Christ Church Arts Week exhibition
From Friday 15th to Saturday 23rd February, Christ Church Arts Week took over the college! Organised by Annika Schlemm, JCR Arts Rep, the week included a wide range of events and activities, including talks and screenings, workshops and classes, and tours of the Picture Gallery. You can find out more about the events that took place during Arts Week on the Christ Church Arts Facebook page. During the week there was also an exhibition throughout college featuring artworks created by our talented Fine Art students! It was great to get an insight into what they do and to see how their work fitted in to the environment at Christ Church - so we've given you some highlights below so that you can take a look for yourself! Read the summaries below to find out more about each artist's work, and click through the gallery at the bottom of the page for all of the photos from the exhibition...
Eleanor Arnold
Title: Chirologia: 'The Tongue and General Language of Humane Nature'
Description: For this exhibition, I have reproduced a series of gestures from John Bulwer’s manuscript Chirologia. Interested in how gesture may be re-appropriated and how it functions once separated from its automatic purposing in speech, I have chosen a series of gestures that ask their recipient for kindness, space and questioning.
Material: Screenprints
Location: Cathedral Cloisters
Ena Naito
Title: Protoroom
Description: This is where the worlds of fiction and reality meet: the staircase leads to an empty wall, the chair drained of colour, the lightbulb remains unlit. These representational domestic objects made out of paper seem, at first glance, fragile and inert, creating a space that is frozen in time. Yet the meticulous tessellations simultaneously transform the paper into vectors, creating a network of buzzing energy. Integrated into ‘reality’, these objects form a unique tension with the pre-existing space that is designed for function.
Material: Paper, mixed media
Location: Old Library Staircase Room
Joanna McClurg
Title: Volcano Feeling
Description: One canvas recalls those drawings that all five year old school-goers produce; the home, the cloud-filled sky, the sun and the parental figure. The other depicts a chest of drawers that stands in my childhood bedroom. The contents of one drawer, the 'bits and bobs' or 'memory' drawer, are arranged on the floor in front of the canvas. Shifting between mediums, mess and precision and a childhood and adult perspective, this work considers themes of comfort and change, questioning the relationship between these supposed strangers.
Material: Canvas, oil, acrylic, mixed media
Location: JCR TV Room
Michelle Chin
Title: You’re Invited for a Tour of Christ Church
Description: For Christ Church Arts Week, people who are not familiar with the college have been invited to collaborate on this project. In exchange for a college tour, the visitors described something that had caught their eye during their visit. Through their elaborate verbal descriptions, you are also invited to explore or re-explore familiar or unfamiliar spaces through first-hand experiences and inquisitive eyes.
Virtual work - no longer available.
Material: the experience of Christ Church visitors and the surrounding environment.
Location: Meadows Staircase 1 Room 16
Additional material for installation view: 4 Bluetooth speakers
Rubia Southcott
Title: Insignificant Shrine
Description: Struck by the scale of Christ Church and the number of people who were quickly becoming people I ‘knew of’ I have explored my relationships with the people around me. In considering this I acknowledged the sheer number of surface level conversations and interactions I have had with people since coming here. While I do not wish to frown upon these interactions, I want to acknowledge the inevitable meaninglessness of them. These conversations are lost the minute we finish them. This work captures both the personal and impersonal nature of all my relationships.
Material: Crystacal Plaster
Location: Peckwater Quad
Tegan O'Hara
Title: Big Teeth, Small Teeth
Description: Driven by a fascination with intersections between object-oriented thought and ecology, this work explores disembodied teeth as an opportunity to reweave a relationship with bodily objects that function outside their use value. I remember the abject horror of my first tooth falling out and turning cold. It planted a realisation that my body is an object, and one that I occupy temporarily, which will eventually exist without me. The painting is based on dreams that swell with vortexes of disembodied teeth, dancing and morphing, spiralling into and away from me. The small tooth sculptures are dispersed to be spotted in corners, buried in grass, thrown in the bin, passed to strangers, popped into pockets, to appear, disappear and reappear in endless chains of circulation.
Material: Oil on canvas, fimo
Location: JCR Room, dispersed
