Tracing Paper

About

An exhilarating show exploring Coming of Age/ Meditative Miniatures/ Hair on Bus Windows/ Filing Systems/ Nightmare Figures & Fantasy Worlds!  After 10 months on the Tracing PAPER mentoring scheme, ten incredible North West artists will exhibit new work developed throughout the period of the mentoring scheme.

Iain Andrews has used Tracing PAPER to explore and create a narrative based on a heady mixture of Faery Tales, related teenage narratives, Goya's 'Disaster's of War' and Flaubert's 'Temptation of St. Anthony'. using ox gall ink on paper. He involves nightmarish figures made from detritus of the studio floor - clay, plasticine and wire, standing in for the demonic presences described by Flaubert and jostling for position with ghosts of the past as they attempt to take on a life on their own in the present. I

David Armes is a dynamic print focussed artist working with language and geography. His work is frequently site-specific and considers how sense and experience of place can be represented. He explores the ways we describe liminal states and how landscape shapes understanding. He works primarily with letterpress printing on paper and in using a once industrial process, he delves into the space where the multiple meets the unique & where the ephemeral meets the archival.

Oliver Binnian is an artist whose practice explores ideas around contemporary versions of the sublime, mediating between real and digital worlds. In absence, the satisfaction of being in a specific place is replaced by a desire and a longing, resulting in a lasting palinopsia. These desires can be partly appeased by digital simulacra such as Google Earth. There is great power in being able to instantly see images from virtually anywhere in the world. In these hyperreal worlds, one sees everything but experiences nothing.

Jack Brown is a socially engaged artist whose work articulates instances of linkage, observation, rumination or pause. His projects bring people together through collective making or thinking. Brown often collaborates, teaches, coordinates, leads public realm projects and facilitates artist networks. His work looks at the overlooked, things that should be given more than a passing glance, moments that would benefit from magnification. Often as a counterbalance to his socially engaged practice Jack's work plays with ideas of placement, slightness, observation and interaction. Interventions in the wider world, collaborations and manipulations; Brown’s practice can be seen as an investigation into ways of making and how those made objects or moments interact with the world around them. For Tracing Paper Jack will be heading out into Greater Manchester to collect the grease marks left by passenger’s hair on bus windows. Using techniques similar to taking finger prints and through experiments with print making and drawing he will produce a new series of work on paper. These works will talk of human trace and unknowing collaboration, moments collected and re-made.

Niki Colclough’s practice explores a sense of belonging, in the physical and the abstract. Her work is process-led, often collaborative, rooted in the real but leaping into the imaginary. Her current interest is in on-line cultures and how we navigate and make sense of a world that is ever-expanding. For Tracing Paper, she has re-purposed every day actions such as photocopying, filing and sorting to re-order and re-examine this culture, offering the viewer a new way of seeing.

Tina Dempsey’s interdisciplinary creative practice examines the way we look at spaces; social, physical and emotional. Exploring how structure, colour, form and language effects our perception and judgement and sets our cultural landscapes. The dismantling, constructing and re-assembling of information via collage, sculpture and photography, aims to interrupt the semiotic landscape via a series of creative interventions, generating an opportunity for imagery, colour and language to develop new identities and meaning. Works offer the viewer the potential to engage their everyday associations and knowledge of image, language and colour to challenge behavioural attitudes towards ways of seeing and interpreting visual stimuli. By disrupting what is familiar the parameters of function, understanding and value shift allowing the opportunity to create new definitions.

Drawing forms the backbone of William Hughes' practice. Images are gathered from a variety of sources; manuals and books, found photo albums and photographs, online and offline image archives. Reproduced In graphite, the work aims to measure the inertia of the translation process from anonymous image to reproduction on paper against the potentiality of drawing as a meditative, developmental platform. In the recent minature drawings, made throughout the Tracing Paper programme, the spontaneous photograph is both exploited and negated by the drawing process and the associations of the medium. Scaled down and delicately drawn, the images form a loose narrative in which notions of memory, history and the human experience are explored.

The main themes of Ruth Murray's practice are the tension of change, the agitation of youth and the feelings of alienation and paranoia associated with misunderstood experiments/rituals. Ruth stages and directs elaborate scenes and then works from photographs of these back at the studio, drawing out and transforming them into something more significant. Primarily a painter, the scenarios she creates are claustrophobically rich and dreamlike, inviting the viewer into private worlds and states of mind. For the Tracing Paper mentoring scheme Ruth has been focusing on her collage works, developing their function as almost ‘negatives’ of her paintings. A painterly approach to layering is maintained but the images are much more paired down with a focus on form and colour composition. 

Using graph paper and basic stationary materials, David Penny has been working on a set of photographic drawings and sculptures. The process involves simple geometric compositions, which are translated through a photographic process. Images are printed back into a grid format where the object merges into the printed surface. The work develops on a practice of using leftovers; studio materials that might otherwise go to waste. This approach is particularly poignant with the imminent closure and demolition of his studio through redevelopment in the area. The objects and diagrams he has made are informed by this new construction visible from where David sits and works. These plans attempt to address an imbalance and offer a new possibility for a place to work.

Ruby Tingle’s practice is primarily concerned with the reconstruction of familiar forms to present and document the extraordinary as authentic. Her works on paper are rooted in natural history and use reassembled cut-out forms to suggest new myths and an alternate folklore. Most recently Ruby has been experimenting with the interaction between these collage forms, either set together as a group within tactile paper landscapes, or in settings comprised of automatic drawing to sound. The forms are also filmed prior to their being fixed into a permanent, physical piece of work, allowing them an animate pre-existence, also posing as evidence of unnatural sightings. She has also begun to use a monochrome colour palette, to reflect the work's current themes of cryptozoic footage or vintage science fiction; whilst cutting from black & white images is allowing a more abstract and complex carving out process to develop. 

About the Artists

Iain Andrews has shown in numerous exhibitions both in the U.K and abroad, the most recent being as part of the New Light Art Prize at Bankside Gallery, London. He has had solo shows at man and eve, London, Castlefield gallery, Manchester and Warrington Museum and art gallery. His work is in several public collections including the New Art gallery-Walsall, Progressive Collection – Ohio, Warrington Art gallery and Yantai Art Museum, China. He has won several awards for his painting including the Marmite prize for painting, the regional award in the National Art Open and Anthology at Van der Plas Gallery, New York. He also works as an Art Psychotherapist in Hulme.

David Armes’ Red Plate Press studio is based on the disputed border between West Yorkshire and Lancashire in the South Pennine hills. He travels frequently for residencies and has spent many months in the USA in the past three years working alongside contemporary letterpress practitioners, thanks to a travelling fellowship from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and a grant from the Arts Council/British Council Artists’ International Development Fund. He has recently shown work in the USA, UK, Germany and Russia, and was shortlisted for the 2017 Flourish Excellence in Printmaking award.

Oliver Binnian was born in Warrington (1987) and lives and works in Manchester. Having studied Sculpture at Glasgow School of Art and Illustration at London College of Communication he completed his MA at the Royal College of Art in 2015. His work has been included in group shows at South Kiosk in 2016 (Eminent Domain) in Berlin at Bootsbau Gallery in 2014 (Brave New World) and in Ithaca, Greece in 2015 (Anonymous Materials). He was awarded the Augustus Martin Print Award and the Peter Gordon Pickard Travel Bursary whilst at the RCA. 

Jack Brown is based in Manchester. He has been making and exhibiting work since graduating from London Guildhall University with a BA Honours in Fine Art. Recent group shows/projects include Problem Solver at Deptford X (London), For Space at Paper, Figure Ground Publication launch at Primary, Nottingham, Den at South London Gallery and The Whatchamacallit at the Parasol Unit, London. Jack won the Marsh Award for Excellence in Gallery Education in 2014 for his work as an artist educator.

Niki Colclough is an artist based in Manchester, working nationally and internationally. Her working practice includes artist interventions alongside exhibitions. She has presented work at CFCCA, Caustic Coastal and Gallery II (Bradford University). Niki has undertaken several international artist residencies including 501 Art Space, Chongqing (China) and most recently at Matadero Madrid (Spain). Niki is a current member of the Islington Mill Art Academy, an artist-led, alternative art school based at Islington Mill in Salford.

Tina Dempsey graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in 2016 with a BA (First Class Honours) in Fine Art. In 2016 she received second prize in the Bath Open Art Prize, held at 44AD Gallery, Bath. Group shows include On – Going at SLOE Gallery, Manchester, AIR Open 2017 at AIR Gallery, Altringham, Looking In, Looking Through at Neo:gallery23, Bolton, Small World at Mirabel Studios, Manchester and Abingdon Studios at Grundy Gallery, Blackpool. In 2017 she was selected for a place on the Tracing PAPER Scheme, a 9 month mentoring programme with PAPER Gallery in Manchester and she is also the recipient of the Associate Artist Award for Art B&B, Art Bed & Breakfast: A pioneering platform for experiencing contemporary art. As part of her practice, Tina regularly works on a range of creative engagement projects, working with galleries, councils, non-profit arts organisations and schools to bring exciting arts sessions to a diverse range of communities.

William Hughes (1991) was born in London and lives and works in Manchester. He completed a BA (Hons) in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2014 and continues to show in group exhibitions around the UK. In 2015 he was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

Ruth Murray (b.1984, Birmingham, UK) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2008, where she was awarded the Stanley Smith Scholarship to study and the Sheldon Bergh Award for her final show. In her graduation year she also won the De Laszlo Prize for Portraiture and the Boundary Gallery Figurative Art Prize. Following this she was Derek Hill Scholar at the British School at Rome and an artist-in-residence at Glogauair (Berlin), Pro Artibus (Finland), Kaus Australis (Rotterdam) and USF (Bergen). This year she had a solo exhibition ‘Keruffle’ at the North Wall Art Gallery, Oxford, and was selected for the Threadneedle Figurative Art Prize. Other notable exhibitions include Northern Stars at the A Foundation, Saatchi's 4 New Sensations, The Creative Cities Collection, and the BP Portrait Award.

Manchester-based photographic artist David Penny makes provocative images informed by the genre of still life. He constructs arrangements of objects for the camera, creating compositions against plain backgrounds. The photographs he makes are subtle manipulations; inviting interpretation of the environments and objects he works with. Recent projects include. A Screen for another focus, Dovecot Studios, ‘A Quality of Distance’, METAL Liverpool and Spatial Correspondences, RAUMX London. He has undertaken an artists residency at Hospitalfield, Arbraoth. His work has been exhibited internationally at Open Eye Gallery, UK and ShanghART, Shanghai and has been published in SOURCE: the photographic review, PIPELINE: Hong Kong, and through Museums ETC. He has completed a practice-based PhD at Manchester School of Art and is a graduate from the University of Westminster.

Ruby Tingle graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2011. She is represented by PAPER Gallery and is their permanent Artist in Residence. She was also awarded runner up in the GM Arts Prize 2016. Recent exhibitions include solo shows The Land Isat PAPER following the Exploring PAPER Residency Scheme and Ermine at Chetham’s Library as part of Manifest Arts Festival 2017. Ruby has also exhibited work in group shows at East Street Arts in Leeds, The Old Courts in Wigan, C4RD London and Bury Art Museum and Gallery. Recent commissioned live work includes performances at HOME, Manchester Art Gallery and The Manchester Contemporary 2017; with upcoming performances for 48 Hours Neukolln 2018 in Berlin. 

Listings Info 

PAPER presents: Tracing PAPER

Exhibition dates: 30 June – 11 August 2018
Private View: Friday 29 June 2018, 6-9pm 
Opening Times: 11am – 5pm every Saturday
PAPER Gallery, Mirabel Studios, 14-20 Mirabel Street, Manchester, M3 1PJ

Website: www.paper-gallery.co.uk

Free

Media Enquiries

For media enquiries contact Sarah Boulter: papermcrpressdesk@gmail.com

About PAPER

PAPER is an artist-led, commercial gallery based in Manchester and represents a range of emerging and mid-career artists whose practice is based around the medium of paper. Directed by artist David Hancock, working alongside Sarah Boulter, Sara Jaspan, Elliott Flanagan, Lubna Ali, and Simon Woolham, PAPER has participated in numerous national and international art fairs and regularly collaborates with other galleries and project spaces.