Tamara Jelaca - Little House in Prairie



Tamara's Little House in Prairie

Welcome to the Dwell exhibition and book. For a whole month we will be taking each artist's page and transforming it into a 3 dimensional dwelling. Each one of these small sculptures will be exhibited in public on the London streets.

Noahs Arc Wheres my Dearest

Detail from Net

Our final Net, on the first day of March, comes from Tamara Jelača.
One of the most exciting aspects of Collect Connect is the contact we make with people all over the world. Today we have a wonderfully dynamic little sculpture from the Serbian Artist Tamara Jelača.
Tamara recently exhibited with us at the Fab Fridge Exhibition in Bath. A quick look at Tamara's recent group shows reveals that she is prolific and hard working artists with a specialism in embroidery.

Cloud

Tamara writes on her web site,
'Embroidery for me is a kind of meditation. The process is slow, the drawing is showing up slowly. I love the fact that I can touch and feel the line. Each line gives me enough time to think and discover what the process itself means to me. Oddly enough, at the same time my embroidery is fast. It is a picture of my thoughts that develops slowly on a piece of fabric. Each finished piece is for me the revelation and tangible moment of my personal history'(http://www.tamarajelaca.com/artist-statement/#)

We placed 'Little House in Prairie' along the canal path at Mile End on a windy day. The threads hanging from Tamara's cloud whipped around in the breeze, each thread tracing a contour in the air to make an ever changing drawing of the wind.

Don't forget to have a look at the next Collect Connect project, 'The Art of Caring' exhibition at The Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The theme is Caring/Care and it is FREE to enter.

 

To buy the Dwell Book for £6 then follow this LINK

Helen Hunt - Thoreau's Room

Helen Hunt - Thoreau's Room
At the Mile End climbing wall,  next to Regents canal, London

Welcome to the Dwell exhibition and book. For a whole month we will be taking each artist's page and transforming it into a 3 dimensional dwelling. Each one of these small sculptures will be exhibited in public on the London streets.

Henry David Thoreau's cabin

Today on the London streets we have a little piece of Massachusetts on the streets of London. Artist Helen Hunt has brought a replica of Henry David Thoreau's cabin to our attention with her fabulous net from the Dwell book. Hunt has been exhibiting with us since our south coast magnet exhibition on the gates of the pier in St Leonards and Hastings. She has a growing reputation on the wider UK scene for her delicate painted moths on the pages and covers of antiquarian books.

Wood-tiger by Helen Hunt
Courtesy of http://www.helenhunt.co.uk/

Hunt's art is inspired by the changes that the seasons bring to the natural world and this is evident in her net for the dwell project. It is inspired by Henry D. Thoreau’s hut at Walden where he lived simply,  surrounded by nature and wrote many beautiful pieces on what he observed in this place. His hut was a rudimentary dwelling (noun) itself but the act of observing, pondering and writing on Nature could also be considered to be dwelling(verb).

She was keen to combine a quote from Thoreau’s writing done while living at Walden with many visual references to the animals and plantlife that were around him. Helen Hunt's dwelling gives you the sense that Thoreau was completely immersed in his surroundings and that Nature worked its way into interior space as much as he went out in search of it. On the outside of the built net we can see this quote from Thoreau journal (3rd January 1853), "I have a room all to myself; it is nature."

Page 23 Dwell Book
Helen Hunt

Here Helen Hunt presents us with something to dwell over in our minds, Walden is one of the most challenging books for us all in the 21st century because it rocks the very foundation of our consumerism. When I read it in my formative years I was shocked by the fact that you could own but one pair of trousers for all your adult life. I tried and failed with my pantaloon experiment but you'll not with this net which received an Average difficulty rating from the book's author Dean Reddick.

"I have enjoyed working in this way and am satisfied with the end result. The real proof of the pudding will be to see whether people are able to follow my instructions and make ‘Thoreau’s Room’ - and most importantly, whether they enjoy doing so!"
Helen Hunt (2015)

Well that's a challenge to you, time to get making! Maybe afterwards you'll take Thoreau's room back into it's natural habitat. We placed ours beside the climbing wall in Mile End, next to Regent's Canal, London.

Regent's Canal at Mile End, London

Don't forget to have a look at the next Collect Connect project, 'The Art of Caring' exhibition at The Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The theme is Caring/Care and it is FREE to enter.

 To buy the Dwell Book for £6 then follow this LINK.

AL.

Eve Allsop - Home

Welcome to the Dwell exhibition and book. For a whole month we will be taking each artist's page and transforming it into a 3 dimensional dwelling. Each one of these small sculptures will be exhibited in public on the London streets.



Eve Allsop, Home beside the Banana Bridge, Mile End, London

 

Today we have Eve Allsop's Home dwelling on the streets of London. Our exhibition is in its 8th day now and has been featured in Artists Newsletter as one of the highlights for the coming week, so we better not let them down.

'Somewhere Between My Fingertips and the
 End of the World I Hover'  - Eve Allsop

Eve Allsop has been exhibiting with us since the Brighton Open in 2011 where she immediately piqued our interest with her idiosyncratic brand of non-conformist creativity. I will never forget seeing the bound figure in 'Somewhere Between My Fingertips and the End of the World I Hover' with someone else's photo glued to the face and wearing a t-shirt with '+1 Add as friend'. It chilled me with the thought of warping personas and losing one's own identity.

Eve Allsop's net is the only one in the book and exhibition to reference an online haven or dwelling. It is a clever play on the ubiquitous HOME link that we see on every website or blog, yet I have never thought of that HOME as a real home until now. We increasingly gather 'friends' around us but we may never have met them in the real world. This net gives us the opportunity to bring them out of ephemeral internet and give them a moment of permanency in the real breathing world.

Eve Allsop

I think Allsop has captured several interesting themes here and these are reflected in her also wider work as an artist. Her practice is a study of cyberculture and the evolving function of the self portrait. She is interested in the way communities and identities manifest themselves online, as if rejecting tangible reality for a limitless, digital utopia. An internet profile is an extension of one’s public persona, and can be seen as a comforting realm of self-importance.

Eve explains more, "I explore ideas of anxiety, obsession, fantasy, revolt, incoherent narrative, and cyberspace as physical territory. Hyperbolically echoing the aesthetics of social networking and amateur photography, my work addresses the inescapable banality of daily life and the conflicting notions of freedom and enslavement that come with virtual escapism."

Home is placed at the Green Bridge in Mile End or as the locals affectionately call it, the banana bridge, due to its yellow underside.

Don't forget to have a look at the next Collect Connect project, 'The Art of Caring' exhibition at The Rose Theatre in Kingston-upon-Thames. The theme is Caring/Care and it is FREE to enter.

To buy the Dwell Book for £6 then follow this LINK.