Soft split the Stone

About

The title connects them all in some way –  from Philippa Brown’s portals inbetween worlds to the split bluestones of Aled Simon’s Legend Extension II; the lost islands and ghost tunnels of Tom Cardew’s filmwork that slips in and out of different timelines;  Alice Briggs explores the archeology of family and place in Each of These Things Is True and Rebecca Jagoe, who looks at the language of stones to discuss illness and geological timescales.

Soft split the Stone is a pause, like any good exhibition should be. The work is not static, but shifting and changing in meaning and context.  Below and above the crust of the earth  – between the particles of sediment and the flow of lava, stone is not set.

Philippa Brown creates playful, sometimes humorous, often ambiguous work; tension is never far away, kept  just beneath the surface. Growing from an intuitive approach to studio-practice-as-daily-ritual, her sculptural work is sometimes fragile, often unstable and shifting. She finds interconnectedness between histories, materials, beliefs and bodies of all kinds.

Aled Simons’ Legend Extension II invites the viewer to re-imagine a Stonehenge arch as if it was made of plastic aerobic gym equipment - a totem to keep-fit cult leaders and their desire to make us live forever, perhaps. What if our memories and collective knowledge were recorded, rewound and re-recorded onto mouldy VHS tape? Stonehenge was originally erected in Wales; it now stands as a second-hand monument built of Welsh bluestone.

In Each of these things is true Alice Briggs has spent time at Cwm Elan, exploring the site with her parents and children, but particularly her father, discussing the history/archaeology/culture of the land and family memories. 

Machynys Forgets Itself is a film, installation and AI-generated image research project by Tom Cardew. It explores collective memory, social class dynamics and the anachronistic collapse of linear history through collective myth-making and the digital. Machynys is a place that was once an island, but is no longer built up above sea levels. It was a place of underground tunnels and, later, of industrial factories, burning furnaces and terrace rows. Now, the site of a centuries old, self-serving community has become a luxury golf course, the only remnant of its past found below, down underneath, through the golf course hole. 

Working throughout g39 testing new work, Rebecca Jagoe works across text, performance and sculpture. Their work is a material memoir of how their experiences of illness, madness, and gender are informed by specific Western, Christian narratives around the ‘human’, and human dominion over the earth. Against this they use the figure of the monster, the animal, or other-than-humans to consider other forms of subjectivity and agency. 

The artists have been based at g39 during the last two years on the g39 Fellowship Programme, which is part of the Freelands Artists Programme. Soft split the Stone is a mixture of new work, work from the last two years and from projects that have grown alongside the parallel exhibition In the Same Breath at the Freelands Foundation, Chalk Hill, 23rd March - 29th May 2023. 

Featuring: Aled Simons, Alice Briggs, Anisa Nuh-Ali, Emmie McLuskey, Helouise O’Reilly, Jan Hopkins, Jonathan HS Ross, Lea Torp Nielsen, Matt Zurowski, Myrid Carten, Philippa Brown, Phillip McCrilly, Rachael Colley, Rebecca Jagoe, Renèe Helèna Browne, Robin Price, Ross Fleming, Seiko Kinoshita, Sekai Machache, Tom Cardew.

In the Same Breath features the work of all twenty artists based across the UK participating in the Freelands Artist Programme and is accompanied by a publication, Unchorus.