BOTH KEEN : Florence Shaw and Natalka Liber Stephenson

13 Nov-13 Dec 2020

Overview

Florence Shaw and Natalka Liber Stephenson have created parallel and co-authored bodies of work that chart an intuitively productive journey: informed by discussion, material experimentation and their friendship dynamic. The exhibition has been conceived as if two parts of a material conversation. The main gallery will host a series of drawings and monoprints hung in pairs, while a set of sculptures made by both artists in response to these works will feature in Coleman’s Shed space. Each artist plays with a different sense of immediacy in their practices, often with aesthetically pleasing and associatively open results. The lively “character-driven” works on paper offer an investigation into the nature of pairings; the symbiotic and potentially ‘toxic’ factors that can present when ideas, modes of working and motifs are combined. The gallery installation has been conceived by the pair to encourage closer inspection and engagement with the artwork combinations. Liber Stephenson’s colourful linear expressions connect the strategies of high art with that of the doodle, while Shaw’s freestyle marbling technique speaks of old-world print processes and the happy accident as a useful creative starting point. Shaw and Liber Stephenson have worked together to create a joyfully irreverent crew of sculptural works, which they appear to have stuffed into the Shed space as if family bric-a-brac in storage. These reactionary 3-D responses to the works on paper have been fashioned and engineered, like a series of experiments, from balloon foil, bags, ceramics, soft articles and projected light. An accompanying publication will include writing by Sinead Evans inspired by the energetic nature of this collaboration and the discussions that have come out of the process.