The Islanders

About

NETTIE HORN is pleased to present The Islanders, a show that brings together ten artists who live and work in Britain today and who explore themes of Britishness. Each artist has been invited to engage with the theme of the show by using the title as both a literal and metaphorical point of departure and undertaking an investigation into the nature of the contemporary society in which we live. Each artist has produced work for this show which constitutes a distinctive response to their own feelings and perceptions of what it is to be British in the 21st century; and taken together, the works of the show provide a vivid cross-sectional vision of life on our Island.

Guy Allott's works allude to the grand narrative of Western civilisation, exploring the preoccupation with discovery, conquest and edifice that continues to hold such prevalence in contemporary society. Allott's paintings present a merging of the philosophies of science and culture that offer an essential critique of the socio-historical beliefs that have shaped our society today.

Ruth Claxton's theatrical assemblage presents the viewer with a riot of sensual delusion stemming from a collision of colourful glitz with traditional yet defiantly mutated figurines and gaudy ornamentation ' thus giving rise to a kitsch humour balanced with disturbing overtones. The effect is multiplied through the use of mirrors which, by creating a landscape, mimic virtual space by blankly reflecting actual space; negating the area between the viewer and the work.

For Kirsten Glass a 'British Artist', like all humans produced by the visuals of global capitalism, is an imaginary construct whose personal and collective identity is nothing but a montage of received fictions. Usually in Glass' work, magazine models are cast as actors in a painterly world of mannered gothic melancholy and harsh pop decadence but for this show she will revisit a pared down format from her past work using the text 'WHO DUNNIT?' which while suggesting an English murder mystery at the same time bluntly exposes the anxiety around any authorship of Britishness.

Nick Goss's large scale paintings contain a strong vein of romantic curiosity for the world's empty or forgotten spaces. He creates listless and melancholic atmospheres that vibrate with echoes of the past majesties of untamed places. As he lives in London, fragments of prosaic life creep into the work which the artist feels create ambiguity and tension, a conflict between artifice and nature, the modern and a more unspoilt past.

Debbie Lawson's work takes you on a journey through the psychological landscape of the domestic interior where often disparate household objects collide with each other, creating a sort of animated hybrid that has a quietly sinister inner life, and harbours aspirations to be bigger than itself.

Wendy Lewis' work often deals with something apparently mundane and inconsequential, drawing it to our attention if we care to look closely enough. She creates hand-constructed facsimiles of objects which are simply installed, as they would be found in the 'real' world - taking by surprise those who seek them out. By pushing and testing the point at which something becomes 'visible', through a copied replicated object, she teases out a moment at which things will disappear or be seen depending on how we experience them.

Alan McQuillan's sculptural practice is concerned with the repression and negation by Modernity of a fundamental confrontation with death that is intrinsic to our condition as mortal beings. The artist presents the viewer with objects latent with cultural synopsis and invites them to grapple with their histories and the systems through which they have come to us, in order to facilitate us with a glimpse at the profound distances that our experiences travel.

Mike Newton's work deals with the perceptual distortions of reality which come with the twisting of memory and the subtle interventions of insinuating prejudice. Often dealing with subject matter that touches upon issues such as ennui, ritual, role playing and confusion of identity, Newton's work sets out a bleak vision of modern society in which hooded figures tower against a monotone urban backdrop.

Abigail Reynolds works with trajectories, networks and ordering systems. Rather than taking an image as a starting point for making work, she sets in motion a system and set of processes that result in a form being created. Based on research with the Oxford English Dictionary, this work is a rule-based series physically describing the interrelationships in a set of words. All the forms are built to the same basic rules which dictate how information about a word, printed in the OED can be translated into a set of spatial dimensions.

Kim Rugg's absurdly obsessive work seeks to examine meaning in relation to construction by taking apart, dissecting and re-ordering information to reveal and rehabilitate the 'fabric' of things. By reclaiming certain key samples of the ephemeral media, by which quantities of equally transitory information is conveyed to us on a daily basis, the artist aims to do away with the signified in order to draw attention to the signifier; and hence, to lay clear its constituents and mechanisms beyond the immediate and the subjective.