The Brownfield Research Centre - Brownfield Artists of the Day : Nerissa Cargill Thompson, Jill Impey, Jane Walker

In our ongoing series highlighting Artists and works submitted to our Brownfield Research Centre, each day until July 22nd, we will be highlighting the work of artists submitting to our Open Call.

Nerissa Cargill Thompson, No Laughing Matter

Collection of gas canisters collected one morning from brownfield site on a journey from the tram to MMU. ^
   

 ^Found gas canister and new growth in urban environment 
Nerissa Cargill Thompson encourages the viewer to stop and look closer; to consider the beauty, value and purpose in the old and discarded through photography and three-dimensional textiles. Her work investigates how things change appearance & shape over time, not just eroding or decaying but also new layers of growth, giving interesting juxtapositions of structure and colour. She uses old clothes and scrap materials within her work for economic & ecological sustainability, choosing fabrics that hold some significance or connection to the work. Currently embellishing & embroidering textures into old office wear representing the city, both people & place, and casting with concrete into found litter. This collection is the start of new work that Nerissa intends to develop further following her MA in which she has been concentrating on coastal textures and plastic waste. 

Website: www.nerissact.co.uk

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nerissact/

Instagram/Twitter: @nerissact

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Jill Impey

 

Jill Impey, film & installation artist offers her practice as a way of bearing witness to natural phenomena and human response, the connection between the natural world, our mental health and wellbeing.  Impey’s practice is anchored in notions of heritage, migration and cultural identity in relation to place, the artist revealing truths, through notions of shifting borders, boundaries and thresholds. The human communicated through perceptions of the mundane and the beautiful, reality and façade, inclusion and otherness, evolutionary development and the unquantifiable sublime.
The 9 images below, submitted for The Brownfield Research Centre, were taken on midsummer’s day 2017, on the former site of Furber’s car breakers yard at Whixall in North Shropshire, on the edge of Whixall Moss. They recognise the way in which nature will always adapt and reassert itself. And how we can benefit by allowing time to pass, nature to reclaim, evidence to be gathered, reflections made and understanding grasped.

jillimpey.co.uk

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Jane Walker

One of my approaches to my subject matter, the city, is to make pastel drawings of street scenes, normally at night.

 This is a really contested site. There was a pretty electricity substation built in 1910 on the site it was demolished a few months ago. The electricity substation was architecturally integrated with the end terraced house. Families complained that kids were doing drugs behind the substation building.  It is industrially polluted land but classed as residential in-fill. The ownership of the wall of the end terrace is contested. The electricity board sold the site 7 years ago. There used to be trees, bats and owls living on the site. Even though it has only been completely cleared of vegetation a few months ago, the variety and colourfulness of the new growth  is amazing. Each year the hedge round the edge of the site was completely cut down, and re-grew each time. That has unfortunately been finally removed. The site was just earth and bricks and bits of the demolition process a short while ago, the greenery in my drawing is very recent, and it is already making a new shape of the site.