ART CITIES:London-Michelle Stuart
Since the late ‘60s, Michelle Stuart has created a multifaceted body of work including large-scale earth works, complex multi-media installations, earth drawings, encaustic paintings, sculptural objects, drawings and prints. The photographic image has been an ancillary part of her work in the past it is currently the primary medium. This is the Stuart’s first exhibition in London since 1979, when she showed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Parafin Gallery Archive
Throughout Stuart’s career photography has been a key element within her practice and this exhibition focus on an important body of recent photographic works. In these Stuart exploits photographs taken during her travels or in the studio, as well as collected from archival sources, to create complex grid configurations. The grids articulate connections between images and places, and suggest grand narratives of journeys across time and space. Stuart has likened these to ‘silent movies’. An inveterate traveler herself, these works encompass a range of locations from New York and Paris to the mountains of Machu Picchu and the oceans of Polynesia. Alongside these new photographic works also exhibits a selection of important older works including drawings, earth rubbings (which were created through a process of smashing, pulverizing, rubbing and imprinting soil and rock into sheets of scroll-like paper), site documentation and book-objects. Notable are a group made at sites around Avebury and the Ridgeway in 1980-81 incorporating earth from the sites and photographic documentation. Taken together, the old and new works suggest a remarkably consistent approach in which the artist’s abiding concerns with place, site, history and memory are addressed through different media. The exhibition suggests a direct trajectory from an earth drawing of 1969 to Stuart’s most recent photographic work.
Info: “Trace Memory: Selected Works 1969–2015”, Parafin Gallery, 18 Woodstock Street, London, Duration: 27/3-9/5/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri: 10:00-18:00, Sat: 12:00-17:00, www.parafin.co.uk