Point of Departure

Exhibition runs: 27th Nov – 4th Dec 2012
Location: Gallery & Project Space

Point of Departure presents an opportunity to view work by second year master’s students from the Royal College of Art’s celebrated Ceramics and Glass programme at a pivotal point in development.

The programme itself has been described as a site for discursive practice, where cultural, social, personal, historical and aesthetic concerns intersect. An overarching belief that the skills of making and thinking can develop in tandem, and that the made object is a vehicle for expression that can engage with the individual and society, lies behind much of its students’ output. The artists do not see ceramics and glass merely as a fixed set of media, instead prizing and celebrating diversity and breadth whilst embracing connections.

As work in progress, Point of Departure includes eighteen individual artists’ investigations taking form. It gives a rare insight into the thinking behind the works at this ‘point of departure’. The exhibition reflects recent discoveries within the students’ artistic journeys as they establish individual identities.

The work itself covers a wide spectrum – from design for manufacture, the unique art object to installation. Themes being dealt with range from the body, the domestic and the architectural, at the core of which is material understanding.

Helle Bjerregaard
Rachel Hopkins
Sabina Stumberger
Kane Cali
Rosanna Martin
Ester Svensson
Kevin Callaghan
Enrique Perezalba Red
Luke Twigger
Eunghan Choi
Helena Plado
Cristina Vezzini Olivia Fink
Shane Porter
Jonathan Wade Lydia Hardwick
Mella Shaw
Yiru Wang

Darren Almond Studio All Things Pass Exhibiton

All Things Pass opened with huge success at the Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. Almond’s diverse body of work incorporates film and video, drawing, painting, installation, sculpture and photography.

Almond’s diverse body of work incorporates film, drawing, installation, sculpture and photography. His subjects are as diverse as clocks, train plates and bus shelters. They reveal feelings about the passage of time, themes of personal and historical memory, movement and space.

In 1998 the artist initiated an experiment, which he called Fifteen Minute Moon. This became the starting point to an ongoing series of works, now known asFullmoon photographs.

Often travelling to inaccessible locations, Almond takes his photographs at night. The only source of light is the full moon. The landscape becomes visible by using extended exposure time and turns a dark night into a light day, often appearing ghostly.

The first Fullmoon photograph is a fifteen minute exposure taken at Montagne Saint- Victoire in Provence, thus conjuring the shade of Cézanne. The remote places in Darren Almond’s works reference painters, photographers and writers such as WG Sebald, John Ruskin and Carleton E. Watkins, JMW Turner as well as Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Baltic sea paintings.

In his continuous journeys Almond creates meditative landscapes, turning the invisible visible. The artist depicts the notion of isolation, complete silence, beauty of nature and thus reflects on time and history; themes reminiscent of the romantic 19th century painters.

Recent settings include the British Islands, Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains and the Yellow Mountains in South East China.

All seven new works Fullmoon@Eifel have been taken in 2010. The large-scale landscape photographs emit a mystic and at the same time warm aura; reminding us of nature’s power and peacefulness.

Darren Almond’s Fullmoon series might suggest a journey beyond time; capturing moments that are spatial in dimension, because here time comes to a standstill.