The Muse Residency Program 2018 - final show

About

Residency Program2018 – final show
The Muse Residency Program 2018 - final show

Mahaut Harley Leca
Josephine Cottrell
Mark Tamer
17 May - 3 June 2018
Private View: Thursday 17 May 2018, 6.30 - 9.00 pm

Josephine Cottrell 

Drawing from elements of abstraction and romanticism, Josephine’s current work  
explores perception, the limitations of art and the artist’s control over a viewer’s response. 
The works experiment with how much information needs to exist in a piece, for it to be perceived and accepted as art and questions why a viewer instinctively objectifies and tries to ‘makes sense’ of abstraction - composing naturalistic images from unintended shapes and forms.

An ongoing aim of her work is to try and provoke a viewer’s most personal response. Creating imagery that is devoid of a prevailing narrative, Josephine’s work is not just open to, but encourages individual interpretation. Using traditional Japanese Aesthetics as a guiding principle, subtlety and detail are critical - the smallest of details can mark an image as either too literal, or as an image lacking in content.

Grounded in printmaking’s process and materials, her work has become increasingly experimental and exploratory. Using traditional techniques and materials in a non-traditional way, the creative process is as instrumental to the work as the initial concept or desired aesthetic.

www.josephinecottrell.com

Mahaut Harley Leca 

Mahaut fades her images to obfuscate the graphic nature of femininity, as it is often presented and abused by pop culture.
 
Her use of collage symbolises a reclamation of the female form from societies tendency to objectify and vulgarise.
 
Mahaut  strips the bodies of sex, intention, fetish and expectation, and presents them in a way that asks us to look again, and think again about what the body means to us. 
 
With these works the Artist uses a process of image abstraction and a delicate aesthetic to invite curiosity. 
 
By using faceless bodies, one can identify themselves with the work, making it personal, and thus creating a moment of intimacy.
 
Mahaut’s works are letters to a past that she never belonged to. These delicate letters ask us to look again at the body and re-appreciate it for its form as opposed to its sexuality, inviting introspective thought rather than being provocative.

https://www.mahautharley.com

Mark Tamer
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men. 
Willie Wonka 
The last four months of Mark’s Muse residency have been one of photographic experimentation, of finding a workable balance between chance and control, and of end results that sit somewhere between careful construction and careless destruction. It has been a process of discovery, of finding some of the magic that has always been a part of analogue photography. 
Working mostly without a camera, the work rejects the window-onto-the- world illusion of photography and instead, presents a new world of chemical reactions, of photographic surfaces that are subverted, interrupted or broken. Mark may well be the missing link between Man Ray and Willie Wonka.