Interview with Jesc Bunyard

07/09/15

Interview: Jesc Bunyard

Performance, disruption and the photographic

Jesc Bunyard (born 1991) has been having a busy year. Following her success in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2014, with which her work toured from Liverpool to Newlyn, via the ICA, she had a residency at the Collusion Real Time Lab in Cambridge in January 2015, and went on to show her film work at the Whitechapel, before being shortlisted as a finalist in the Digital Graffiti juried art competition at Alys Beach, Florida. She is about to have some of her film works shown at the Wysing Arts Centre annual art and music festival, Space-Time: The Multiverse, on 5 September 2015. Only graduating from Goldsmiths with a BA in Fine Art and Art History two years ago, Bunyard has achieved a lot, fast, but she still only sees herself as an emerging artist. She is about to go back to Goldsmiths and embark upon an MA in Contemporary Art Theory.

Anna McNay had an email conversation with Bunyard about her multidisciplinary approach to combining photography, film, performance and installation, placing her viewer in an immersive and perceptually challenging environment.

Read this interview here.

Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through Photography

04/09/15

Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through Photography

Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World

Tate Britain

24 June – 25 October 2015

Hepworth in Yorkshire

The Hepworth Wakefield

16 May – 6 September 2015

A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-1975

The Hepworth Wakefield

18 April 2015 – April 2016

Much as I love looking at the sculptural work of Barbara Hepworth (1903-75), I also love looking at photographs and film footage of the sculptor herself, both at rest and, even more so, at work. Perhaps this quote, from the mouth of the artist herself in 1961, goes some way towards explaining this predeliction: “I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”

This summer sees three shows dedicated to the sculptor: Penelope Curtis’s final offering at Tate Britain and two smaller, but equally rigorous and delightful, exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, home to the Hepworth Family Gift, a collection of 44 of the artist’s surviving working models for her bronze sculptures.

While Tate’s exhibition unsurprisingly largely comprises sculpture, it dedicates one worthy section – Staging Sculpture – to photographs taken by both Hepworth and others, showing her work in the landscape. Many of these, including a series of photo-collages, cutting out photographs of existing sculptures and pasting them on to new backdrops, including a house designed by Richard Neutra in Los Angeles and the interior of flats designed by Alfred and Emil Roth and Marcel Breuer in Zurich, have never been shown before, except for when published in Architectural Review in April 1939. Fired by her ambition to work on a larger scale, Hepworth made these composite images to show how her work might enrich an architectural or natural setting. Photography enabled her to explore such sculptural ideas and only partly came out of economic necessity.

You can read the rest of this essay here

Portfolio: Jesc Bunyard

26/05/15

Portfolio: Jesc Bunyard

“I have become accustomed to the darkness,” smiles Jesc Bunyard. “I spent most of the third year of my BA in the darkroom.” While the artist might be toiling away in the dark, Bunyard’s audience get to luxuriate in the sumptuously rich colours of the photograms that she produces – like cells of dye, they seem to breathe and expand as you gaze upon them.

Photography has always run through Bunyard’s practice, although filmic work grew within the second year of her BA at Goldsmiths (completed in 2013), where she also established a music group, comprising fellow artists and musicians. “Initially this developed out of a desire to push the photograph beyond its two-dimensional boundaries. I want the medium to be seen as something more than just a picture you can hang on a wall. So, I started by displaying my photograms alongside a soundtrack I created.” For Photo Piece, a collaboration with The Angel Orchestra, Bunyard’s photograms were used by the musicians as a visual score for an improvised piece, performed at a classical concert, with no warning to the audience. This intervention was described as “anarchic” by one of the musicians involved. A baritone horn player herself, Bunyard laughs: “I like to think of myself as setting up the parameters for a work and then unleashing it in order for it to be experienced and participated in.”

Jesc Bunyard will be showing two film works at Digital Graffiti, Alys Beach, Florida, 4-6 June 2015. She is a finalist in their juried art competition

She will also be showing some of her film works at the Wysing Arts Centre annual art and music festival, Space-Time: The Multiverse, on 5 September 2015

www.jessicabunyard.com

digitalgraffiti.com

www.wysingartscentre.org/whats_on/annual_music_festival

To see the full portfolio and enjoy the images, please see the June 2015 print issue of DIVA magazine 

f&d cartier: an essay

22/04/13

f&d cartier: Wait and See

Oriel Canfas

1 – 31 May 2013

We are the camera. The title of one of f&d cartier’s previous exhibitions (2004), but equally an apt epithet for the Swiss artistic duo themselves. Having met at college at 20 years old, the pair built up individual careers – Françoise as a painter and sculptor, and Daniel as a black and white photographer – before entering into a shared dialogue in 1995, and uniting their creative practices with the collaboration, f&d cartier, in 1998.

As minimalist visual artists, they work with the two basic prerequisites for photography – light and photosensitive paper – opting mainly for camera-less techniques, often in combination with found objects. Their professed aim is to question everyday life, intimacy, the passing of time, and the position and role of the artist and the image in today’s society.

To read the rest of this essay, please go to: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/2013/04/we-are-the-camera-fd-cartier/