her practice has shifted into a focus on tactile representations of intimacy and connection between humanity and nature. A connection that borders upon sensibility and the sublime, especially in a world continuously rocked in chaos brought on by the natural order. This preoccupation has morphed from highly detailed photography of the surfaces to magic abstract forms.
The original series of photographs from which ANTINOMY series morphed is called Metamorphosis, as it was inspired from the idea of rebirth.
Artist: Sarah Grounds
Instagram: @midlifepsychosis
Description: “Menopause” . This work explores the emotions a women feels as she is going through the menopause. Changing but with no knowledge of into what.
Artist name: FAZAR ROMA AGUNG WIBISONO
Instagram: @fazar.r.a.wibisono
Description: TITLE : REJUVENATE EXOGENETIC #3, MEDIUM : DRAWING INK ON PAPER
(2022)
With rejuvenation we try to cultivate the soul that has been in us for years looking for experience in dealing with what life is, who we are and what to do next with our soul, as just as metamorphosis is rebirth both physically and mentally, the soul always tries to rejuvenate all of our actions and deeds for the better and with the ultimate goal at the mouth of the soul whether it is wisdom, purification, salvation, protection, harmony, liberation, awareness, hypocrisy, stupidity, arrogance or greed.
Artist: Joe Coleman
Instagram: @joetimothycoleman
Description: "Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology - put simply - claims that language and writing are separate beasts and much of Western writing fails to embrace the difference, resulting in work which lacks. In 2021, the entire text was passed backed and forth through translation, autocorrect and grammar software until it resembled little more than a shadow of itself in an attempt to distance the very text from the writing processes Derrida critiqued.
The new text has been sifted, mined and recalibrated to create poignant, absurd and at times serendipitous new lines and verse: All sentences are as translated."
Artist: Silvia
Instagram: @silviabattista68
Description: These three images are part of the work in progress 'Theresia And The Chthonic Ones' - a performance, a book chapter and a series of drawings inspired by the work of Donna Haraway. It is an eulogy to composting creative processes, to Theresia's gender shapeshifting and their prophetic power; to all the fermenting creatures of the underground.
Artist: Kirsty Greenwood
Instagram: @kirsty_greenwoodillustration
Description: 'Sedna' by Kirsty Greenwood. The story of Sedna, Goddess of the Arctic sea, is one of unrequited love, traumatic family ties and mutilation. Her hands, chopped off by her father as she pleads to be rescued after escaping from the Crow her father married her to against her will, become the whales, seals and walruses of the ocean and Sedna herself the Goddess of the sea and its creatures.
Artist: Olana Light
Instagram: @olanalight
Description: In the latest ongoing photography project Searching for a Place to Belong I explore the idea of human connections with nature through camouflage and metamorphoses: by creating a series of costumes made from natural materials and photographs it within its natural landscape. Exploring notions of the ‘self and its connection with the body, others and nature in the world, this work presents new perceptions by challenging audiences to accept the absurdity of the Other.
Artist: Noelle Genevier
Description: Disparate 2d images converge creating three-dimensional sculptures, metamorphosing into speculative objects. Removing backgrounds, freeing images from previous constraints and merging unrelated subject matter the three-dimensional collages investigate new beginnings.
Artist: Ali Darke
Instagram: @ali_darke
Description: BEASTLY I: Made from old, warn linen sheets, upholstery stuffing and branches found in woods reputed to grow above a burial pit for victims of the Black Death. Whittled to their hard core, and bleached they become arboreal bones. BEASTLY appears to hover between states of life and death, tree and creature, escape and entrapment; a hybrid being.
Artist: Ellie Moore Fine Art
Instagram: @elliemoore_fineart
Description: This chrysalis, defined by its transitional status, is dead and static: this fixed artefact, the proto-butterfly still inside and the cycle interrupted, allows this gleaming whole to be preserved rather than ruptured. The mirror exposes it top and bottom, out of its element against an upside down sky, offered larger than life for reflection on an aborted process.
Artist: Hannah Jean Moulds
Instagram: @hannahjeanie
Description: To force flowers through a process of mutation, so they never look like the original form, imitating other life forms to reproduce like parasites or sprawling attachments to the human body that are fleshy, organ like, a mutation gone wrong. Organs, as repulsive as they may seem, binds us together. I'm interested in how things evolve. Not a real evolution, more of a futuristic speculation. Transforming or mirroring the world, in a way that nothing would die, it would keep transforming, fluidly from one thing to another.
Artist: Sam Wright
Instagram: @newflesh
Description: This silicone sculpture displayed on a handcrafted latex sheet is about the corporeal, the uncanny, and connection with the self and the body. Being transgender, going through transition embodies change and transformation; and this theme runs through nearly all of my work, and often involves post or pre-humanoid forms. This piece is intended to evoke the feelings of rebirth and change, while also relating to the collective universal feeling of the uncanny while perceiving an almost human form.
Artist: Sally Broadbent
Instagram: @sallybroadbentartist
Description: The classic photographic printing process of cyanotype merges with the digital realm in this piece featuring the artist's son. Reminiscent of a figure in foetal position, ready to transition into another realm. In real life, the boy is undergoing physical changes before the mother's eyes, alongside changes that can't be seen physically - his neurological system improving rapidly as his disordered speech develops and improves.
