Test Space: Anna Boland – SPY-nul

Building on her recent solo show at Studio KIND, Anna Boland presents a new configuration of “SPY – nul” at KARST. 

Anna is an interdisciplinary artist and KARST studio holder. Influenced by dystopian fiction, notions of invisible environments and worlds, and post-pandemic existence, her current work explores the potential of everyday air packaging to create sculptural works. 

Anna’s work at KARST focuses on the internal body with a specific focus on the vagus, one of the most important nerves in the human body, which communicates via unseen electrical impulses. The work explores the spine and muscle knots – pockets of trapped air that can compress the nerve and affect function. Anna combines large-scale sculptures with light to create an immersive environment exploring the internal world.

The private view will be on Friday 19 May (6pm – 8pm) and the exhibition will be on view on Saturday 20 May (11am-5pm). 

Test Space: Ashanti Hare & Mitzi Dabrowski

Multidisciplinary artists and graduates Ashanti Hare (Arts University Plymouth) and Mitzi Dabrowski (Bath Spa University) present work they have developed during their residency at KARST in this open event.

Ashanti is a Devon-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the duality of existing as both human being and spiritual entity. Combining digital manipulation, folk craftsmanship and writing, Hare often explores the boundaries between cultural identity and spiritual entity through sensory experiences that include tactility, scent and moving image. Through the use of traditional craft practices such as textiles and ceramics, Hare creates tapestries and sculpture that retell Caribbean and African folklore, spellwork and history while reflecting popular culture specific to Black Britishness.

Mitzi practice uses a multi-disciplinary approach to expand fleeting moments from live music gigs into tangible works, as well as using existing imagery within youth culture as inspiration. The intention behind Mitzi’s work is to explore the ephemeral nature of particular nights in music venues, to give these moments more attention and time to potentially dissect the energy and change in behaviour people experience. Her practice during her residency at KARST has had a new focus on the correlation between particle movement and human movement in mosh pits, while her continuation of exploring painting music venues, musician performances and spirituality act as records of events and lyric.

Their work will be on public view in the gallery on 25 February between 11am-5pm.

Sonic Faction

The Sonic Faction sound installation features three diverse audio essays: Kode9’s ‘Astro-Darien’ (2022), Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s ‘On Vanishing Land’ (2006), and Robin Mackay’s ‘By the North Sea’ (2021).

Come and experience the ways in which sound and voice can produce new sensory terrains and provoke speculative thought. The exhibition will also feature archive materials and ephemera that provide context for the audio essays, together with reading resources and a listening station featuring a collection of additional unreleased audio artefacts.

LOCI X KARST mural

A new mural created by art collective LOCI alongside local skaters, and overseen by Ben Borthwick – Head of Creative Programme at KARST – transforms the hoardings around Plymouth’s Civic Centre.

LOCI are a Plymouth based artist collective specialising in exterior and interior murals. With a focus on community and collaboration, they develop mural projects with organisations, artists, individuals, community groups and companies across the south west of England.

The designs – created by LOCI in collaboration with the city’s skating community – are covering the hoardings on Civic Square and Royal Parade.

The project, led by sector support organisation Plymouth Culture, is part of the preparations for the launch of the Mayflower 400 programme on 16 September 2020 – the date four centuries ago when the ship sailed from Plymouth.

This initiative has been made possible with the support of Urban Splash, City Centre Company, Mayflower 400, Plymouth Culture and Take a Part.

No Soap Radio

No Soap Radio (NSR) is a street photography collective created by a group of friends to share analogue photos of the oddities they encounter daily. The images have no consistent theme, planning, or any order at all: they are purely opportunistic. The thread that draws the group together is skateboarding in Plymouth but NSR looks beyond that to places and characters encountered along the way.

The display of NSR work in KARST gallery follows the completion of a 150-metre mural on the hoardings of Plymouth’s empty Civic Building by the Youth Committee of Prime Skatepark, Cattedown, which was curated by KARST’s Head of Creative Programme, Ben Borthwick.

A live event on Saturday 26 Sept features a skate jam and DJ set.

Test Space: Annie Shrosbree

Multimedia artist, sculptor and Bath Spa graduate Annie Shrosbree presents work she has developed during her 2021 residency with KARST studios in this two-day open event.

Annie’s sculptural practice challenges classically accepted notions of ‘sophisticated art’ in it’s ‘silly’ and ‘child-like’ hand built aesthetic. Her residency at KARST has seen her inspiration become more language based, with a growing focus on memes and other popular forms of online communication as well as word-play and regional dialect. Annie will present a multitude of spatial, size and material juxtapositions at the end of her residency, allowing her collection of ‘jokes’ to hold the physical space in ways that are unavailable to their online equivalents.

Test Space: Katy Richardson – A Cake of Painted Tin

Following its exhibition at Studio KIND. in November, A Cake of Painted Tin will be shown at KARST on Friday 18 and Saturday 19 February.

The installation presents a body of new moving image and sound work exploring the experiences of writer Antonia White, with particular reference to her Frost in May quartet of novels. The texts describe White’s early life and young adulthood, including time spent in Bethlem Hospital for a psychosis which was attributed to schizophrenia at the time of her admittance in late 1922, but which might now be understood as a symptom of her probable manic depressive illness (Moran, 2018).

Collaborators

Amber Amare – director of photography
Natasha Berry – sound engineer
Katrina Brown – zoom collaborator
Eve Ess – zoom collaborator
Rosanna Gilderthorp – zoom collaborator
Rachel Gippetti – zoom collaborator
Naomi Girdler – sound collaborator
Léonie Hampton – zoom collaborator
Alice Neal – Antonia White performer
Jane Richardson – zoom collaborator
Eleonora Roaro – zoom collaborator
Jodie Saunders – sound collaborator
Carly Seller – zoom and sound collaborator
Naomi Wood – zoom collaborator

A Cake of Painted Tin is funded by Arts Council England with public funding from the National Lottery.

Marcy Saude: Directions: Forward

Directions: Forward presents moving image work that juxtaposes the mythic and the everyday to develop connections between the past and future. Invoking ritual and resistance, dance and document, historical forces and speculative fiction, the artists map out a terrain that challenges borders – both literal and figurative. Urban indigenous experiences and traces of light captured through photographic process transform the landscape into a celestial realm. Ancestors speak through rhythm across space and time. Histories of settler-colonialism in the built environment intersect with questions of narrative, migration, and community belonging.

Eve-Lauryn LaFountain / Metigoshe Jiibayag (Clearwater Ghosts) (2022)
3 loops of varying duration. Sound: Jon Almaraz

Metigoshe Jiibayag (Clearwater Ghosts) is a new multimedia video and sound installation commissioned by Directions. The first part of the title is Ojibwe, the traditional language of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa people, and the second part is a rough translation into English. The video was shot at Lake Metigoshe at Turtle Mountain in North Dakota. This is part of the artist’s ancestral tribal lands which were severed by the US/Canadian border. The lake itself is cut by the border, but the water runs freely. The people can no longer travel freely across the waters, border control agents regularly patrol the park areas, a reminder that this land has been divided. The video was shot on the 4th of July, the United States Independence Day. Fireworks explode on an island in the center of the lake, the lights in the distance are in Canada, the spectators in the front are in America. Many are distant relatives whose lives, families, traditions, and cultures have been divided by settler colonial nations. The fire rains down from the middle, reflections of violence and wonder dancing off the clear water. The sound washes over the viewers as they stand between two screens, on a border surrounded by ghosts and trails of light, memories of time expanded and collapsed.

Eve-Lauryn Little Shell LaFountain is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, a multimedia artist, and an educator. She was born into a family of artists and grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she learned how to ride a horse instead of a bike. Her artwork explores identity, history, Indigenous futurism, feminism, ghosts, magic, and her mixed Native American and Jewish heritage through lens based media and installations. LaFountain has received support for her work from the Sundance New Frontier Labs where she was a Fellow in 2019, and received an Indigenous MacArthur Fellowship in 2018, as well as awards from COUSIN Collective and Cinereach, Mike Kelley Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Marcy Saude / Come On Pilgrim (2022)
16mm transferred to digital file. Duration: 26:30 min

In the form of a series of visual “field recordings” of and staged interventions in place, this essayistic film originates in the experience of the artist living in Plymouth in a flat overlooking the Mayflower steps. This location provided a jumping-off point to interrogate histories of settler-colonialism, British identity and mythos in the surrounding landscape, from the viewpoint of a recent immigrant. These histories are related in fragmentary fashion by the artists’ community in a collage of voices, challenging notions of singular authoritative narratives, such as those set in stone monuments. Throughout the film, fellow immigrants are rendered visible in everyday situations, protests are documented, a wizard invents an empire, and Anglo-Saxon re-enactors trek through Dartmoor, gesturing towards waves of settlement on the British Isles.

Come on Pilgrim was commissioned by Directions and features (in image and sound) Amber Amare, Vincent Ring, Margareta Kern, Heather Martin, Norman Buchan, Sophie Ingram, Ana Simões, Helen Thomas, Amani Alsaad, Jacqui Knight, Samandar Maani, Thannasis Alvanos, Antgoni Pasidi, Aliki Pasidi Alvanou, Eve Ess, Jackson Sprague, Eric and Verna Sprague, Guy Edmonds, Alma Saude Edmonds, Sol Moyano, Rachel Dobbs, Fiona Pitt, Mo Bottomley, Rachel Gipetti, Plymouth Morris, Lucy Dafwyn, JR Carpenter, and Hildsvin.

It was made with the support and assistance of Amber Amare (sound recording), Russell Cleave (lighting), Dajain Daley (sound recording), Guy Edmonds (additional camera), Katy Richardson (locations), Asha Ungar (sound recording and clapper), and Jack Witek (production and sound recording).

Marcy Saude’s work in time-based media addresses subjects such as marginal histories, speculative fiction, the landscape, counterculture, radical politics, and text(s). A Portuguese national raised in California, they are a member of Bristol Experimental and Expanded Film (BEEF) and currently facilitate Labordy Ffilm Aber in Aberystwyth, Wales.

Sonya Dyer / Andromeda (2021)
Duration: 11:16 min

In Andromeda, a portal between worlds opens, creating a conduit between the Andromeda galaxy and Earth, transporting a chorus of drummers into the world of an unsuspecting protagonist.

Andromeda continues Hailing Frequencies Open, Dyer’s ongoing body of work intersecting the Greek myth and constellation of Andromeda, Star Trek actor Nichelle Nicols’ astronaut recruitment activism, and the complex genesis of HeLa cells, the first human materials sent into Space. Continuing the epic world building characteristic of the HFO project, speculative fiction, social justice and art history collide in the work, which includes performance, animation and morse code.

Commissioned by Art Night and Somerset House. Supported by the Adonyeva Foundation.

Sonya Dyer is an artist and writer from London. A Somerset House Studios resident, she was a finalist for the Arts Foundation Futures Award 2021, and a UK Associate Artist at the Delfina Foundation in 2020. She is an alum of Whitney Museum of American Art: Independent Study Program and obtained a PhD from Middlesex University in 2021. Dyer’s practice reimagines where the centre is located in fictional narratives of the future. She explores how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities, creating radical futures through unexpected connections.

This exhibition concludes the Directions project, an artist-led moving image series with a broadly decolonial perspective. Supported by the Mayflower 400 Culture Fund and Arts Council England.

Directions: Forward has been made possible with thanks to The Arts Institute at Plymouth University, MIRROR, Plymouth College of Art, Spike Island, Paul Ager, Ben Borthwick, Tilly Craig, Nick Halford, Molly Erin McCarthy, Allen Robinson, Phil Rushworth, Elaine Sinclair.

KARST X KIND. A Cake of Painted Tin by Katy Richardson

A Cake of Painted Tin is an exhibition at Studio KIND. by KARST studio artist Katy Richardson. The exhibition presents a body of new work exploring the experiences of writer Antonia White, with particular reference to her Frost in May quartet of novels.

The novels describe White’s early life and young adulthood, including time spent in Bethlem Hospital for a psychosis which was attributed to schizophrenia at the time of her admittance (late 1922) but which might now be understood as a symptom of her probable manic depressive illness (Moran, 2018).

Katy first read the Frost in May novels around the age of 13 and has revisited them repeatedly. A recent re-reading coincided with her undergoing a period of Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, during which she noticed a shared difficulty in forming functional relationships with other women. In response, Katy developed a series of experimental collaborative research sessions with 13 other female practitioners across art, dance, photography, sound engineering, voice, performance, poetry, filmmaking and psychotherapy, many of whom also have lived experience of mental illness.

A Cake of Painted Tin translates White’s experience into the bodies, voices and gestures of these women collaborators, creating echoes across the almost 100 years since her incarceration at Bethlem. Comprising moving image and sound, a collective solidarity and empathy manifests here in the present – not just with and for White, but also each other.

Katy Richardson (b. 1977, Cuckfield) is an artist based in Plymouth, UK. Her moving image, installation and sound works draw on research into trauma, haunting, memory and mental health. A Cake of Painted Tin is funded by Arts Council England using public funding from the National Lottery.

Join Katy Richardson, Lucy Rollins (independent curator), and the collaborators on the project for a virtual panel discussion on Thursday 2nd December, 7-8pm. Bookable via Eventbrite here.

Image: Work in progress, Katy Richardson.