AirSpace Graduate Residency 2017/18 - Meet the Artists

In August 2017, we selected from open call, two new graduates - Amy Lou Matthews and Natasha Brzezicki, for the 6th instalment of our Graduate Residency Programme.

Now more than a month in, and preparing to show work in their interim Residency exhibitions, they set out their practice and plans.

Amy-Lou Matthews
(graduated in 2017 from Staffordshire University Fine Art)

My practice is based around film, photography, choreography and staging, where acts of playful nature are used in the performances. In the past, I have used performances within my practice to explore the archetypes of identity. This experimentation has evolved into a fascination of the more absurd, by using myself in the performance and the demonstration of how these can be constructed.

Past works such as the ‘Four Shades’(2016) used post-production techniques to merge different recorded performances into a single constructed time period, overlaying the footage to connect together separate actions and forming an cohesive group performance. Later works explore with green screen as space of endless potential while physical in our reality is typically a very bleak and bear stage. I find the whole concept of a production set in it self is a stage, stripped of visual elements to become abstract in our reality to later exist in reality very absurd.

On the residency I will be following on with my past themes of the absurd, exploring further within digital works as well as set designs working alongside one another. I plan to develop my knowledge and use of production techniques that are used in cinematic films and bring them into a gallery. I would like to explore further with green screen as a stage of endless potential, that objects acting as ‘stand ins’ for other props even have the opportunity to act in these space, Investigating Bertolt Brecht's theory of ‘distancing affects’ and question if we as a culture are becoming lost in the smoke and mirrors of digital advances in entertainment where fictional stories appear realistic. 

http://amyloumatthewsalm.wixsite.com/artist 

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Natasha Brzezicki
(graduated in 2017 from Coventry University Fine Art)

Natasha's interests lie in the notion of the artist as translator: a mediator between scientist and the layman. The practice is interdisciplinary, maintaining a closeness to science and a sensitivity to the organic world. A compulsion to identify and categorise within her practice leads her to subject nature to human notions of order; likening human nature to the slow formation of a stone shaped by the sea. Currently, she is researching the intricacies of birdsong, exploring its parallels to the human voice to find a method of ‘translation’ that depends on strategic allocation of data with a particular interest in an idea of emotion vs. physicality, the transferal of a sentiment into an object and how ‘sentimental value’ is comparable to monetary value.

During this residency I would plan to develop my enquiry into the intricacies of language: how birdsong can be ‘translated’ into human text and vice versa. I would be keen to bring the outdoors inside and capture new field recordings of birdsong before manipulating them digitally; crafting the pure and the natural into something ordered and human. I would use the time to delve deeper into ‘sound as art’ and aim to perfect the creation of a truly immersive environment; how to manufacture a space for listening carefully to subtle sounds and the introspection that naturally accompanies this.

http://www.natashabrzezicki.com/