re:place

re:place is a two year programme of site-specific contemporary art projects across
Derbyshire, featuring a host of artists:

2009 - Alec Finlay
Kate Genever
Matthew Smith
Ivan Smith
The Centre of Attention
Bruce Rimell

2010 - Philippa Lawrence
Flore Gardner
Charles Monkhouse.

This year re:place comes to Ilkeston Festival, with contemporary art cropping up in unexpected places around the town.

Keep an eye out for more informaiton. This page will be updated with more informaiton as it happens

FLORE GARDNER | CHLOE STEELE

Chloe Steele and Flore Gardner are two contemporary artists having
exhibitions at Ilkeston Festival 2010. Chloe has been invited to make a
huge wall drawing in Ilkeston, and Flore Gardner shows an amazing
photographic installation as part of re:place, an ambitious two-year
curated programme of site-specific contemporary visual arts
commissions and installations across Derbyshire of regional and
national significance, running throughout 2009 - 2011. Over the
two-year project there will be two major artists’ commissions, four
smaller-scale commissions, bursaries for artists, and a host of other
projects such as this one at Festivals throughout the county.

Visit the website,www.re-place.co.uk, to find out more.

Both exhibitions are free to visit and are at 156/158 Bath Street from 29
June to 3 July, open from 9am – 5pm each day.

Chloe Steele is an artist who trained at the Slade School of Fine Art, and
before that at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art.
Her wall drawing will grow over the period of her residency, 29 June to 3
July, so visitors can come back regularly to see how the drawing is
progressing.

Chloe’s work has been regularly exhibited over the past ten years, both
nationally and internationally, and has been selected for
residencies in the UK and France. On graduating from the Slade in 2005 she
was awarded the Henry Tonks prize for drawing.

Drawing forms the essential backbone of her work, increasingly based on
the Norfolk landscape where she grew up. She currently lives in London.

Chloe says, “I like the idea of doing a drawing of the architecture in
Ilkeston, playing with the idea of creating a 2D townscape and
somehow incorporating words, the names of shops and the signage
littered about the place. That seems to me the thing that denotes the
British high street these days, and differentiates it from the past - the
fact it just shouts out at you. I like the idea of working from sketches,
and memory, so that is the process I will work with in
Ilkeston.”

Upstairs at 156/158 Bath Street you will find a photographic
installation by Flore Gardner, a contemporary artist originally from
Scotland but now living in France. She has been commissioned to make new
artworks as part of the re:place project, and during September and October
2010 her mile-long piece of French knitting will appear at Wirksworth
Festival, Melbourne Festival, and at locations in the
Derwent Valley World Heritage Site at Cromford Mills. This exhibition is a
taste of her other work using found photographs and digitally manipulating
them.

Working from old found photographs or Polaroids, Flore puts them
through a process of fragmentation, inversion, rotation and
repetition, creating amazing abstract patterns or revealing unexpected new
images.

There are six photographs from the series Roots, which are strange,
distorted structures created from manipulated photographs, which
spread in any number of directions: they are the building’s
imaginary roots, the hidden monstrous mass of the architectural form. This
organic underground architecture seems voluminous (it appears to grow
towards us), and yet it floats, weightless, on a white
background.

Alongside the photographs Flore shows one of her Archi-patterns, which are
all-over, potentially limitless repeat-patterns created from
architectural fragments. One of these patterns is made into wallpaper
which covers the walls of a room upstairs at 156/158 Bath Street;
visitors will have the strange sensation of finding themselves
simultaneously inside and outside the building, and have the sensation of
being watched; as one looks at the pattern it seems to look back with its
hundreds of “eyes”.

Both exhibitions are open from 9am – 5pm from Tuesday 29 June to
Saturday 3 July, and visitors can also see Tom Hackett’s Silicone Boys,
twenty brightly coloured silicone children’s heads, similar in colour to
jelly baby sweets, at Margaret Anne milliners, 160 Bath
Street, until Thursday 1 July, and at Erewash Museum from Friday 2 July to
Saturday 17 July.

The silicone boys will spend the first half of Ilkeston Festival, from 18
June to 1 July, at a working milliner’s shop, nestling amongst a sea of
immaculately hand crafted women’s hats. The shop, Margaret Anne, at 160
Bath Street, stands as beacon of skilled trade and
economic autonomy in an era of faceless retail parks.

Then they migrate to Erewash Museum, where from 2 July to 19 July, the
twenty brightly coloured silicone children’s heads, similar in
colour to jelly baby sweets, swamp the interior of a faithfully
recreated 1950’s grocery shop. The heads balance visual playfulness with
immobility and awkwardness, appearing as if buried from the
shoulders down. They are stuck in a scrum at floor level and unable to
access the confectionery. Like much in life the sweets are on offer, but
beyond reach.

Funded by Arts Council England, the silicone boys has been shown at 20-21
arts centre, RED gallery Hull, SEAS international, Skegness and Brighton
University Gallery as part of ‘Occidental Dimension’
which will be touring to China in 2011.

Ilkeston Festival website ( http://www.ilkestonfestival.co.uk/ )

re:place website ( http://www.re-place.co.uk/ )