Currently working for Axis the Uk Artists Database
as an Open Frequency Advisor.
Link to Biog
www.axisartists.org.uk/ofADVP.aspx?AID=243

Examples of texts

Peter Bodenham
The Meeting and the Journey

In Courbet's painting 'The Meeting' (1854), Courbet chances upon his patron, Gustave Alfred Bruyas and his servant Calas, on a road outside Montpellier. The painting depicts their respective social stature through their clothing and pose, with Courbet, the less wealthy artisan, commenting on the nature of the art market of 19th century France. Peter Bodenham's work draws a number of parallels with this painting as he examines the different codes of urban and rural living and how objects such as clothing directly identify our position in a western consumerist hierarchy.
In the 'Suit Project' (2006-7), Bodenham invited farmers in the Cardigan area to wear business suits while working. The subsequent photograph document questioned the function and purpose of modes of clothing. The suit, symbolising power and tailored for urban living, soon became muddy and torn through everyday farm work.

For 'Marcheurs des Bois' (2005) Bodenham walked the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec dressed in garments made from Carthen (Welsh Blanket) and Hudson Bay Blanket material. He created a hybrid of social signifiers, referencing people of equal social status and occupation. The clothing developed as a product of the landscape and of the respective regions. Such material is developed out of necessity and is habitual. Patterns and motifs locate the material to a region of commerce while they predate the spread of capitalism and fashion over function.

A key element in Bodenham's work is allowing for things to happen over time, with work becoming durational, it's sometimes open ended nature taking years to bear fruit. Other pieces exist within a seasonal time frame. '2 MPH' involved a summer-long collaboration with fellow artist Simon Whitehead, a dog and a goose. It took the form of a 300-mile walk retracing the drovers' roads between Cardigan in West Wales and Smithfield market in London and resulted in a deep map of movements of pre-industrial traders. The work formed part of a performance presentation for the ResCen Nightwalking festival for performing arts in London.

For his web-based project 'Walk with Me', Bodenham made 10 unique thumbsticks that were left in random places. Instructions, burnt on the sides, invited the finder to take the stick on their journey, documenting it in someway for the website before leaving it for someone else to use. The resulting archival document traces how we move between different environments and brings meaning to points along an undetermined highway.

Bodenham's practice involves initiating a dialogue between unaligned situations, environments and conventions. His practice spans performance, painting, sculpture and craft as he considers how we relate to our surroundings, the history embedded within it and how the nature of how we live continuously evolves in relation to economics and invention.

His work questions the existing definitions for visual art and craft and he is comfortable with citing his work as contemporary craft, while his work responds to the shifting representation of the rural and urban environment and how these worlds overlap.

Holly Davey

Holly Davey's current work questions the way in which the city influences the way we think, and how imagining acts in opposition to social codes can appear monstrous and alien, while they aspire to herald the surreal to sit alongside the everyday.

Davey originally trained as a dancer before studying fine art. This experience is key to her understanding of the role of the camera in her work. The viewfinder becomes a replacement for the dance studio mirror; it could also be said the mounted print becomes the mirror. The final image is unmanipulated; it remains the closest possible document to how Davey understood she would look as if viewing herself through the lens. Her impossible desire is to physically appear simultaneously on both sides of the camera, as rational image-maker recording a fictional version of her body embedded in reality. This relationship to the self in her work is not as Lacan would see us, looking as the mirror (or camera's) reflection as a misrepresentation of the self. For Davey the figure recorded is implied as autonomous and anonymous. The face is covered or turned away, her identity in doubt, she uses herself as a vehicle to create work aspiring towards objective detachment as she walks from behind the lens to within the framed view of the camera's eye.

In Davey's photographs, the figure exists to make specific compositional gestures that explore our symbiotic relationship with the urban environment. Influenced by the musical cinema of the 1940's -where set piece dance routines simply appear, enrobe the actors into physical dreamscapes before returning them to a sense of reality - her staged photo shoots are actions against the uniformity of architecture and the role it plays in conditioning our movements through the city.

For her solo exhibition A Third is You her figure appears in transitional places - a deserted underpass, an empty car park, a path in a cemetery and on a flight of stairs. Places where we are taken to or filtered along as we past from one activity to another. In each image the figure appears on the mid-point of receding perspective. A marker along a journey between points, they are taken when no one else is present to emphasise the movement of the individual within this alienating environment.

Images taken at first light in a city centre car park see Davey position her body to directly relate to the geometry of her surroundings. Here the foreground interacts with the background as Davey references Francesca Woodman's 'Some Disordered Interior Geometries' (1981), her actions influenced by Euclid's elements. A length of red ribbon is used as a surreal measuring tape and floating line to suggest a record of the relationship between the angles of the architectural forms and the position of her limbs.

The colour red features in a number of works. It symbolises the physical presence of the imagination, referencing the occurrence of red in numerous fairy tales and subsequent cinematic recreations of children's stories such as Powell and Pressburger's 'Red Shoes' (1948). The photograph appears as the work itself and not as a document of a performance. This is because the convention of photography, with its ability to create an illusionary space, references her interest in an alternative reality of Cinema. Within the frame, as with all photography she is captured, the moment suspended and actions, often awkward become resonant and accepted.

Richard Higlett 2007

Dan Rees

Dan Rees' work depends on the actions of others … we all do, as we do not exist in a community of isolation but a community of ideas and influences. Art like everything in life is not the result of an individual, and the idea of the artist as the unique, sedentary creative genius has made way for the artists whose methodology and role is one of catalyst and quiet observer of the zeitgeist. The processes that inform the ecology of artists and their respective practices in turn shape Rees' numerous works.
Rees has initiated collaborations with artists who are his peers, notably the conceptualists working today such as Jonathan Monks (with whom Rees worked as his assistant), Cerith Wyn Evans and Simon Starling. The installations created may be the result of a tangible relationship, for example over a game of ping-pong or through an interaction with an artwork, where the object is a representation of the artist's psyche and presence is through absence.

In 'A Cup of Tea with Gavin Turk' (2007), Rees added a tea stain of his own next to Gavin Turk's cup mark on a White Cube limited edition print. They become associated through sharing marks on the same page. We spend our lives existing in other forms, footprints in the rain, songs that move and define us, materials and images existing as mute representations of our presence in the world that are autonomous in our absence. This work echoes Daniel Spoerri's 'Snare Pictures', where meal settings with fellow artists are preserved in vitrines, the residual archive of a dialogue distilled in empty plates and half eaten bread rolls.

In Rees' piece the conversation is mythical and hypothetical, through the tea stains they meet but exist in different times. As the observer we are party to a dialogue that is purely fictional and the space exists where we can invent what they may have discussed. While a complex argument over the value of the intervention and the issue of whether Rees' has increased or decreased the selling price of the edition comes to our attention, the action is initially humorous. Jokes and puns being part of the conceptualist canon from Duchamp to Fluxus, arriving at the artists working today with whom he has a strong empathy.

In 'Variable Peace Up to 21' (2006) Rees references the work of Július Koller, who played table tennis against a mirror. Rees films himself and other artists playing Ping-Pong while discussing ideas about art. The 'Variable Peace' refers to the tiny differences in the duration of the silence between strokes. These become akin to the spaces in between words as a physical narrative is created.

Most recently Rees' work has moved to explore the relationship art has in suggesting the transformation of objects and the connections between things as opposed to the action of the artist. In 'Sonata for a Wall Drawing' (2008) images of trees are projected on to a gallery wall accompanied by the sound of improvised piano. A section of the projected film is left blank allowing the light from the projection bulb to cast an illuminated square on the gallery wall. This moment of nothing reveals something, a small wall drawing of some steps. While Rees cites the work of Sol Le Wit and the way music can facilitate interpretation and meaning, like previous strategies that he has evolved for making art, ambiguity now becomes a technique in itself; physical narrative is created.

Richard Higlett, 2008