Make Hauser & Wirth's summer exhibition in London, 'Strange Friends' brings together a collective of artist-makers exploring new conceptual narratives through mixed material disciplines including glass, clay and stone. Across large scale installations and still life compositions, the exhibition considers the way in which we interact with objects and how they in turn occupy space. Employing visual and tactile stimulation, the works question how we encounter the complexity and possibility of colour and our sensory response to textural and surface finish.
Anchored by form and process, a rich and varied vocabulary of material interpretation emerges from each work. Playful and experimental investigations of functional forms and objects question familiar archetypes, reimagining notions of use and the everyday. A common thread remains throughout; a sculptural ambiguity and sense of curiosity, testifying to the dynamic breadth of contemporary material-led practice.
About the Makers
Alice Walton
Ceramicist Alice Walton creates highly complex, multilayered labyrinthine forms infused with a rich tonal blending technique. Comprised of individual clay components, Walton's abstract scenes emerge through a technique of repetitive and ritualistic mark-making, highlighting the tension between the meditative coloured clays and kinetic surface furnish. Thin ribbons of porcelain ripple across the surfaces of Walton's abstract sculptures. Gently sloped domes and pillars are covered in countless individual strips, which vary in thickness and length and add irregular texture and depth to the finished pieces. In a world that is increasingly changing minute by minute, she attempts to slow down, allowing her to steadily evolve–brick by brick–her forms. Her work is about a consideration of the everyday, taking the time to notice the unseen things in our environment and re-evaluating them. The linear and chaotic, the regular and irregular. Pivoting from the literal into the imaginary and abstract.
James Shaw
James Shaw is a London-based designer who makes objects and furniture. His work aims to bring out the inherent beauty of diverse materials, often uniting or contrasting handmade and tactile qualities with the structured and systematised. Frequently, his work considers the resources around us, challenging the notions of 'waste' and 'value'. He is probably best known for his work with recycled plastics, and his selfbuilt extruding gun, which produces blobby, gloopy and baroque forms, creating objects of unexpected beauty from a problematic material.
Nicola Tassie
Nicola Tassie is a London-based ceramic artist whose work traverses the boundaries of current ceramic practice to explore and manipulate the material and conceptual possibilities of domestic forms, investigating the relationship between function and art. With a desire to develop the language of ceramics and engage in questioning its contemporary relevance, the thrown object is re-assigned to serve a more visual, narrative or aesthetic role. For this exhibition, Tassie's domestic wares also form the basis of more conceptual works, to display functional, functionally ambiguous and overtly sculptural works together in larger scale installations and 'still life' sets.
Jochen Holz
Glass artist Jochen Holz produces vibrant, organically shaped glassware with a spontaneous energy. Holz specialises in lampworking, a technique that transforms prefabricated borosilicate glass tubes by melting with a torch. He is one of few makers practising the method in Britain, with each one-off piece of molten glass given shape and texture using bespoke tools. Holz's approach to working with hot glass is always improvised and free formed, evoking animal and plant like shapes. His work with neon examines the possibilities of sculptural lighting, bypassing the conventional and opts instead for thick borosilicate glass tubing to create free-standing three-dimensional shapes. These pieces cpature what can be achieved with conventional neon in terms of size and open up new aesthetic qualities within the neon tradition.
Marianne Huotari
Marianne Huotari is a Helsinki-based ceramic and textile artist who reinterprets traditions in a modern way, by applying a version of the classic Finnish textile technique 'ryijy', together with unpredictable materials. Using ceramics in place of woollen yarn, her colour palate mimics that of the original woolen fibres: creams and light greens alongside glowing pinks and blues populate her tapestries and free-standing sculptures. With her pieces she explores hecticness of modern days through slowness of craftsmanship. Each of her ceramic works is approached with tenderness, whether it be a bead passing through her fingers or a wall hanging requiring countless hours of stitching.
Julia Obermaier
Playing with notions of the second view, Julie Obermaier's unconventional jewellery pieces bring to light the moments that would otherwise go unnoticed. Through a process of skilled delicacy, Obermaier approaches the limits and secrets of the stones to construct new spaces, hollowing insides with corners and nooks. Thin slices of coloured gemstone fragments have been layered and overlapped to create sections of contrasting opacity and then joined together using coloured resin. Enclosing a blank space, she intends for the free space generated to hold the wearers own personal feelings, perceptions and sensations. A means to protect the wearer's inner space, like a second skin. The jewellery of Obermaier connects a sense of interiority with the outer world, every part of them is unique and an embodiment of unswayable nature.
Jinya Zhao
Through the medium of glass, Jinya Zhao explores themes of environment, emotions and personal experiences. In her current practice and research, she questions how blown glass can connect maker and viewer and its potential to evoke memories and the imagination through sublime qualities such as colour, obscurity, revelation and form. Prompting a sense of 'synesthetic touch', the visual experience of her work enables others to follow their own journey from vision to touch. Re-invoking a multisensory approach to her blown glass artwork, she aims to extend beyond the visual and to connect us with the unreachable. Since 2019, Zhao has been developing collections of vessels that seek to evoke the 'non-existent existence' or the contradictory nature of the interior, exterior and empty space. For example, in some of the works she uses opaque and transparent layered blown glass to deliberately obscure the interior of the intricate organic forms that exude a mysterious aura that connects us to the blurred appearance the landscape takes on a cloudy or foggy day.
Press release courtesy Hauser & Wirth.
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