Year 2118 - Ann Kopka - Small World Futures

Ann Kopka

Small World Futures is a collection of 38 miniature sculptures depicting what life could look like in years to come. Each of these small artworks will be placed in public spaces (#unsettledgallery) around London Bridge. Every day throughout February we will be featuring one of these worlds here on the website. A writer will also use the world as inspiration to create something new and fresh, their words describing the shape of a new world.

Today we discover the Small World Future of.... Ann Kopka

Living on the Skin
What if we didn't live on the thin skin of a rocky planet?
Separated from the sucking, endless night of space by nothing more than a few miles of whimsical gases it is of little wonder that human kind lives a clinging, fearful life.
Ann Kopka's Small World Future offers a less tenuous existence.
Safely encased, on the inside, we are protected from the annihilating fear of living on the edge. No longer between infinity and a hard rocky place we could feel contained, held firmly in rather than on. What new mind sets would evolve in such a place? What new societies would emerge if we were free to delve inwards rather than circling forever round and round with only the desperate fantasy of a mad flight outwards into the deadliest unknown as an escape?
Ann's enticing world, like a brain holds folds and layers, spaces within spaces to explore, niches, planes and curves, organ like, body like.
Her world is green not blue, armoured against invasion from cosmic radiation or imagined aliens and lush.

Dean Reddick

Ann Kopka

You can find Ann Kopka's Small World Future on Weston Street at the back of Guy's Hospital #unsettledgallery No.1. If you can find it then you can take it home, or perhaps you will leave it for someone else to discover.

Ann Kopka studied Fine Art at Central St Martins College of Art and Design and the City Lit. She has studied The Practices and Debates of Modern Art and graduated with a First Class Honours degree from The Open University. She has also studied Museum Curating at Tate Modern. Kopka has exhibited in London, the UK and USA. Her work is held in private collections in France, Spain, UK, Australia and Australia. Her experimental work engages with the research, process and transformation of discarded everyday ephemera and disposable objects of little or no intrinsic value. Through the concept of ‘making something out of nothing’ Kopka seeks to draw attention to the throwaway nature of consumer society and question our perception of its value systems.
http://www.artcontemporary.co.uk/

Dean Reddick is an artist, an art therapist and a lecturer. He uses a range of media and enjoys experimenting with casting processes using plaster, metal and resin to explore the tensions between organic and geometric forms, positive and negative space and the distortions that occur in producing casts. As an artist and art therapist Reddick has a keen interest in the role of art as a cultural phenomenon and as a container for inter-personal meaning. He enjoys working collaboratively and has been a regular exhibitor at Walthamstow's E17 Art Trail as well as exhibiting with CollectConnect. Recently he published Art Therapy in the Early Years: Therapeutic Interventions with Infants, Toddlers and Their Families (pub. 2016, Routledge) alongside co-editor Julia Meyerowitz-Katz.