Sunday 20th June 2010
St Michael's Church grounds, Market Place, Macclesfield, Cheshire
For the Barnaby Festival 2010, Contents May Vary invited artists, collectives and zine makers to set up stall in Contents May Vary's Barnaby Art Market. Following on from 2009's successful ANTIFREEZE in Manchester, 2010's alternative contemporary art fair continues to explore ideas of value, exchange and independence, now responding to physical, social, economical, geographical and literal aspects at Macclesfield Market.
www.barnabyfestival.org.uk
For Barnaby Art Market, Alice will run an exchange stall for the newly founded Museum of Contemporary Rubbish. Throughout the day, Alice will be inviting visitors to the Art Market to donate their rubbish to the museum collection in exchange for either a brown paper bag or a small card box. Alice's role as museum curator is to acquire, catalogue and archive each item and maintain the museum collection.
Alice Bradshaw is an artist and curator based in Halifax. Her practice focuses on the manipulation of everyday and mundane objects, materials and processes. Alice has exhibited prolifically throughout the UK and internationally in solo and group exhibitions and in several festivals. Alice is also a co-founding director of Contents May Vary, Temporary Art Space and Fundada Artists' Film Festival.
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www.alicebradshaw.co.uk
museumofcontemporaryrubbish.blogspot.com
The Liverpool Art Journal is based on the concept of a discussion group where creative professionals discuss ideas and issues broadly related to the field of Fine Art practice instigated from a quote, an essay, a film or any other manifestation of interest. A lo-fi production, the journal aims to bridge the gap between grass-roots Fine Art practice to a more academic appreciation of theory, creative writing and philosophy.
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theliverpoolartjournal.blogspot.com
Lisa Gorton is an artist based in the North West of England. Lisa's work deals with the nature of drawing. It has evolved out of an enquiry into the relationship drawing has to sculpture and asking whether sculpture can be seen as drawing. Recent research has dealt with material tensions: the dependency of material on material, the reciprocal nature of support. Small, intimate installations generated through fragile everyday materials and the role of the body in this intervention.
Drawing and collage works have evolved from a process of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing line and form within space. By creating installations and situations in response to the built environment and responding by using elements of the drawn, sculptural and the photographic image, she aims to engage the viewer in a multi dimensional space of perception and representation. A dialogical relationship between line, form and materiality emerges, via a creative listening to which both the artist and viewer can respond.
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www.lisa-gorton.blogspot.com
www.artblocyork.tumblr.com
HappyCat is a collective of like-minded people who believe that art should be accessible and affordable to everyone. Happycat = Melanie Alexandrou + Jade Blood. All of our work holds dear the ethos that handcrafted goods embrace the individuality and often minute and acutely personal details that mass produced goods are lacking in. The lo-fi, handcrafted aesthetic of our work is purposely so, no two items are the same, they reflect engagement with the process and how sometimes the inherent mistakes add to the essence of the work. We are all human after all - not robots! Sometimes a little clumsy stitching just happens.
The focus on animalia (most specifically birds) in Melanie's work is a way of exploring and celebrating a return to a more organic aesthetic, using materials and methods that are craft-based together with more 'traditional' disciplines such as printmaking, illustration, and painting. Participation in postal art networks enables a continued dialogue with other artists and makers, independent from the constraints of clinical, mainstream galleries and invites the viewer to get involved. Her bureauphiliac tendencies bring together a feast for the eyes through an assortment of books, stationery, and little treasures, both found and handmade. Melanie currently makes from her studio in Macclesfield.
Jade questions culture, commodity and community in her work. She believes that art exists outside of galleries and institutions, that art is created by everyone through 'positive action'. Her aim? Return art to the everyday! Jade prefers to use disused, tacky 'stuff' that many people shun only to replace them with shiny brand new commodities and likes to swap her work with friends' work.
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happycatcollective at googlemail dot com
Sarah Hardacre explored the construction of knowledge and the institutional shaping of history and the natural world. Her particular interests lay in the appearance of a 'Natural History' and the evolution of the museum. Works emerge somewhere between sculpture and installation and often appear again, reflected in vanitas like photographic landscapes.
Appropriating the forms of arbitrary collecting and the transmutational techniques of taxidermy, each piece of work presents a rupture, a momentary disturbance; questioning the clichés of chronicle and examining the gap between rational reasoning and irrational influence.
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www.sarahhardacre.com
Steve Humble was born in Middlesbrough in 1962 and graduated from Leeds University in 1983. His creative practice spans over thirty years, incorporating text, photography, painting, drawing, sound, sculpture, installation and performance.
Humble's ongoing practice-led research explores and interrogates social relationships and structures through the making of publicly sited works and performance installations, in addition to studio-based drawings. So far this work has engaged with notions of memorial, loss, governance, gifts, hospitality, homelessness, displacement and consumerism, within the context of social space. These investigations have arisen through a continually developing understanding of, and reflection upon, the conflictual and antagonistic potential in relational praxis.
Interest lies in the making of work which is political in the manner of its conception, manufacture and/or execution; which by its very nature locates its practice and line of questioning from within the realm of 'the political' - i.e. it is embedded within the politics of the day-to-day and the day-to-day political is embedded within it.
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Yan Laundy produces mixed media work using - quite often- everyday and found objects based on observation and experience of objects and actions and emotions arise from it. They can be 2D or 3D works. Yan appreciates the value of old tradition in Art and believes that experimenting and creating a new tradition is essential.
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www.flickr.com/photos/yanlaundy
The Lombard Method is an independently run studio and project space led by 8 Birmingham based artists. Functioning primarily as a large communal studio with flexible project spaces, the objectives of the group are to develop individual practice through critical dialogue and group interaction, and to engage with other artists through a programme of residencies, exhibitions, and events.
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thelombardmethod.wordpress.com
M-19 are a group of three artists based in Levenshulme. We are a recently formed group of artists who are tied together by a shared interest in challenging the traditional ‘white cube’ approach to art exhibitions, and developing and exploring different ideas of what it means to view art. Although this shared ethos brings us together, our individual work ranges dramatically in style and medium, ranging from textile art, sculpture, model making, illustration, costume design to animation. Over the last five years, we have exhibited in venues throughout Manchester and the UK.
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Since graduating from Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2006 Elizabeth has exhibited extensively throughout the UK. Liz's work incorporates sculpture, installation, drawing and performance, often using familiar social references from mass media and substandard television to build narratives that are both imaginary and nostalgic.
For Barnaby Art Market Elizabeth will be exhibiting a new piece of work 'Shergar (if I asked you to could you draw me a racehorse?)' in which she will spend all day trying to draw the perfect picture of a racehorse in order to prove to her granddad she is a geniune artist. The failed drawings will be avalible to buy for a cut price.
Elizabeth is also Co-Founder and Co-director of Contents May Vary
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As a multidisciplinary artist I often employ drawing and the exploration of nominated objects. Quite often I will copy from pre existing images whose content will create an intrinsic bond between the pieces elements. My interest in creating this unity within my work takes inspiration from vintage minimal and conceptual artists such as Carl Andre. Taking the concept of copying from already existing material and the opportunity to pick up pirate videos from the market place I have made a Bootleg copy of Andre's 1966 Equivalent VIII, a pile of fire bricks laid out in a rectangular block, currently on display in the Tate Modern.
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I will recreate on an local scale the earthwork 'partially buried woodshed' by the artist and writer Robert Smithson. I will pile the soil from nearby grounds on top of a tressle table, much alike the other tables in the barnaby art fair, until the supportive struts underneath the table snap. The work will serve as temporary monument, complimentary to the other stalls in the art fair, whilst keeping ambiguous rather than specific the subject I intend to monumentalise.
more on partially buried woodshed (taken from www.clui.org):
"Robert Smithson conceived and executed this piece while he was staying at Kent State University for a week as a visiting artist in January, 1970. It was too cold for the 'mud pour' work he had expected to perform, so this substitute was hastily developed by Smithson and some of the students. Intended as an illustration of entropy, dirt was dumped on an empty shed by a backhoe until the center beam of the wood and stucco structure cracked."
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