ASSEMBLE

Broad word that can be used and applied in different areas such as music, dance, art, industry. 

Dictionary:

• Gather of people in one place for a common purpose
• Fit together the separate components of parts
• To make something by joining separate parts
• ?Assemblage? a work of art made by grouping together found or unrelated objects. Often three-dimensional elements. Similar to the collage practice.Assemblage is art that is made by assembling disparate elements which are often scavenged by the artist, or sometimes bought specially.objects arranged in such a way that they create a piece. You can track pieces of art of this movement from 1920 (Picasso, Braque). The dada and surrealism experienced this practice. But also there are post-modern artists such as Louise Nevelson that worked with this.

 Synonyms of ?Assemble?: accumulation, conglomeration, selection, combination, grouping

 Assemblage the art form is basically the three-dimensional cousin of collage. 

The origin of the word as an artistic concept can be tracked back to 1950 with Jean Dubuffet, but before this in 1920 dadaists and surrealist artists such as Duchamp, Man Ray, Picasso had been working with found objects.

 Although this,  he is seen as the ?father? of Assemblage.

 He used sponges, slag, clinkers, burnt cork, metal, foil, vinyl, and polyurethane.

?In 1961 the medium of assemblage was given a boost by an exhibition ?The Art of Assemblage? at the New York MOMA  William C Seitz, the curator of the exhibition, defined the term when he wrote that the assemblages were ?entirely or in part, their constituent elements are preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials.??

Assemblage ? the process of joining two and three dimensional organic and prefabricated materials that project out from the surface plane.

?A work produced by the incorporation of everyday objects into the composition. Although each non-art object, such as a piece of rope or newspaper, acquires aesthetic or symbolic meanings within the context of the whole work, it may retain something of its original identity. The term assemblage, as coined by the artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s, may refer to both planar and three-dimensional constructions?

Assemblage technique has been used for a big range of art movements such as ?cubism, futurism, the russian avant grade, dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop art and  the new object?

The main difference with the conventional sculpture is that the process is the addition of pieces and not shaping or carving them from a monolith. 

It very related with collage but the difference is that while collage works in the plane, assemblage works in the space of the spectator. 

?It can incorporate painting and drawing. It primary characteristic is that is tangible.

It introduces a big range of materials, forms and it brought into play a whole new body of work that could not be strictly codified as belonging to the domain of either painting or sculpture?.It became the basis for the innovatory work of a postwar generation of americans and europeans?( Collage, assemblage and the found object)

Also an important artist of this technique is Rauschenberg, he combined autobiographical references with references to everyday life and to life in art. He takes objects from everyday life and also uses a compilation of past a present images. 

He rejected the way that Marcel Duchamp presented his artwork (real objects as art pieces), and prefer to re create the objects  ir order to establish a dialogue between the original and its replica.

Also in my opinion an act of ?assemble? could be the happenings where artistist gathered people together to create a message.

Such as Spencer Tunick, a photographer that gathered naked people in public spaces and document it. He says

?The individuals en masse, without their clothing, grouped together metamorphose into a new shape. The bodies extend into and upon the landscape like a substance. These grouped masses which do not underscore sexuality become abstractions that challenge or reconfigure one's views of nudity and privacy. The work also refers to the complex issue of presenting art in permanent or temporary public spaces.?(Art net).

Picasso

Sarah Lucas

Earth transformed by heat of the flame. 

Can be rough and rock like or smith and seductive. 

It can be polished or layered, squeezed or shaped into elegant forms and coloured to convey the harmonies of nature, or torn and distressed to suggest disharmony(Naked Clay)

Fine grained natural rock. Mineral mined dug from earth.

The more impurities it has the more plastic it its

You can work it with your hands but also with tools. 

Each type of clay is different and each of them need different temperatures to get to their final point, but they all come from earth.

Polymer clay is a type that come in a big range of colours, is widely available, and its capable of being malleable and after being cured quite reliably permanent.

There are clays that are translucent, metallic, and even liquid, that is why is a incredible material to explore.

When you put heat on in it turns from soft and malleable to hard and strong.

This technique has more than 30.000 years. 

Clay can be glazed or ?naked?.  When the the clay is unglazed its softer and warmer to the touch and absorbs light.

Originally clay was mean to be in a raw state as a material for strengthening shelters or for tribal identification marks. 

Then for pottery but today there are many contemporary artists working this material a creating the most exquisite sculptures. 

?Despite its ubiquity clay is barely visible. From the ground that supports us to the bricks that house us, from the cups and plates that we eat off to masks that purify us, clay, is in its many forms, is an assumed fact of life, so constitutive of the everyday as to be taken for granted, present everywhere except in consciousness? ( A secret history of clay).

A reason why clay may be not accounted as art as first is because its moves from the concept of art and crafts, which is a distinction that has never been that clear. 

Isamu Noguchi said ? Working with clay did not satisfy me because in a medium like clay anything can be done, and I think that is dangerous. It is too fluid, too facile? The very freedom is a kind of anti-sculpture to me, you can make clay look like anything?.

Clay is physical, gestural, somatic, temporal, fragile, malleable and unpredictable.

In the art of clay sculpture there are a diversity of styles, techniques, content, and media.

?Fired clay does not disssapear, clay is basic stuff, universal, it is dug up almost everywhere, and almost every culture has a ceramic tradition, except where the earth is frozen. There is a commonality of approach too, techniques have involved with similarity in different places, or haven been carried by emigrant craftsmen or copied off imported goods. Ceramic objects are by and large internationally comprehensible, with the pot or container as the crux of understanding? (the raw and the cooked book)

Ceramics are not just pottery. Artists such as Alison Briton connect her concerns in ceramics to modernism and to other art forms, especially literature and painting. 

?Artists such as Picasso, Leger, Miro, Chagall worked with clay, they treated the ceramic surface as a canvas painting directly and spontaneously rather than using traditional decorating approach. 

The american ceramicst were influenced by zen buddhism linked to the art of making and firing with the zen concepts of beauty, and the abstract expressioist artists. Peter Voulkos was one of the forerunners of this approach.? (Naked Clay)

?Because of the ability to mimic different materials many art movements used it, like dadaism, surrealism, pop art, funk art and realism. 

An artist to name could be Neil Forrest in his most famous sculpture ?hiving mesh?  he investigates the history of ceramics, the structures of living spaces and phenomenon known as a particle packing.

?From the 20 century to present day clay has been used by artists from ceramic vessels to installation and performance art. The fact is that clay is playful and democratic and that it is impossible to categorised the range of work produced.

It has reached the point where artists made use of clay by its property of dematerialises completely such as in the performance ?changes? by Jim Melchert, in which the artist and other dunk their heads in clay slip and are filmed waiting for it to dry in a room hot at one end and cold at the other, the body itself is described in terms of the vessel ?it incases your heads that the sounds you hear are interior, you breathing, your heartbeat and your nervous system. 

?Every perception is a communion and a coition of our body with things. This coition of the body is one of the secret stories of the century of artist working with clay. It reveals what can be described as a phenomenological approach to clay. For some reason artists using clay has been the recuperation of unmediated materiality, they had a powerful sense of clay as earth, as being the great formless primal matter that allowed them a kind of expression they could not approach through other materials. Indeed the image of a returning to earth carries with it the apprehension the almost visceral feeling of having separated, alienated from earth. Clay allowed for a return to self, a return to the body? (A secret history of clay)

The potter Axel Salto though that ceramics could catch moments of transition or ?the painful process of transformation? 

The work of clay is usually seen as a spiritual approach to making, the relationship between man, art and nature.

AXEL SALTO

JESS RIVA COOPER

Gillian Wearing

VideoArtist and photographer

?Wearing uses photography and video to explore the intimacies and complexities of everyday life. Her work borrows from familiar forms of popular culture to explore deep-seated human trauma and emotion, often adopting methods similar to television documentary.? ?Her work can be disturbing and confessional, an honest portrait of the many sides of contemporary life?(Gillian Wearing book)

She tries to incorporate as wide a variety of people as possible.

She believes that one of the central activities of the artist is to reveal the inner emotions that drives human life. 

She plays with the concept of the outside and the intimacy, desire and fears.

In her work different types of identities get in collision. 

Her work has been influenced by tv programs where normal people that are for first time in tv, express their emotions to the public. She is very keen on the limits between privacy and public, and tries to break the ?mask? behind every human being hides themself. 

?Imagine how the others see us and how they think about us conditions the way we think of ourselves, and try to collate the different views we have from ourselves with the ones the other people has, its one of the constant worries of the work of Gillian, that is why the world of childhood and teenage is really present in her work, because in this moment of the life is when we acknowledge the there is a world outside, where there is people judging, loving and hating us, and this affects how we act?

What you see from the outside of a human is not what they are is a fake concept, is the prejudice. She thinks that we all have different identities. That is why for different projects of her she make use of masks, each project has a different end, but the masks represent that what we see with our eyes is just an illusion.

An example could be the use of these in the project ?confess all? where normal people confess their secrets using a mask. In ?Trauma? the appearance of the masks are the appearance of a teenager, because here the also normal persons who are possessed by their past tell the story that traumatised them in the transition between childhood and adulthood. 

For her the use of masks are not to substitute one identity for another as to obliterate the superficial aspects of physical appearance in order to reveal more fundamental truths. 

She make us pass through the archetype before reaching the individual.

She does not care about the aspect of a human being. She thinks that judging someone for their looks is boring a limited.  

Her main interest is in what happens to normal people. She does not care about the appearance, the outside of them, she is keen on what moves them, their life story, their traumas. She thinks that the prejudice we can do from what someone looks its always wrong. So the core of everything is the identity. 

Her interest relies on the public and private spheres, truthfulness and projection. What is perceived versus what is real.

She talks about the front-stage and backstage personalities.

This is part of the research that led me to the final outcome of the "Ideas Factory" Project.

Gillian Wearing research, led me to this. Relating it to the masks

Butoh

Dance of the darkness

Effort to recover the primal body.

Founder  Ttsumi Hijikata. 1950

?Butoh taps the subconscious body by stripping the social body, and its aesthetic dramatics the beauty of emergent form through natural process of birth and decay?

?Butoh is natural and theatrical?

?It was born because of the need of renascence after the death that was provoked but the nuclear bombs in Japan in the world war II?

?Influenced by traditional scenic arts in japan, and also german expressionist dance, Butoh is the search of the freedom through the body, the dance as a critic conception of the being? 

?Butoh is feeling, its leave the usual movements of the body, and enter in the world of the incomprehensible? ?Through this movements the human being is able to connect with their inner world, our real core is the transgression, see the body movement as something different from the consciousness?

?Butoh works with the misery, the fears, the light? ?Every time you dance butoh its a renascence?

?the deepest search of the button it is what is to be human?

The work of Tatsumi has been described as the search for a representation of the body that would be free of cultural references and open to all metamorphosis. This presupposes the existence of a natural state of humanity (as opposed to culturally determined) that could be reached and expressed with movement and that would lead to a wide variety of aesthetic results?

?butoh delves into the relationship between culture and society?

?Catharsis is the aesthetic heart of butoh, the reason behind its exposure of clumsiness, its distorted faces and sublime emptying of the self.?

?the collective consciousness is the arena of butoh aesthetic? 

?A button student explaining his experience

?strings are attached to your joints, you float, above the earth, not moving yourself, your spirit goes before you, form follows behind, your sides are pieces of your body moving out into space?

?Butoh require the dancer to ?become? something rather than act like or express something? 

IMAGES OF PERFORMANCES OF THE CREATOR OF BUTOH TATSUMI HIJIKATA

Tom Price

Born in London in 1973, Tom Price continues to live and work in the capital. Drawing on his training in both sculpture and design, his practice regularly delves into the grey areas between the two disciplines. 

Much of the work Price produces seeks to explore the untapped potential of familiar materials, encouraging them to behave in unfamiliar ways. This often requires developing machinery and tools that are capable of subverting conventional industrial manufacturing techniques, introducing a dose of entropy into what are typically very controlled processes. Chance is an essential element in this creative process, and one that Price relies on to transcend the limits of imagination.

Since graduating from London?s Royal College of Art, Price has established an international career as an artist and designer with works in major collections and museums worldwide, including acquisitions by San Francisco MOMA, Denver Art Museum, Chatsworth House, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the MKG Hamburg and Amore Pacific Museum of Art in Seoul. He has also completed several large-scale sculptural commissions for public and private spaces.

Iris Van Herpen

 Iris van Herpen stands for a reciprocity between craftsmanship and innovation in technique and materials. She creates a modern view on Haute  Couture that combines fine handwork techniques with digital technology .Van Herpen forces fashion to the extreme contradiction between beauty and regeneration. It is her unique way to reevaluate reality and so to express and underline individuality.

The essence of van Herpen is expressing the character  and emotions of a woman and to extend the shape of the feminine body in detail. She mixes craftsmanship- using old and forgotten techniques- with innovation and materials inspired on the world to come.

Iris her designs require every time an unique treatment of material or even the creation of complete new materials. For this reason, Van Herpen prefers interdisciplinary research
and often collaborates with other artists or scientists

Meadham Kirchhoff

Benjamin Kirchhoff and Edward Meadham are the designers behind London-based label Meadham Kirchhoff. The duo met while studying for BA degrees at Central Saint Martins; France-bred Kirchhoff trained in menswear and English Meadham in womenswear. Upon graduation in 2002, they joined forces to start a menswear label Benjamin Kirchhoff and were selected for the first Fashion East MAN show in 2005. A year later, they relaunched to include womenswear under the label Meadham Kirchhoff. Their high-octane shows often act as social commentaries rooted in the Riot Grrrl movement. The label has since garnered a diverse following, partly owing to its strong sartorial practice and teenage youth sensibility, winning the award for Emerging Talent (Ready-to-Wear) at the British Fashion Awards in 2010. The cat-lovers continue to challenge mundane conformity through their work.

Shaun Leane

Celebrated world-wide for his modern romantic jewels that push the boundaries of contemporary design, Shaun Leane began his career training at the bench in London?s jewellery quarter, Hatton Garden.  This grounding enabled him to break entrenched traditions, play with conventions and bring a fresh dynamic spirit to exquisitely crafted, fine jewellery.  While working as a goldsmith, Leane began a long-standing collaboration with the late Alexander McQueen, creating provocative catwalk jewels that have become iconic milestones in the art of couture jewellery. This high-profile collaboration acted as a catalyst to Leane?s burgeoning desire to blend technical perfection with creative freedom, and in 1999 he launched the first collections of Shaun Leane Jewellery.

Antoni Gaudí

 was a Catalan architect who has become internationally recognised as one of the most prodigious experts in his discipline, as well as one of the top exponents of modernism. His exceptional ground-breaking genius made him the inventor of a unique, personal and incomparable architectural language that defies classification.

Gaudí's creative genius?and the curves, shapes, and ornamentations it produced?literally changed the face of architecture and building technology during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gaudí recognized the formal order inherent in most architecture before his time?and deliberately turned it upside down. As a result his buildings seem strikingly unique and almost surreal even after a century.

Gaudí's efforts included not only building design but also decorative style and overall settings; his touch was applied to everything from sculpture to gardens. As UNESCO noted in its criteria for listing the sites: ?Gaudí's work exhibits an important interchange of values closely associated with the cultural and artistic currents of his time, as represented in Catalonian Modernism (a contemporary movement akin to Art Nouveau). It anticipated and influenced many of the forms and techniques that were relevant to the development of modern construction in the 20th century.?

Le Corbusier 

In the history of architecture, the Swiss-born architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, best known by his pseudonym "Le Corbusier" is regarded -  as one of the greatest architects of the 20th century and a leading theorist and practitioner of modern functionalist design. He is famous for (1) his open plan private domestic architecture - similar to the styles emanating from of the Bauhaus Design School- perfected in his Villa Savoye (1929?1931). (2) His utopian urban development schemes, including his 1922 plan for a "Contemporary City" (Ville Contemporaine) designed for three million inhabitants, and his 1935 plan for a socially progessive "The Radiant City" (La Ville radieuse) of 1935. In 1946, he resurrected the "Unité d'Habitation" - the basic concrete apartment block used in The Radiant City plan - and erected them (1946-65) in Marseilles, Nantes, Berlin, Briey and Firminy. He also built a series of Radiant-City-type buildings in Chandigarh, India, during the 1950s. (3) His theoretical ideas on architectural design, as expressed during the 1920s in the journal L'Esprit Nouveau, and later published in his highly influential book "Vers une architecture" (Toward an Architecture). His ideas on building design were influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses,, the concrete, glass and steel designs of Walter Gropius, the spatial concepts of Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), the geometrical lines of De Stijl, and the social awareness of Russian Constructivism ( later the Soviet Narkomfin Building). However, while acknowledging his influential role in the development of 20th century architecture, critics of Le Corbusier say his architecture paved the way for the concrete excesses of Brutalism, and to the isolation of communities in badly built housing blocks. Le Corbusier became a French citizen in 1930.

Issey Miyake

Issey Miyake is a Japanese fashion designer born in Hiroshima, Japan in 1938. He studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo and graduated in 1965. He went straight to Paris after his studies, where he trained at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture (French regulator of Haute Couture fashion houses) before taking apprenticeships with Givenchy and Guy Laroche. Issey Miyake founded the Miyake Design Studio in 1970, which was seen as an experimental laboratory for Japanese fashion.

Issey miyake is seen as one of the leading clothing designers of our time. His career has taken him form Japan to Paris, london, new york and back to toy.

Long before fashion began to take inspiration from popular culture , Miyake was searching for ways to interpret clothing as something other than elite haute couture. Miyakes work is a fusion of japans and western influences, which proves what wonderful results can arise from global thinking and acting. 

Miyake looks for real challenges and solutions. One of these challenges is found in the relationship between body and clothing, which he has interpreted in many new ways.

Miyake sucedes in almost offhandedly creating designs of an unpretentious beauty, which seem to come from another world beyond trends and fashions. "Issey miyake and DAI FUJIWARA book"

Rei Kawakubo

Rei Kawakubo is the creative director of Comme des Garçons, which she has grown into a business turning over $220 million a year. She never trained to be a fashion designer; instead she studied art and literature at Keio University. Perhaps as a result of this, Kawakubo has always followed the beat of her own drum, both commercially and creatively.  Dubbed ?anti-fashion? and ?Hiroshima Chic? by easily shocked and insensitive journalists, Kawakubo?s first show made ripples across the fashion industry. ?Business of fashion?

?In terms of creation, I have never thought of suiting any system or abiding by any rules?either a long time ago or right now. In this respect I have remained free. The necessity has grown, as we have gotten bigger, to think about commercial aspects of the business more and more, because of the responsibility we have toward our staff and our factories.? Getting bigger has led to over 20 distinct lines in the Comme des Garçons? ecosystem?

Kawakubo's best collections reflect upon a woman's obsession with liberty and fulfillment, her dependence on love and desire; they express the torment of never being truly understood. She toys with how the body, heart, and mind limit us, how identity rules us. She has crafted clothes that tell parables of romance, love, protection, neglect, self-abnegation, war?and, more recently,

Kawakubo was born in 1942, three years before the atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She studied the history of aesthetics?both Japanese and Western?at Keio University, worked in advertising for a spell at a textile company, and then started working as a freelance stylist in 1967. Kawakubo opened her first office in Paris and staged her first Comme des Garçons show there in 1981. Not surprisingly, one of her favorite themes is punk, which was waking up the world to the principles of individual choice and just-do-it spirit just as her brand was finding its feet. Her conceptual clothes, mostly black and often tattered with holes, were an affront to the sexy, body-conscious fashions of the time?such as Mugler and Montana. But over the course of the '80s, Kawakubo's intellectual and feminist take on fashion often mirrored the cultural and emotional turmoil of women infiltrating the male-dominated work world. It also began to influence a new generation of designers?especially the Antwerp Six?who were looking for ways to reflect what they saw as a spectrum of societal woes, from greed and sexism to corruption, military power structures, and xenophobia. But it wasn't just antiestablishment designers who admired her: Karl Lagerfeld and Marc Jacobs have referred to Kawakubo as the most influential and talented designer in the world and have paid homage to her through their own collections

 Dries Van Noten

For Dries Van Noten fashion is above all storytelling. Intuitive in his choices and cerebral in his exploration, he, plays with the cliches often used to refer to him and his work "ethnic designer" "explorer of cultures" "traveller to the exotic" .

Dries Van Noten starts with a photographic like detail to create an entire wardrobe fir each character, dressing him or her in myriad ways for circumstances such as chance encounters or chance places discovered. "When looking at a fabric you ask yourself whether the character would wear it, while at the same time you retain a certain degree of interpretation. It is important to have this idea to connect everything on, a sort of leitmotif for the whole collection. Using the fabrics , the prints, and their meticulously selected colours as his base, he then goes on to clothe his character, reinventing him or her at the whim of a roving inspiration. 

Dries Van Noten is a distinctive figure within the spectrum of contemporary fashion, standing to by virtue of his original and in depth research into textiles, like an artist white canvases, are worked layer by layer, adorned, and enhanced by ornaments and patterns. 

He has a talent for evoking volume through an almost two dimensional treatment of a garment, minimal to the extreme, proffering to emphasise a fluidity of movement that gives total freedom to the body wearing it. 

"Dries Van Noten book"

Sonia Delaunay

Sonia Delaunay was a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and key figure in the Parisian avant-garde. Alongside her husband, Robert Delaunay, she pioneered the movement Simultanism. Her exploration of the interaction between colours has created a sense of depth and movement throughout her oeuvre. "tate"

She was among the group of avant garde artists drawn in the early part of this century who were exploring concepts of art that were felt to capture best the speed and mechanisation of the modern world. She set up a dialogue between fine art and everyday objects and accomplished the transition from representational work to her color theory through her investigations in embroidery and collage. Her fashion and textiles designs were especially instruments to this end. They were highly successful and worn throughout the world during the twenties. As well as being a form of moving paintings, textiles served as color studies for her future work

Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota is renowned for her dramatic, immersive installations which frequently utilise found objects such as clothing, shoes, old furniture, vintage suitcases and doors and windows from demolished and derelict buildings. Such items resonate with personal and emotional if elusive histories. Chiharu?s installations alter and energise the physical and architectectual space, challenging our perceptions of the immediate environment and embracing the viewer as an integral part of the experience. ?The new art galley?

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist best known for creating room-filling, monumental yet delicate, poetic environments. Central to the artist?s work are the themes of remembrance and oblivion, dreaming and sleeping, traces of the past and childhood, and dealing with anxieties. Shiota finds diverse visual expressions for these subject matters, the most celebrated being impenetrable installations made of black thread which often enclose various household and everyday, personal objects: a burnt-out piano, a wedding dress, a lady?s mackintosh, sometimes even the sleeping artist herself.

Chiharu Shiota belongs to a generation of young artists who have gained international attention in recent years for body-related art. 

?I am more interested in the lines, which are often represented

in my work through black string. These strings are woven into each other, which can make it look a bit like lace, which is also intricately woven. The difference is that my strings are in a random pattern, whilst lace follows set designs and patterns?. ?lost in lace?

My installations with clothes always refer to the clothes as a second skin, which carry the memories of the people who wore these clothes

The starting points for the majority of Shiota?s installations are collections of used possessions; belongings, haunted with memories, that act as expressions of human acts. Complex networks of yarn are often interlaced around and between objects, linking their inherent narratives and creating a new visual plane, as if painting in mid-air. ?blain southern?

In 2014 Shiota was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale 2015 where her installation, A Key in the Hand (2015), can be viewed in the Japanese Pavillion until the 22nd of November. Shiota attended the Kyoto Seika University, Japan, from 1992 to 1996 and from 1996 onwards went on to a further education at a series of Universities in Germany. She has exhibited extensively in both group and solo shows. Her most recent shows include; The Key in the Hand, la Biennale di Venezia, Venice,Italy, Follow the Line, Japanisches Kulturinstitut Köln (The Japan Foundation), Cologne, Germany, Chiharu Shiota : Works on Paper, Hadrien de Montferrand Gallery, Beijing, China, Seven Dresses Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Saarbrücken, Germany and First House, Zorlu Center Performing Arts Center, Istanbul, Turkey. Shiota is represented by ARNDT, Berlin and Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris. "Curating the contemporary website"

Shiota dwells on the significance we ascribe to the objects in our lives, giving literal form to the threads of association that so often attach to things. In previous installations, these ostensibly fragile threads have threatened to choke up entire rooms, cobweb-like in the way they cling to everyday objects. For Over the Continents, she has collected dozens of discarded single shoes and scrap paper notes: orphan objects, displaced and defunct, whose personal histories are no longer fully accessible. The red strings tied to them recede into corner of the gallery, to vanishing point. It looks as though the original owners might tug them back to their rightful place at any moment. "Apollo magazine"

 Nils Volker

Nils Völker is a German artist known for his work at the intersection of art and science: physical computing, robotics, media art, new media art and machine art.

Today, Völker?s artistic practice includes robotics, sensors, customized software and interactive computer technology. When added his fascination for everyday objects and carefully selected fragile materials ? the result are his original and creative installations. He reinterprets ordinary, everyday object and then inflates to huge installations, arranging them in a new context.

Beginning in 2010 this artist started working on a series he will title ?choreographed breathing? installations. Mainly, these installation consisted out of a matrix of cushions of different size and material inflating and deflating in controlled rhythms.

One piece represents this series more than others. It is his One Hundred and Eight installation made from ordinary garbage bags, inflated and deflated in controlled rhythms. This work has been exhibited several times and has been widely published online, in books and magazines and it was the starting point for a whole series of installations based on inflating/deflating cushions made from different materials. The installation became a huge success and has been exhibited in Mannheim, Istanbul and The Hague.

?WIDEWALLS?

Reiko Sudo

Textile designer Reiko Sudo, renowned as a ?weaver of new ideas?, is Co-founder, current CEO and Design Director of Nuno Corporation of Tokyo, universally recognised as one of the world?s most innovative textile companies.

Nuno takes the techniques, materials and aesthetics of traditional textiles and re-interprets them with cutting-edge technologies.

Reiko and her design team, together with the company?s skilled weavers and dyers, have greatly broadened the parameters of contemporary design in the industry, experimenting with an eclectic array of materials, ranging from silk, cotton and polyester to hand-made paper and aluminium, and finishing methods that include salt-shrinking, rust-dyeing and caustic burning.

The results are distinctive, intriguing and undisputably remarkable. (IDEAS ON DESIGN)

sudo's path to creativity was as serendipitous as the first glimpse of her grandfather inspecting intricately woven kimono fabrics. After studying Japanese painting and gaining a textiles degree from the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, she met the now renowned revolutionary textile designer Junichi Arai. In 1984, the pair founded Nuno (Japanese for 'cloth' or 'fabric'), a small Tokyo atelier, widely considered as the capital's textile design destination.

What sets Nuno apart is Sudo's ability to move from idea to idea, from one medium to another, in order to unveil rich new interpretations. Innovation and experimentation are at the core of her groundbreaking techniques that range from high tech to intricate crafted details. Feathers, nails and paper all feature as integral components in her textiles.

Her pieces range from a futuristic-looking fabric created by applying unusual finishing techniques to synthetic materials, such as the spatter-plating method employed by carmakers in the application of metallic strip to car parts and the use of 'seal skin', a polyurethane-coated stretch-knit fabric made of recycled plastic bottle fibres with a waterproof surface. At the heart of even the most unusual pieces, however, remains a deep commitment to maintaining traditional Japanese techniques in textile dyeing and weaving.

?I define lace as a fabric of gaps and see-through openings, the spaces between carrying its essential meanings. Spaces ?intervals or ?ma? in Japanese ? exist between things, between movements, between sounds, between patterns, between threads, between words, between people, whether in the form of physical emptiness, or time, or attitude?. ?Lost in lace?

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Ernesto Neto

Since the mid-1990s, Ernesto Neto has produced an influential body of work that explores constructions of social space and the natural world by inviting physical interaction and sensory experience. Drawing from Biomorphism and minimalist sculpture, along with Neo-concretism and other Brazilian vanguard movements of the 1960s & 70s, the artist both references and incorporates organic shapes and materials ? spices, spices, sand and shells among them?that engage all five senses, producing a new type of sensory perception that renegotiates boundaries between artwork and viewer, the organic and manmade, the natural, spiritual and social worlds.

Often working with a stretchy, stocking-like fabric in vibrant colors, which he fills with aromatic, organic, or tactile materials such as spices, coffee beans, or Styrofoam, Neto suspends pendulous forms from the ceilings and walls of galleries, or creates spaces walled with membrane-like gauze, into which viewers are invited to enter. These giant stalactites and structures contain phallic forms and orifices suggestive of sexuality. ?My work speaks of the finite and the infinite, of the macroscopic and the microscopic, the internal and external, by the masculine and feminine powers,?

He says about keeping a feeling of intimacy in his work 

"I think the intimate is always part of it because that's the way I deal with the world, in a way. It?s the way I feel things. Even with the monumental things, all these works are made by hand. At some point, this thing is going to attach to this wall here. The moment that it will be attached to the wall, is going to be a small interaction, an intimate situation.

So this is reflected in the whole construction because the whole construction is constructed by hand. So, in terms of architectural space, it?s the feeling of the hand being present"

Camille Rose Garcia

Her illustrations of creepy cartoon children living in wasteland fairy tales are critical commentaries on the failures of capitalist utopias, blending nostalgic pop culture references with a satirical slant on modern society. Her work has been displayed internationally and feature in numerous magazines. 

Gill Button

 Its a fashion illustrator I discovered a while ago on instragam, I am really interested in her approach to fashion illustration since it got a melancholic aesthetic and although she uses different medias, the aesthetic remains the same, that is something that it is really interesting for me.

"The modern conception of art starts with the Renaissance and so does the modern conception of th ebook. In terms of aesthetics and form the history of painting, sculpture and architecture has numerous parallels with the development of the book.

In 1960 with the emphasis on art as idea, process, gesture or information and the subsequent rejection of the art object, the situation became more complex. The employment of new mediums, materials, and process meant it to became increasingly difficult to find a definition for a sculpture or architecture. New categories had to be defined for the new mediums including the new book. Used in the context of art i could not longer remains just a book. A new definition came, "artist book" it was an object also and idea, something that the 1960 avant garde declare to be a liberating art form. " BOOKS 

"A book is a sequence of spaces. 

Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment, a book is also a sequence of moments"

"The new arts knows that books exist as objects in an exterior reality, subject to concrete conditions of perception, existence, exchange, consumptions, use, etC"

Annette Messager, La femme et la peur

"Annette Messager is a leading French artist whose extensive body of work over four decades encompasses drawing, photography, needlework, sculpture and installation. For her first Australian survey exhibition, the artist presents works from 1972 to the present, including major installations with kinetic or moving elements. Messager?s artworks are modest in their choice of materials. Clothing, badges, stuffed toys, yarn and synthetic hair all feature prominently, reworked by the artist to unsettling effect. Images are culled from popular magazines and newspapers, drawn by hand or photographed, while particular words are repeated over and over, like a litany.

Annette is a french artist who is in a continual search for her identity as a woman. She produced many unique books using photo-montage , drawings, bricolage, and proverbial and folkloric texts

Messager has spoken of her longstanding interest in ?outsider? art, including the work of amateur artists and children?s art. Equally significant are the historically overlooked practices, materials and techniques of women artists, which she has explored over decades. Since her debut in the Paris art scene in 1971?72, Messager has created an eccentric menagerie of creatures. Animal, human, monstrous or something in-between, her creations suggest the complexity of life as well as the mythologies, superstitions and vanities that underpin it ? the shadowy ?other? within us all. From her earliest works exploring concepts of the feminine, to works of the 1980s that explore hybrid beings or ?chimeras?, to later works featuring dismembered soft toys, unravelled woollen sweaters and hand-stitched limbs and organs, the body remains central while identity is destabilised" Moma Website

I collect, you collect you and she collects. The collecting is as old as man, almost like a basic instinct. It seems own children, but nevertheless results in adults as their own people applied, organized and careful. We can collect a lifetime, in fact often happens, and we add to our collection, our great little treasure, as we grow and age. Although our tastes and preferences change or have a more difficult life, the collection will gradually nurturing new things. A collection can become a personal passion, something very intimate. It is not surprising that this basis of collecting is one of the pillars of the French artist Annette Messager.  In the beginning, he began using repetitive elements collected in his works, such as stuffed birds and photographs. These photographs were exhibited in different theme albums. In general his own life was shown as a project, as a project of life really, for example the album built with her husband on vacation memories adding photos and postcards of the time they were acquired "Empoderadas del Arte"

 Dieter Roth

 Dieter Roth was a German-Swiss Conceptual artist. Best known for his use of biodegradable foodstuffs, he created large-scale installations and sculptures that included cheese, chocolate, and sugar that lent oppressive smells to his exhibitions. His innovative practice blurred the line between process and product, with Roth embracing accident, mutation, and mutability in his finished works

Dieter Roth Diaries

His work comes in a multitude of forms books paintings sculptures, graphics, music, poetry. Found materials are transformed and organic materials, together with their decomposition, chance and process, even dogs barking are used. The immaculate surface of advertising and consumerism is seen as concealing chaos. He made his first book "Kinderbuch" in 1954 and in it explored the device of cutting holes in the pages to partially reveal those coming before and after. In 1961 he first introduce found materials into books, making the pages from bundles of printed material.

Lorna Simpson

"Lorna Simpson belongs to a generation of American artists whose work emphasises questions of race, gender and sexuality, and the systems of discrimination that exist in mainstream society

In 1985 Simpson began to combine staged photographs with text, examining the processes through which meaning and understanding take place. Her use of repetition and subtle variation was a way to question the impact of words and images on one another. Her work is also characterised by the use of stark black and white or minimal colour, in which details are kept to the bare essentials." Tate

"Re-examining photography as a conceptual medium, Lorna Simpson?s works explore the experience of African American women in contemporary society. Simpson?s imagery is culled from both original photographs and those she collects from eBay and flea markets. In order to make her subjects elusive or adaptable to any narrative, Simpson rarely depicts them from the front, and instead shows them from behind or with their faces and eyes obscured or omitted. Placing an emphasis on the social and political implications of African hairstyles and textures, her 1994 piece Wigs (Portfolio)presents an almost scientific study of hairpieces, aiming to underscore the wig as a tool of conformity and agent for physical transformation. Simpson?s work often presents a fragmented or open-ended story, which the viewer is to complete based on his or her own expectations." Art Forum

Nick Knight

Nick Knight is the groundbreaking fashion imagemaker and director of SHOWstudio, a pioneering fashion website created ?based on the belief that showing the entire creative process, from conception to completion is beneficial for the artist, the audience and the art itself.? Knight was one of the first and most high profile imagemakers to adopt digital film as a medium for showing fashion. Nick Knight's reputation for pushing boundaries technically and creatively at every opportunity and being at the forefront of innovation is deeply attractive. He has worked on a range of often controversial issues during his career - from racism, disability, ageism, and more recently fat-ism. He continually challenges conventional ideals of beauty.

Tim Walker

Fashion photographer Tim Walker doesn?t seem to belong to the world of you or me. He?s a Peter Pan, a daydreamer, a fantasist. His pictures are mirages, telling stories conjured directly from an imagination that most of us left behind in childhood. Looking at Tim?s photographs is like following the white rabbit into a world where elephants are painted blue, horses are dusted lilac, paintings come to life and pretty girls with Thirties faces are transformed into marionettes or abandoned princesses.

Tim creates photographs that evoke wonder ? a skill as rare and fragile as one of his butterflies. In presenting his imagination to us, his photographs remind us of our own capacity to dream. And, even though his images are pure whimsy, they feel true because they have been meticulously executed. Understandably, then, in an age when wonder is in such short shortage, Walker?s work is both the subject of an exhibition, Tim Walker, at the Design Museum, SE1 and a new book, Tim Walker: Pictures.

Richard Prince

Mining images from mass media, advertising and entertainment since the late 1970s, Richard Prince has redefined the concepts of authorship, ownership, and aura. Applying his understanding of the complex transactions of representation to the making of art, he evolved a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures yet that is unquestionably his own. An avid collector and perceptive chronicler of American subcultures and vernaculars and their role in the construction of American identity, he has probed the depths of racism, sexism, and psychosis in mainstream humor; the mythical status of cowboys, bikers, customized cars, and celebrities; and most recently, the push?pull allure of pulp fiction and soft porn, producing such unlikely icons as the highly coveted Nurse paintings.

Best known for his use of appropriated imagery. Prince uses photographs taken from consumer culture?advertising, entertainment, and social media?to probe ideas around authenticity and ownership with his controversial practice sparking debates concerning copyright, intellectual property, and theft within the art world. 

Noma Bar  Is graphic designer his work has been feature in very important magazines as TIME OUT, WALLPAPER,

Eric Gill Gill was born in 1882 in Brighton, Sussex (now East Sussex) and in 1897 the family moved to Chichester. Eric studied at Chichester Technical and Art School, and in 1900 moved to London to train as an architect with the practice of W.D. Caroe, specialists in ecclesiastical architecture. Frustrated with his training, he took evening classes in stone masonry at Westminster Technical Institute and in calligraphy at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, where Edward Johnston, creator of the London Underground typeface, became a strong influence. In 1903 he gave up his architectural training to become a calligrapher, letter-cutter and monumental mason. (The Eric Gill Society webpage)

 He is a controversial figure, with his well-known religious views and subject matter generally viewed as being at odds with his sexual behaviour, including his erotic art.

Gill was named Royal Designers for Industry, the highest British award for designers, by the Royal Society of Arts. He also became a founder-member of the newly established Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry.(Wikipedia)

""Radical" might seem a contentious word to use in the context of female Iranian artists or religious architecture, but Shirazeh Houshiary's soon-to-be unveiled East Window for the revamped St-Martin-in-the-Fields is nothing less.

The abundance of natural light filtering into the church through the etched glass and steel fret work of the new window makes it hard to disagree with the vicarthat the project has more than adequately fulfilled its brief. And what a brief: to provide a permanent replacement for a stained glass window shattered by bombs in the second world war that would "successfully animate the light". This delicate fusion of contemporary art and classical architecture is sublime for reasons all of its own, but helped in no small part by Eric Parry Architects' outstanding lottery-assisted renovation of this once dank interior.

The abstract cross-infused design by the 1994 Turner prize nominee and her architect husband Pip Horne was chosen from a shortlist of five contemporary artists. From an art critical or London-cultural perspective they might seem the obvious choice - not one of the other proposals comes close to the poetic simplicity of their warped monochrome grid. And then there's the issue of Houshiary's exotic heritage - a Shiraz-born woman resident in the UK since 1974 - as lever for column inches. But it's not until you experience the work in situ that the significance of this decision hits home...

In the context of the artist's practice this may be nothing new. Her objects and paintings describe the point of exchange between formal modernist principles and spiritual enquiry. And Houshiary and Horne are hardly strangers to controversy." The Guardian

Etched mouth blown clear glass and shot peened stainless steel frame; and Commissioned by Modus Operandi for St Martin-in-the-Fields; Architectural renewal: Eric Parry Architects; Photograph: James Morris

The East Window was commissioned as part of the Renewal of St Martin-in-the-Fields, our major £36m building project from 2005-2008. Light was a key theme of the project and the East Window was designed to let in as much light as possible while creating a work of art that is uplifting and inspirational.  The artist was given a brief suggesting a minimal, possibly monochromatic design would be appropriate and that a potential starting point or subject was that of ?Jacob?s Ladder?, a story which has had a continuous thread of resonance for St Martin?s.

Jacob's Ladder (Hebrew: Sulam Yaakov ???? ????) is the colloquial name for a connection between the earth and heaven that the biblical PatriarchJacob dreams about during his flight from his brother Esau, as described in the Book of Genesis. The significance of the dream has been somewhat debated, but most interpretations agree that it identified Jacob with the obligations and inheritance of the ethnic people chosen by God, as understood in the Judeo-Christian-Islam panoply. It has since been used as a symbolic reference in various other contexts.

Henry Moore was the most important British sculptor of the 20th century, and the most popular and internationally celebrated sculptor of the post-war period. Non-Western art was crucial in shaping his early work - he would say that his visits to the ethnographic collections of the British Museum were more important than his academic study. Later, leading European modernists such as Picasso, Arp, Brancusi and Giacometti became influences. And uniting these inspirations was a deeply felt humanism. He returned again and again to the motifs of the mother and child, and the reclining figure, and often used abstract form to draw analogies between the human body and the landscape. Although sculpture remained his principal medium, he was also a fine draughtsman, and his images of figures sheltering on the platforms of subway stations in London during the bombing raids of World War II remain much loved. His interest in the landscape, and in nature, has encouraged the perception that he has deep roots in traditions of British art, yet his softly optimistic, redemptive view of humanity also brought him an international audience. Today, few major cities are without one of his reclining figures, reminders that the humanity canrebound from any disaster.

The foundation of Moore's approach was direct carving, something he derived not only from European modernism, but also from non-Western art. He abandoned the process of modeling (often in clay or plaster) and casting (often in bronze) that had been the basis of his art education, and instead worked on materials directly. He liked the fierce involvement direct carving brought with materials such as wood and stone. It was important, he said, that the sculptor "gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head... he identifies himself with its center of gravity.

During the 1930s, Moore's most fruitful and experimental decade, he was influenced by both Constructivism and, to a much greater extent, Surrealism. From the former he came to appreciate the importance of abstract form, from the latter he derived much of his interest in lending a human and psychological dimension to his sculpture. But Surrealism also shaped his mature style. It encouraged his love of biomorphic forms, and also suggested how the human figure could be fragmented into parts and reduced to essentials.

Henry Moore?s sculptures are lumpy and bumpy and sometimes have holes right through them. Some look like people, others look like rocks or other objects that you might see in a landscape

 In the 1930s, he joined an artist group called Unit One, which included Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash. He was also a member of the British Surrealist movement, and took part in the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936.

The human figure has always presented the sculptor with a compositional problem. The body consists of a heavy tune an the munch slighter appendices of the arms, the legs, and the head. Since the artist task is not to copy what he sees but to create a whole pattern of unified for, he must find way of imposing unity on so heterogeneous an object. How can he organize the trunk and the limbs in one ingrates composition? Henry Moore solution is that by transforming the heaviest volume, the trunk, into a configuration of narrower shapes, a common denominator has been found for the whole figure. The beam like or ribbon shaped units which represent arms and legs differ little from those which are found in the area of the trunk, ant the holes that pierce the body resemble those between the legs or between the arms and the torso. In some of the reclining figures, a surprising symmetry is produced by the correspondence between the frame of the pierced chest and a similar frame formed by two legs. 

This stress of the interdependence of things, their mutual influences, the indivisible unity of th whole is likely to reflect the artist conception of the world. But the structural pattern with conveys this meaning is possible only at a high level of formal development

French abstract sculptor, collagist, engraver and poet. Born at Strasbourg. Studied at the Ecole des Arts et Métiers, Strasbourg, at the Weimar Academy and briefly in Paris at the Académie Julian in 1908. Spent the next years mainly in Switzerland, at Weggis, working in isolation. Made his first abstract works in 1910 or 1911. In 1912 met Sonia and Robert Delaunay in Paris, and Kandinsky and the artists of the Blue Rider group in Munich. Co-founder of the Dada movement with Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball in Zurich in 1916, and continued working on the same lines with Ernst in Cologne 1919-20. Made abstract collages and painted wood reliefs, and published poems in French and German. Lived mainly in Paris from 1920, married Sophie Tauber in 1922 and settled with her at Meudon 1927. Participated in the Surrealist movement (having his first one-man exhibition at the Galerie Surréaliste, Paris, 1927), and made reliefs with poetic configurations and experimented with chance arrangements. Developed from relief-sculpture to sculpture in the round in 1930-1 and from then on sought a concrete art: sculptures which identify themselves with natural forms, without description or imitation. Member of Abstraction-Création 1931. Awarded the main sculpture prize at the 1954 Venice Biennale and one of the two equal main sculpture prizes at the 1964 Pittsburgh International. Died in Basle.

Barbara Hepworth distinguished herself as a world-recognized sculptor in a period where female artists were rare. She evolved her ideas and her work as an influential part of an ongoing conversation with many other important artists of her time, working crucially in areas of greater abstraction while creating three dimensional objects. Her development of sculptural vocabularies and ideas was complex and multi-faceted. This included the use of a wide range of physical materials for sculpting and an unprecedented sensitivity to the particular qualities of those materials in helping decide the ultimate results of her sculptures, the investigation of "absence" in sculpture as much as "presence," and deep considerations of the relationship of her sculptural forms to the larger spaces surrounding it. Though her forms in their larger outlines tended to possess the clean lines of modernist aesthetics, she complicated these with different textures, an effect described by one reviewer as "sensuous and tactile" that "quickened the pulse".

She helped shift three dimensional art works into greater abstraction as she herself moved from creating work mingling figurative forms with abstraction in her earlier sculptures to almost entirely abstract, non-representational later works.

Hepworth was a key figure among modern sculptors in responding to the physical characteristics of whichever material was chosen to work with in order to resolve appropriate forms for the finished works, rather than simply mold material to fit some pre-determined shape.

Though she developed a long series of highly abstract pieces, the greater trajectory of her work was imbued with underlying aspects of nature, which she brought out more explicitly in the sculptures of her later career. "All my sculpture comes out of landscape," she wrote in 1943. "I'm sick of sculptures in galleries & photos with flat backgrounds... no sculpture really lives until it goes back to the landscape, the trees, air & clouds."

Hepworth revealed their move towards abstraction in joint exhibitions in 1932 and 1933 (). This became the abiding direction of her work, epitomised by the pioneering piercing of the block, and coincided with experiments in collage, photograms and prints.. Establishing links with the continental avant grade,she visited the Parisian studios of Arp, Brancusi, Mondrian, Braque and Picasso. She joined abstraction-creation.

 Her first major solo exhibition (Temple Newsam, Leeds 1943) was followed by a monograph by William Gibson (Barbara Hepworth: Sculptress, 1946). Although Hepworth's contribution to the 1950 Venice Biennale was dogged by comparisons with Moore, two retrospectives - in Wakefield (1951) and London (Whitechapel 1954) - and Read's monograph (1952) confirmed her post-war reputation.

Hepworth was especially active within, and on behalf of, the modernist t artistic community in St Ives during its period of post-war international prominence. Her experience of the Cornish landscape was acknowledged in her choice of titles. In a wider context, Hepworth also represented a link with pre-war ideals in a climate of social and physical reconstruction; this was exemplified by her two sculptures for the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain (1951). Public commissions and greater demand encouraged her to employ assistants for preliminary work - including Denis Mitchell and Dicon Nance - and to produce bronze editions

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In the first half of the 1960s, the Argentine Italian artist Lucio Fontana created Spatial concept  an abstract painting that is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. In this work Fontana took an unorthodox approach to his medium; after punching a series of holes through the canvas with a knife, he applied an even coat of metallic paint to the ravaged surface. The process may imply violence, but the resulting composition is characterised by the utmost simplicity: a dialogue between a monochrome surface and the rupture of that surface. For this reason Fontana is often compared to twentieth-century modernist painters who have sought formal purity by reducing painting to its bare essentials. Beneath the surface of Spatial concept, however, are layers of rich and complex meaning that belie this apparent simplicity. Fontana painting represents neither destruction nor a reduction of painting. On the contrary, it is an eloquent visual argument for a radical expansion of the medium. To appreciate this we need to look beyond the purely visual qualities of this painting and the immediate context of its production to examine the artist?s early career, his theories of spatial art, and the large series of works beginning in 1949 to which Fontana gave the enigmatic title Spatial concept.

"Anish Kapoor is one of the most influential sculptors of his generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, he manoeuvres between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work. Immense PVC skins, stretched or deflated; concave or convex mirrors whose reflections attract and swallow the viewer; recesses carved in stone and pigmented so as to disappear: these voids and protrusions summon up deep-felt metaphysical polarities of presence and absence, concealment and revelation. Forms turn themselves inside out, womb-like, and materials are not painted but impregnated with colour, as if to negate the idea of an outer surface, inviting the viewer to the inner reaches of the imagination. Kapoor?s geometric forms from the early 1980s, for example, rise up from the floor and appear to be made of pure pigment, while the viscous, blood-red wax sculptures from the last ten years ? kinetic and self-generating ? ravage their own surfaces and explode the quiet of the gallery environment. There are resonances with mythologies of the ancient world ? Indian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman ? and with modern times, where 20th century events loom large."

"It is my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive?. I think it is my role as an artist to bring to expression, its not my role to be expressive. Ive got nothing particular to say, I don't have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, lets stay to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence" Anish Kapoor.

"It may be the most valuable insight into Anish kapoor's work to suggest that the presence of an object can render a space more empty than mere vacancy could ever envisage. This quality of an excessive, engendering emptiness is everywhere visible in his work. It is a processes that he associates with the contrary, yet correlated, forces of withdrawal and disclosure, "drawing in towards a depth that marks and makes a new surface, that keeps one the whole issue of the surface, the surface tension...

The monumental and nominal address of Kapoor's work should not obscure these uncanny experience which suggest that his vast tolerance of empty space expands the space available into another ongoing disruption of time...

The enigma of the void is now discernible in the intimation of a movement that obliterates perceptual space and supplements it with a disruptive , disjunctive time through which the spectator must pass." Anish Kapoor Hayward gallery book

?The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It's very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It's a space of becoming? 'something' that dwells in the presence of the work? that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance?(Anish Kapoor in Bhabha, 1998: 11-41).

Kapoor recognizes the void in many presences. The presence as fear can be seen as a fear for the loss of self, from a non-object to a non-self. This fear has to do with the idea of being consumed by the object, or in the non-object. Kapoor has always been drawn towards this notion of fear, towards a sensation of falling, or vertigo. Imagine yourself falling into the black hole of Descent into Limbo. He sees this kind of work as an inversion, a turning inside-out. Fear is like darkness, the eye is uncertain, the hand feels in hope of contact with walls. You look to see if you can find the bottom of the black hole (Van Winkel, 1995: 39-46).

"The word imago designated the effigy of the absent, the dead, and, more precisely, the ancestors: the dead from whom we come, the links of the lineage in which each of us is a stitch. The imago hooks into the cloth. It does not repair the rip of their death: it does less and more than that. It weaves. It images absence. It does not represent this absence, it does not evoke it, it does not symbolize it, even though all this is there too. But, essentially, it presents absence. The absent are not there, are not ?in images.? But they are imaged: their absence is woven into our presence. The empty place of the absent as a place that is not empty, that is the image. A place that is not empty does not mean a place that has been filled: it means the place of the image, that is, in the end, the image as place, and a singular place for what has no place here: the place of a displacement, a metaphor . . .
Jean-Luc Nancy 

In equal measure poetic and political, the work of Colombian artist Doris Salcedo explores the paradox of simultaneously forgetting and remembering the social scars of violent conflicts. In sculptures, installations, and public projects, Salcedo reflects on how once unimaginable suffering becomes abruptly real, conveying how war just distorts . . . It throws a shadow over your entire life.Her subjects are those affected by large-scale conflict and include not just those who are killed but also their families, who endure the pain and suffering of absence. The work transcends simplistic notions of victimhood to engage more fully with the complexity of personhood wherein all people remember and forget, are beset by contradiction, and recognize and misrecognize themselves and others.

Salcedo?s thinking is influenced by philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy, writers and poets such as Paul Celan, and Holocaust survivors such as Jean Amery. Their works provide ways to process traumatic conditions of violence created by racism, oppression, exclusion, poverty, and humiliation, while Salcedos artworks consider these conditions from the distinct perspective of the victims. Salcedo is also influenced by the work of German artist Joseph Beuys, for whom art is inflected with questions of how to heal after social traumas. From the beginning of her career, Salcedo has participated in a central shift of the paradigm of political art by embracing ideas, objecthood, and materiality simultaneously a substantial and early break from the autobiographical approaches of artists associated with 1980s multiculturalism." 

Salcedos oeuvre diverges from centuries of paintings and sculptures about war that rely on depictions of the figure. Instead, her research, processes, and art refute notions of representation by signaling the futility of such attempts. She embraces the abstract as an essential tool for art making. This is another crucial element of the artists work her decision not to address violence through depictions of battle scenes, victims, or gore, but instead to plumb the emotional and psychological textures of loss, grief, and other aftereffects of violence. The work, by the artist s own admission, is like a funeral oration.

he seemingly infinite number of conflicts around the globe and the neverending loss of individuals are echoed in Salcedo?s work through an aesthetic strategy that emphasizes a repetition of forms with subtle variations, as if to acknowledge the individual among the masses. And yet, despite the twenty-four-hour torrent of media images bearing witness to extraordinary pain, suffering, and loss around the globe, Salcedo suggests that as a society we have developed an inability to mourn. In order to mourn, one must negate apathy toward others and empathetically feel their loss so that it may become our loss as well. Through highly crafted sculptures and installations, her work offers an image and a space to conjure feelings and subsequently a public platform that forges this sense of collective human connection.

If mourning restores humanity, and Salcedos sculptures create sites for mourning, then she creates art that counters dehumanizing acts with humane ones. In the face of the widespread injustice and suffering that accompany systemic violence, Salcedo?s work creates spaces where we can reaffirm life by confronting,seeing, hearing, and acknowledging,the other. In doing so, it is both urgent and timeless.

In addition, the paradox of an absent body that makes its presence felt is central to Salcedos work, specifically the notion of agency for those who are socially or politically ,invisible,the refugee, the immigrant, the widow, the person on the receiving end of violence.

The House of Bernarda Alba (Spanish: La casa de Bernarda Alba) is a play by the Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. Commentators have often grouped it with Blood Wedding and Yerma as a "rural trilogy". Lorca did not include it in his plan for a "trilogy of the Spanish earth" (which remained unfinished at the time of his murder).^[1]

Lorca described the play in its subtitle as a drama of women in the villages of Spain. The House of Bernarda Alba was Lorca's last play, completed on 19 June 1936, two months before Lorca's death during the Spanish Civil War. The play was first performed on 8 March 1945 at the Avenida Theatre in Buenos Aires.^[2][3] The play centers on the events of a house in Andalusiaduring a period of mourning, in which Bernarda Alba (aged 60) wields total control over her five daughters Angustias (39 years old), Magdalena (30), Amelia (27), Martirio, (24), and Adela (20). The housekeeper (La Poncia) and Bernarda's elderly mother (María Josefa) also live there.

The deliberate exclusion of any male character from the action helps build up the high level of sexual tension that is present throughout the play. Pepe "el Romano", the love interest of Bernarda's daughters and suitor of Angustias, never appears on stage. The play explores themes of repression, passion, and conformity, and inspects the effects of men upon women.

"In 1962, the American architecture critic GE Kidder-Smith wrote that the Alton Estate in south-west London was "the finest low-cost housing development in Europe". Comprising blocks of flats, high and low-rise, set in expropriated aristocrats' gardens and parkland, aesthetically split between an "east" of pretty details and informality and a "west" of raw concrete and sublime scale, Alton was the nearest thing London ever got to a complete Ville Radieuse, a total implementation of Le Corbusier's programme for the metropolis of tomorrow.

Just four years later, in the film Fahrenheit 451 (1966), it really was the metropolis of tomorrow. Its most famous corner, where five slab blocks punctuate a rolling hill, each designed by their London County Council architects as serial copies of Corbusier's Unités, became the imposing, mute backdrop to the burning of books, in a future society where reading is banned.

This marked the first in a series of films in the 1960s and early 70s where directors from outside the UK, from France, the US and Italy, arrived here and radically re-read the British landscape, severing it from the cliches of either the stately home or the kitchen sink, filming it instead as a hard, alienating and unnervingly futuristic place. Even in recent years, the most convincing visions of dystopia, such as Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006), have been visitors' visions of a country, unaffected by familiarity or affection. In short, for these directors England is a country of violence, concrete and piss – and its then-internationally-admired modern architecture is the invariable backdrop.

Fahrenheit 451's director François Truffaut famously claimed that the British landscape was inherently uncinematic – all that rain, all those smudged landscapes, all those pinched towns without aesthetic drama, all this meant that London could never become a cinema city like Paris or New York.

It was a completely ridiculous statement, of course, and not least because of its provenance – an interview with Alfred Hitchcock about his earlier films in the UK. In the interwar years, after a brief spell in Germany learning the techniques of the expressionists, young Leytonstonian Hitchcock started to make impressive use of exactly these vague, threatening aspects of the British environment – pea-soupers engulf the murderer of The Lodger (1927), a bomb is carried on to a bus in a crowded Fleet Street in Sabotage (1936), a police chase crawls across the heavy metal of the Forth Bridge in The 39 Steps (1935).

So whatever he might have said, Truffaut had learned how this landscape could be made to look eerie and unnerving rather than pretty and picturesque. In Fahrenheit 451, you have for possibly the first time on film the use of tower blocks as dystopia, rather than utopia, images of an atomised society rather than an image of community. And it's not just the use of the already famous Alton Estate, but also spec housing from the same era, as in a scene where the professional book burner goes back home to a street of spaced-out modernist villas surrounded by pine trees, a location that could be either Surrey or Sweden. Meanwhile, our book-reading heroine, played by Julie Christie, lives in a mock tudor semi, here coming to signify freedom rather than conformity. It's no condemnation of the film to admit that, for the most part, this begins what would become an easy identification of concrete with dystopia – especially dystopian compared with the joyous explorations of historic Paris in Truffaut's other films.

Michelangelo Antonioni could never have been accused of being obvious in his choices of buildings and locations, though. In films such as La Notte (1961) and Red Desert (1964), he had already depicted Italy as the country not of historic architectural grandeur but of sterile modernist apartments (in which people have seemingly endless bleak, anomic relationships) or of pre-war industrial wastes. Unlike Truffaut's film, there is no hint of a "good" historic place being contrasted with a "bad" modern one – there is only a modern environment, whether it has new or old buildings in it.

In his only film made entirely in London, Blow-Up (1966), Antonioni did various peculiar things to the local landscape – most notoriously, painting the grass in a park in Charlton because it wasn't green enough – but he also chose to shoot pivotal scenes in newly built London office complexes. An early scene of the film's various swinging Londoners cruising around the city takes place along London Wall, which was then being experimentally redeveloped with Miesian towers and overhead walkways, with the road itself a traffic-light-free runway. In another scene, Antonioni's melancholic beautiful people are filmed hanging around the Economist building, as if to acknowledge the way that the Smithsons' raised plazas in that scheme provided a site to see and be seen.

Less well-known than Blow-Up in its treatment of modernism, though, is a scene in The Passenger (1975). Set mostly in the North African desert, this is a bleak film even by Antonioni's standards, starring a depressive Jack Nicholson. In one scene he wanders around Patrick Hodgkinson's newly built Brunswick Centre, through the shopping plaza in the middle between the ziggurats of the housing blocks. The estate looks incredibly shiny and clean, bathed in sunshine, as if the occasional tendency of British modernist architecture to wish it was in Italy had been fulfilled. As with Blow-Up, you get the sense that Antonioni was a very keen reader of the architectural press.

Both Truffaut and Antonioni made British modernism look more than a bit unnerving, but they didn't take it on in the same ferocious way as the Americans Stanley Kubrick and Sidney Lumet. Kubrick deliberately had his violent droogs in A Clockwork Orange (1971) live in what was then the most complete modernist environment in London, and Thamesmead has never really lived it down since. When a part of the estate was demolished a few years ago, the local paper's headline was "No More Clockwork Orange" – although the area on Southmere Lake, with its angular blocks arranged placidly around the water, is mostly the same as it was in 1971.

An equally terrifying vision of people in brutalist buildings behaving in a brutal way can be found in Lumet's The Offence (1972). A psychologically damaged policeman (played a little too convincingly by Sean Connery) resides in Point Royal in the new town of Bracknell, a (now-listed) tower in a park designed by Ove Arup. At several moments in the film Connery has flashbacks to the horrors he has seen over the years – dead bodies found in railway sidings, a grim, stunted, Victorian country to confirm all of Truffaut's scepticism – but he always returns to his impeccable modernist apartment in the tower surrounded by greenery, an attempt at escape that inevitably ends in the flat being smashed up.

Although A Clockwork Orange's success and notoriety meant that Thamesmead is perhaps the only one of these places to have been adversely affected by its cinematic depiction, these films all helped the sudden shift in the public presentation of modernism, away from optimism for the future towards a more familiar vision of mechanised and dehumanised failure. And interestingly, none of them depicted the standard blocks system-built everywhere in their hundreds – most were filmed in the prestige projects of the time.

Tom Cordell's recent documentary Utopia London (2010) explicitly argued with these visions of the modernist city, polemically editing Truffaut's depiction of the Alton Estate next to very different accounts from its actual inhabitants. Turning a real, lived environment into a mythical dystopia always creates a caricature. Other recent documentaries, from Enrica Colusso's Home Sweet Home (2012) on the Elephant and Castle, to local residents' Rowley Way Speaks for Itself (2009), on Neave Brown's Alexandra Road estate in Camden, take places more commonly used as backdrops for TV crime dramas and tell stories of everyday life in the buildings, and of the now-defunct socialist modernism behind their construction.

However, it is noticeable that the most interesting recent depictions of Britain on film still come from foreign directors. Tellingly, they make more use of the luxury spaces of the new ruling class than they do of the housing projects of the 1960s. Children of Men depicts its fascistic future London looking much as it does now, with chain coffee shops and art galleries in converted power stations; while Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 28 Weeks Later (2007)takes Canary Wharf literally, as the sealed-off decontaminated zone where the UN try to police a zombie-ridden London. The films of the late 60s and early 70s were prophetic; their vision of London as the site of failed housing projects, concrete and social collapse began to be how a lot of Londoners saw their own city. Will these films of an authoritarian, neoliberal, steel and glass London have the same effect?"

This imposing mid-60s building famously starred as the ?Ludovico Medical Facility? in Kubrick's legendary film A Clockwork Orange. For this reason alone it is well worth a pilgrimage. It has also appeared in various TV series including Spooks, Silent Witness and Inspector Morse. Its jutting geometric forms mark it as a classic example of mid-period (or ?Massive period?) Brutalism.

Thamesmead.

"Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971) depicts a future where the disenfranchised youth run wildly amuck, blood-lust fuelled by a popular cocktail known as Moloko whilst sprouting profanities in a bastardised concoction of English and Russian. One night whilst partaking in a bit of the old ‘ultra-violence’ high on Moloko, Alex and his ‘droogs’ tear into their neighborhood; beating, raping and finally murdering an unsuspecting cat-fancier. The cat woman’s walls drip with pornographic art as she is murdered mid-yoga by Alex wielding a giant sculpted phallus.

Banned, derided and ultimately lauded, Kubrick’s uncompromising vision based on Anthony Burgess’s book of our society in a downward spiral is matched seamlessly by the unforgiving selection of location and design. Alex’s silhouetted droogs adorned with Pinocchio noses and cod-pieces, beating an Irish drunk with their gentleman’s canes could only have been set against the stark, concrete walls of a Thamesmead, SE28 subway. The brutalism of the architecture providing a stark realism that this encroaching future could have felt uncomfortably close to those watching at the time.

Influenced more on account of a 2 million dollar budget (peanuts to Kubrick) than with proposed set design, the brutalism provides a perfect framing to the film in both locale and in name.

Venture inside those punishing exteriors and there is no escape from the violence in a visceral orgy of 1970’s post-modernist kitsch. None is played out more prevalently than in Alex’s flat where gold wallpaper, bulbous chrome-cladded walls and JH Lynch paintings rise-up to bite you on every corner. The banality of a mid-century credenza resting against a wall only adding to the violence of saturated colours on account of its mere presence.

It’s a house from which there is no respite for your senses and juxtaposed with Alex’s own bedroom, his habitat appears equally as tempered but with the colour white providing an intermission to the madness outside of his combination-locked door.

A painting by Cornelius Makkink (brother to Herman Makkink whose phallus kills the cat woman) adorns Alex’s wall, its blatant pose rises above another Herman Makkink sculpture – ‘Christ Unlimited’. A chrome wall sconce and light through the Beethoven window blind illuminate both the artworks brightly. It appears as a rather large nod to Alex’s own love of violence and a bit of the old Ludwig Van. A stunning Mitchell ‘Transcriptor’ Turntable soothes Alex with Beethoven’s 9th. Add to the mix two walls of white, wall-mounted speakers to amplify it, and that is a real horrorshow hi-fi set-up my brothers; a haven from the garish nightmare of his own parent’s making just beyond those white walls. It’s Alex’s haven all right, but perhaps even a true retreat from his parents banal personalities and the intensity of their decor choices.

Kubrick is renowned for his obsession with detail and his decoration of Alex’s room not only purports to amplify his character, but acts as a counter point to his parents’ own tastes. His room serves not just as an act of rebellion, but the externalisation of his violent and lustful nature. It comes as no surprise that when he is ‘cured’ by science he returns home to find his room reduced to dumbbells and football cut-outs by new lodger ‘Joe’.  

Kubrick himself stated that “… modern art’s almost total pre-occupation with subjectivism has led to anarchy and… the notion that reality exists only in the artist’s mind, and that the thing which simpler souls had for so long believed to be reality, is only an illusion…” (ref Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange by Michel Ciment). The illusion he provides by use of art and design in A Clockwork Orange, emphasises the sterile dysfunction of this society by their characters not only adopting modern art but by violently throwing it in our faces.

Alex utilises his art and surroundings to express his own inner revulsion at society and a mirroring of his own brutality, but also as any young man – he just loves to be surrounded by cool stuff."  Film and Furniture

Post-modernism is an umbrella term to the art produced between 1980 and the present, that includes conceptual art,neo conceptual art, neo minimalism art, video and installation art, politic art, feminist art, and neo surrealism art.

Essentially post modernism gave birth to the notion that the critique and deconstruction of art, the art world, social constructs, and society was necessary. Issues of identity, self representation, politics, the environment, mass media, advertising, celebrity culture and consumerism have been the concerns of postmodern artists. One tenet of postmodernism in art is relativity, or the belief that no belief has value over another, and this had led to endless deconstruction. 

Yet postmodernism is alive and well. Many would agree that Andy Warhol and other Pop artists set the stage for postmodern artist, who would later explore issues of art production and reproduction, and the death of the notion that art bus be original and a single object to be viewed on a pedestal. Post modern art has a plethora of satire, irony, and black humour as artist continue to critique art and life.

Post modern art includes many examples of installation art, and site specific art, or art that is made with either a natural setting or a gallery or a museum space in mind. In site specific works, aesthetic issues are often secondary to social issues or concepts, and they may often include events and performances within the site that are usually documented through photography or video. While postmodern art continues to flourish many view postmodern art as a spectacle driven, shallow, unenlightening and cynical.

Artists today, however, do not operate under the same rules as in the past, they are a reflection of our times, and they respond by taking full advantage of technologies and new ideologies. If their work is viewed as cynical, maybe we do in fact live in more dangerous, precarious, and uncertain times. Instead of looking to their inner worlds and unconscious like the modernists did, artists today peer outwards and use the world as their subject. Many postmodern artist push the limits of acceptability and operate along the lines of Marshall Mc luhans "art is what you can get away with"" The postmodern book

"To give another example during the 1980 female artists began to challenge the male-orientated balance of the art establishment. One particularly successful group, the Guerrilla Girls, named themselves "The conscience of art world" and used theatrical means to pint out the under representation of women in the major galleries. One piece which began as billboard poster but is now frequently reproduced as a work in its own right. "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?"

"Other artists such as the duo Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin use their work deliberately to parody masculine sexual repartee and thereby challenge the dominant constructions of gender identity that represen men as voracious predators and women as their passive victims. If the experimentation of these artists extends the scope of what art can be and introduces new voices and styles into the galleries, it is also seen by some critics as a loss of critical edge as art embraces the markets and, apart from some minor scandals which often serve only to increase a work popularity, is embraced in its turn by the very bourgeoisie against whom modernism set itself up in opposition. Kiefer, Lucas and Emin might have cause some brief scandals, but their work has quickly become as marketable as that of the modernist whom they succeeded. It is perhaps not just a coinciden that the 1980s saw the fastest growing art market in history, art and finance seem to some critics to be becoming more and more closely related as the distinctions between high and popular culture disappear and artist become mass-media stars in their own right.

'Emin's artworks have embodied what can only be described as an intensity that mirrors the life experiences to which they refer. Their emotional immediacy runs the gamut of expression from fear anger and despair to ecstasy, hope and love. They incorporate some of the longest established themes of art history like spirituality and the afterlife, as well as topic seldom addressed remarkable diversity of mediums and materials, which include appliqué blankets and embroideries , wooden sculptures and modified furniture, mono prints, drawings, photographs, neon signs, writings, and even live performances. 

Her influences include artist whose works can be seen as an expression of the self, such as edvard munch, egon schiele, and Louise Bourgeois." Love is what you want, Tracey Emin book

"As illustrated in these works and others, Tracey Emin explores very personal and sometimes turbulent childhood experiences and sexual history in her art which is often described as confessional. These sources are reflected very literally, creating strikingly autobiographical pieces, the titles of which convey exactly what the viewer sees without veiling the works in metaphor or symbolism. She works in a wide variety of media including neon lighting, needle point, and photography.Emin creates a world where personal truth-telling moves beyond the me-culture and into collective catharsis.

Her intensity and her total reckless commitment to herself and to what she does is necessary for an artist, but it is also necessary for any human being who want to live at the centre of their humanity and not on its rim."

Much of the material she uses for her collages and patchwork are elements that come from things she has kept. 

"there was no room for people who made work like me. If you think back to 1993, whatever it was that was hip and popular in contemporary art, it wasn't me. What was good about have "the museum" was being able to have one to one discussion on my terms. Also it was just after the brilliant show at the Walker Art Gallery and I was so upset about the way I had been treated.

"15 years after its debut Tracey Emin?s iconic installation ?My Bed? has returned to the Tate Britian, complete with the empty vodka bottles, used condoms and blood-stained underwear that made it legendary. A testament to the breakdown of a relationship, ?My Bed?, like the former Young British Artist?s other early works, makes some people uncomfortable with its raw emotion. But is this glimpse into Emin?s inner life intensely personal and anti-establishment, or just an unrestricted example of a narcissist oversharing? Whichever side of the fence you?re on, it is hard to deny that ?My Bed? is a seminal feminist art work. A symbol of changing attitudes towards women that defined the 90s.

 Through her autobiographical art she exposes intimate details others would be too embarrassed to reveal, such as her bout with genital herpes and various sexual encounters. Her work is not symbolic, Emin forces us to look square on at reality. In an era where it is still considered shameful to discuss women?s issues, where period talk is still considered disgusting and abortion is taboo, Emin?s work remains more important than ever." Untitled Magazine

"I enjoyed making this series because I somehow felt removed from it. And even though it is an erotic subject, I even felt distant from the sexuality of the pictures. It was almost like I was trying to get to the bottom of something, understand something - what it means to be a woman, a single entity and feminine. There is no shock or offence intended. They were made for me, trying to deal with something that is going on in my mind. And that's the beautiful thing about drawing: it's intimate, like handwriting, and the dialogue is between the paper and me. One day I could write a poem; the next I could draw that poem. If I were left alone on a desert island I would still have the need to draw." Tracey Emin on and Interview with the guardian 

"The work of Sarah Lucas is unambiguous. There is humour in her work as well, a humour recalling the Monty Python team absurd jokes. As Sarah Lucas has stated in interviews se enjoys the fun of Python hilarious translations of expressions and opinions gleaned from the media an the street.

Sarah Lucas too keeps close to reality, her objects, photos, videos, and installations all come from her direct surroundings. She also frequently features in her own work. But in translating texts into images, commingling different elements and placing them in a particular context, she shifts the viewer angle just a fraction. She is concerned with coping with the vast amount of information, notions and things that already exists.

 It is hard to identify such a thing as a central theme in Lucas often recalcitrant work, but two subjects do frequently crop up: personal fighting spirit and a critical vie of society stereotyped image of women.

Me suspended is the title of a series of miles made from full length photo cutouts of lucas sprawling, legs spread, wearing jeans and workman shoes. Her pose is though, exaggeratedly """"""masculine"""""" . This is inverted machismo: Lucas upturns the male and female authoritarian relationships with there own show of macho behaviour, something with is felt to be a disturbing violation of the male self image. The allusion to a state of suspension the the title of this work emphasises the freedom and unconditional of the ambiguos role she plays in it, also the freedom and unconditionality of the ambiguous role she plays in it, and also the freedom of though the makes it possible to capture such gender bending by means visual associations. " Sarah Lucas book

"Lucas?s materials ? furniture, clothing, food ? are sculptural and associative. Nylon tights provide a useful casing: stuffed with wadding they become splayed limbs of female bodies. Tights are also intimate, erotic, yet cheap and disposable, both glamorous and abject. Lucas?s objects also draw on art history; her frequent use of toilet bowls recalls Duchamp?s urinal, the first ready-made.Stained mattresses, sofas and chairs act as plinths for ?bodies? sometimes situated against the surreal domesticity of Lucas?s wallpapers. Her figures are all headless. There is only one face, that of the artist herself, omnipresent through a sequence of self portraits" Whitechapel Gallery website

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