The Path That Runs Across

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Nicholas Cheeseman | Michaela Nettell | Rachel Wilberforce Bond House Project Space, ASC Goodwood Road, London, SE14 6BL Preview Friday 2 May 6.30-8.30pm Exhibition continues 3-5 May 12-5pm and by appointment until Friday 9 May 2014 You who build gardens, don't make parks or green spaces, make margins. Don't make leisure and game parks, make places of jouissance, make closures that are openings. Don't make imaginary objects, make fictions. Don't make representations, make empty spaces, gaps, make neutrality. (Marin, 1992) ‘The path that runs across' brings together work by three artists whose practices explore the binaries of nature/artifice; expression/control; and imagination/matter. For three months Cheeseman, Nettell and Wilberforce have engaged in a reciprocal creative process, responding to each other's research and practice in a three-way dialogue focusing on the manipulation of nature within the urban environment. This has, in turn, informed the development of new works and the configuration of the gallery as a test bed, a controlled environment in which to identify common themes, structures and forms. Sequential photo-studies of concrete grids in a Modernist garden; a stop-motion animation of a sea buoy run aground; a projected film negative revealing the hexagonal tessellations of a city tree grate; and sculptures combining carved tree stumps with found plastic objects are arranged to create a new and playful landscape typified by the rhythmic patterns of grids and frames, intervals, fissures and spaces between. The project's title adapts Louis Marin's analogy of the Rue Traversière (the road that runs across) in his discussion of gardens' unexpected, contradictory designs1, while reflecting the pathways that have opened up between and through the artists' conversations: thepaththatrunsacross.tumblr.com 1 Marin, L. (1992) Lectures traversières. Paris: Albin Michel *** Nicholas Cheeseman uses making as a form of thinking. His material investigations use craft related processes to challenge the integrity of the form being created or deconstructed. The element of failure is often deliberately visible and present, forming part of Cheeseman's interrogation of the value of making and craft in contemporary art practice. Cheeseman is currently undertaking an MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts. Michaela Nettell works across moving image, photography and installation, exploring the potential of projection and collage techniques to affect relations of space, optics and memory. Her ongoing ‘1964 Series' documents incidences of non-orthogonal structures in post-war city architectures, making reference to Frank Lloyd Wright's ‘organic architecture' and the hexagonal plan. Rachel Wilberforce's practice explores the relationship between the everyday and other, specifically drawing from Foucault's notion of heterotopia, through photography, collage and mixed media installation. In approaching landscape, the body and architecture as interchangeable, she examines issues of freedom, control and transgression across the interior and exterior realm, as a spatial and psychological experience. Taking the materiality and physicality of the environment, her work offers up a deconstructed narrative that is at once historical and present, fictitious and real, liminal and fixed. Wilberforce was awarded The Rector's Scholarship for MA Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts (2012/14).