Fleshing Out
In January 2020 as final year students we had the opportunity to curate our own exhibition at The Courtyard Gallery in Hertford.
I was part of the curatorial team, charged with selecting work and putting together a coherent exhibition showcasing the talent of our year group.
With such a wide range of practices and a small exhibition space, the challenge was to find pieces that would display well given the constraints whilst providing some sort of narrative.
Walking around the studio spaces, there was little in common in terms of underpinning ideas or subject matter, but what became apparent was a commonality in fleshy tones and textures. I pointed this out to the group of curators and that became the basis for our exhibition.
To prevent the exhibition feeling too contrived and ‘fleshy’ we added a structural black metal sculpture by Neofytos Agisilaou which played well against the latex sheet of Mumta Murghur.
Ewelina Wojdylak’s tiled plinth held a glass tank, bursting at the seams with the hefty fleshy weight of its plaster contents creating a tension between fragility and mass.
Isaac Florencio’s Invisible Man added a sense of humour to the proceedings as he stood and gazed presumably at the monotone canvas of Paul Bakewell’s, a piece chosen for its unfinished aesthetic, questioning its completion.
Three small black and white photographs belonging to Sofia Ivanova drew the audience towards their intimacy, their ambiguous images requiring some attention to decipher the subject matter.
