Hinterlands is a group exhibition that invites us to consider our relationship with the land and its ecosystems. The artists showcased explore complex histories, mythologies, legacies and potential futures for its custodianship.

The show considers the landscape of the North East, its histories, mythologies and legacies and potential futures for custodianship. New commissions and existing works by artists connected with the area reflect on ideas of rootedness and belonging, human and more-than-human relationships, boundaries, land and time in the era of the climate emergency.

The idea of hinterlands – the land away from the coast or the banks of a river – is at the core of the exhibition, which explores what lies beyond the visible or known. Considering land and place as a complex layering of relationships, the exhibition will explore these ideas through innovative artistic processes and approaches, including through the possibilities of materials and contexts: geological, biological and social, shaped and hardened by history.

Artists:

Michele Allen / Uma Breakdown / Jo Coupe / Laura Harrington / Emily Hesse /Alexandra Hughes / Mani Kambo / Dawn Felicia Knox / Sheree Angela Matthews / Anne Vibeke Mou / Sabina Sallis

https://baltic.art/whats-on/exhibitions/hinterlands

Speaker at International Conference: Strange Intimacies at Unive​rsity of Tartu, Estonia -

We ask what kinds of intimacies have a life and how is intimacy influenced by normative life-narratives? What new intimacies emerge from this new attention and what effect do they have on our thinking, our aesthetics, ethics, and politics? The focus of our conference is on arts and humanities, with a focus on literature, but we also welcome insights from other disciplines, especially critical theory…

Keynote speakers:

• Dominic Pettman (New School for Social Research)

• Gregory Seigworth (Millersville University)

https://maailmakeeled.ut.ee/en/strange-intimacies

Visit Newcastle Cathedral to experience peace, space, movement and sound in this site-specific artwork by artist Alexandra Hughes. Responding to shapes, patterns and symbolism from around the Cathedral, Alexandra has created a kaleidoscopic journey through the Nave. You are invited to encounter ephemeral colours from the Spring Equinox with captured, printed, and painted expressive imagery, taking time to explore, create and contemplate.

Start: 28th May - End: 6th June

Opening times:

Saturdays and Sundays: 8am-5pm

Mondays to Fridays: 8am-6pm

https://newcastlecathedral.org.uk/event/tender-kaleidescape-art-installation/

Ph:Network Presents -

Bridging the Distance

Four Corners Gallery, London uk
23rd June - 3rd July 2021

Andreia Alves de Oliveira
Estéfani Bouza
Liz J Drew
Paula Gortázar
Alexandra Hughes
Sukey Parnell Johnson
Uschi Klein
Caroline Molloy
Gil Pasternak
Annalisa Sonzogni
Alexandra Tommasini

For more information on PH: The Photography Research Network please see link: https://www.ph-research.net/

Curated by the Rabbit Island Foundation and Temporal School of Experimental Geography

Opening reception: Friday, 8 November, 5:30pm - Royal Geographical Society Pavilion – London

Part of the Explore Conference weekend 9–10 November 2019

PRESS RELEASE:

From watersheds to fault lines, the Earth’s core to the cosmos, Artists in the Field offers a glimpse into practices of intricate fieldwork across a variety of environments, each with a critical eye and rigorous aesthetic approach. Departing from visual displays that may be seen as merely complementary to data-driven explorations and scientific studies, the artworks hint towards a truly interdisciplinary future—where the arts and geography stand alongside one another as collaborative methods of understanding and connecting with our environment, both near to home and further afield.

The exhibition brings together a diverse collection of work from 14 international artists working across a number of disciplines. Solo explorations with poetic intent converse with group projects encompassing a number of fields of research. Individually and together they can shift between the concrete and ephemeral, offering new perspectives of the places we celebrate and the challenges encountered in our changing world.

Artists

Ruben Brulat, Luce Choules, Edwina fitzPatrick, Roseann Hanson, Laura Harrington, Emma Harry, Duy Hoáng, Alexandra Hughes, Alice Pedroletti, Andrew Ranville, Himali Singh Soin, somewhere-nowhere (Rob Fraser and Harriet Fraser), Rhona Taylor

Visitation and address:

Open by appointment 6–8 November. Please call +44 77 3775 2293

Open for the Explore Conference weekend 9–10 November

Royal Geographical Society
1 Kensington Gore, London, SW7 2AR

www.jakobkroon.org

PRESS RELEASE:

Sticky Together includes photographs in qualities of transparency, opaqueness and iridescence. Central in the room, a circle radiates long strands of metallic sticky tape, string and wire out to architectural points in the gallery; it’s web-like structure seemingly catching and suspending fragmented matter and imagery, including human hair and urban flowers. From floor to ceiling further material and imagery of balloons, glaciers, oil spills, lily pads and the surface of Mars is seen in the installation as a spatial collage, seen in dual aspect, inviting close and traversing examination from the viewer. This motion of the viewer actives the shimmering, reflective qualities dispersed throughout the installation, creating a flux between stillness and motion.

Sticky Together presents an ambiguous, lively and sensorial space with forms full of nuances and oddities, engendering both dream-like reveries and slippery meanings we bring and find to and in environments.

This installation belongs to Hughes’ wider practice, in which Hughes describes her process as wilding photographs; “going beyond the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.” (Halberstam 2013) This process returns the photograph to a physical condition and mutable image, sitting between matter and mediums, the photograph is seen in a turbulent state of confusion and instability, both fixed and not. This turbulence reveals an important ambiguity; it reorders perception before representation, returning the photograph to the experiential realm. This rupture collapses the dividing line of image to the sensuous world, encompassing the body, showing the potential to form multiplicities of new and unique situations. These affective and turbulent qualities manifest in the photograph as a threshold, a threshold to the Other, to dialogue, to performance, to unforeseen imaginative narratives, gesture and material matter. It shows its state as crucially undone, continually merging and emerging, challenging the narrow conception of photographic images as ubiquitous, immaterial representations.

View by appointment - info@jakobkroon.org

CURATED BY Sophie Buxton, Rob Smith, Lesley Guy and Alan Boxshall

http://www.arthouses.net/

PRESS RELEASE (excerpts):

ArtHouses is an annual event in which the homes, gardens and public spaces of Whitley Bay become the venue for contemporary visual art. Through hosting artworks in people’s homes, ArtHouses develops unique situations to exhibit and experience artworks.

Alexandra Hughes -

Flinking: "an object neither floating nor sinking in water” (Wilson 1993) is an installation made for Arthouses.

Flinking situated in a living room includes photographs in qualities of transparency, opaqueness and iridescence, wrapped over the architecture and furniture. Through cut-out shapes resident objects become suspended in a spatial collage of fragmented matter, video and imagery, such as, dogs in fields, hair, hands, balloons, glaciers, oceans and oil spills; captured by both artist and householder. Orb-like, net-like and horizontal structures invite close examination from the public and in places, the physical insertion of limbs and heads.

Flinking presents an ambiguous, lively and sensorial space with forms full of nuances and oddities, engendering both dream-like reveries and slippery notions of contemporary environments.

Wilding Photographs - Exploring the Turbulent and Affective Qualities of the Material Phenomenon of Photography

PRESS RELEASE:

This installation celebrates the culmination of my practice-based PhD research:

Wilding Photographs - Exploring the Turbulent and Affective Qualities of the Material Phenomenon of Photography

By wilding photographs (used as a verb deriving from the meaning of ‘wild’, defined by theorist Jack Halberstam as “going beyond the structures we inhabit and that inhabit us.” (Halberstam 2013) returning the photograph to a physical condition and mutable image, sitting between matter and mediums, the photograph is seen in a turbulent state of confusion and instability, both fixed and not. This turbulence reveals an important ambiguity; it reorders perception before representation, returning the photograph to the experiential realm. This rupture collapses the dividing line of image to the sensuous world, encompassing the body, showing the potential to form multiplicities of new and unique situations... These affective and turbulent qualities manifest in the photograph as a threshold, a threshold to the Other, to dialogue, to performance, to unforeseen imaginative narratives, gesture and material matter. It shows its state as crucially undone, continually merging and emerging.

The research widens critical reflection on the material encounter of photography in the social and cultural sensorium. The visceral and psychological enquiry of this project draws on key texts relating to photography’s expanded field (Baker 2005) as well as the ‘experiential turn’ (von Hantelmann 2014). Furthermore, considering the embodied encounter through the critical sphere of phenomenology; (Merleau-Ponty 1945; Dufrenne1973) and ‘situated cognition’; (Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989).

The research found relevance to the feminine sublime which sustains “a condition of radical uncertainty as the very condition of possibility” (Freeman 1995). As well as theory on ‘New Materialism’ in cultural geography, anthropology and contemporary feminism; to rethink and challenge conventional epistemological systems used to define our material world.

In wilding photographs, this practice-based research has challenged the narrow conception of photographic images as ubiquitous, immaterial representations. It has also sought to counter the dominant paradigm in photographic theory that overlooks the transformative, nuanced affective qualities of the material phenomenon of photography.