Ground Work

21 Oct-31 Oct 2021

Overview

Madi Acharya-Baskerville, Tom Banks, Joost Gerritsen, Sam Hodge, Mike Sims, Mark Sowden, Matthew Swift, Ana Vicente, Marcia Teusink.

Ground Work is the latest project from the artists’ collective Ground culminating in an exhibition at APT Gallery. The Ground Collective’s interest lies in finding objects and making observations from the everyday landscapes they travel through, reconfiguring these discoveries into artworks, performances, poems and installations. They celebrate a slowing down and a closer scrutiny of things that are overlooked or forgotten.

For this exhibition a multi-disciplinary site will be created within the gallery, presenting new artwork and viewpoints from the Ground Collective alongside work produced by people living in the London Borough of Lewisham. Working with pupils from Bonus Pastor school and older adults has formed an essential component of the Ground Work project, allowing the collective to share and listen to ideas about the different ways we understand ourselves in relation to the immediate environments we inhabit. A collaborative scrapbook will be created during the exhibition with all those visiting encouraged to add photographs, drawings, paintings and written elements, creating a shared legacy of moments recorded in a specific time and place.

Ground Work aims to utilise the gallery as part viewing space, part laboratory, creating an indoor landscape that draws from and extends out into the wider landscape of Deptford Creek and beyond. Workshops and activities aim to encourage a range of people from outside the gallery to engage with investigations into their own localities, finding things within them and using these as starting points for their own narratives. The gallery becomes a drop off point, a place where objects are given attention, where fragments are gathered to generate new and complex forms. Ground Work presents a potential utopian piecing together of displaced and replaced landscapes and objects that facilitates a breaking down of hierarchies between art producers and members of the public. It asks that we decelerate to appreciate the wonder that lies beneath our feet and around the next corner and notice what is nearby and in reach. It suggests that when we each bring a reconfigured patch of a place we know and sit it next to another’s which in turn is sat next to another’s, walls start talking and floors begin murmuring as discoveries are made about ourselves and each other.