Homeland – Previewed

Home sweet home? We head down to Wolstenholme Creative Space to find out…

A homeland is a birthplace, an environment, a sanctuary. The word can also evoke a feeling of place and belonging; from an artist’s perspective, pinpointing a personal reflection of an artwork’s origin.

In the latest exhibition at one such artist sanctuary, Wolstenholme Creative Space (WCS), Homeland seeks to demystify the artist’s studio. With suggestions of deep cultural association with state, region or territory, the nine artists exhibiting (a mixture of Liverpool-based current undergraduates and practising artists) have their own particular interpretations of what this means.

There’s Justyna Czasnowicz, a recent graduate brought up in post Communist Poland, working with film photography laden with Catholic overtones and snapshots of daily life and memories. Her choice of works were inspired by the WCS building, “situated near the dynamic and modern city centre [it] holds memories of the past…amid the crumbled walls one can find a weaving loom, or a very aged church bench.”

Photographer Lucy Westall, born and raised in a British Army base in Cyprus, develops all of her film back home. Her father was the Garrison photographer in the 1980s, and two images from his collection feature in the show. Turkish checkpoints and derelict land combine, guarded closely by the Turkish army and the UN, the scars of the 1974 invasion lingering.

Matt Weir, a film and sound artist, exhibits a series of photographs taken from Google street view exploring his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina; capturing glitches in time and space by finding subject matter fractured by the process of merging photographs. These sit alongside sound recordings of his mother and sister reading his grandmother’s letters back home to the US from Berlin, just after the World War II.

Part of the need to form this exhibition, explains curator and third year LJMU Fine Art student Rose Parish, was the desire to understand her own artist space at university and explore her practice as a painter. “One of the things that has come out of LJMU and us as artists [is that] we realised that we can’t spend the rest of our lives sat in the studio…we need to construct our practice around space and how to use space.” Her knowledge makes it easy to forget she’s still a third-year student, caught in that exciting yet terrifying period between working hard to achieve her final grades and thinking about what’s next. This is a confident vehicle for the works and artists on show; painting, photography and works on film all enhance the feeling of place and time that WCS naturally emits through those crumbling walls.

Seal of approval comes from John Byrne, Lecturer at Liverpool School of Art and Design. “To get a group of third year students putting a coherent and critical show like this on, and under their own steam, is a real testament to the students themselves and, of course, to the Fine Art Staff who’ve worked with them and embraced all of the new challenges and changes that the Programme has faced in recent years”. Cant wait to see the finished results.

Preview Thursday 26th, with music from The Electric Valves and Repulsive Rapture, 6pm-11pm

Exhibiton continues until 5 February 12-4pm

Posted on 25/01/2012 by thedoublenegative