Alertism - Ann Kopka

Welcome to the Alertism exhibition, featuring artistic and literary works that were inspired by the Emergency Alert test message that was sent to people with a mobile device on Sunday 23rd April at 3pm.

Ann Kopka was the poster artist for the 2019 Art of Caring exhibition and her visual themes always provide a graphic twist to CollectConnect exhibitions. Her submission for Alertism is no different. Here Ann represents the visual signals of semaphore using the hand-held flags method, but it can also be employed using rods, disks, paddles, or occasionally bare or gloved hands. I would think semaphore with paddles would be useful in this emergency. Our First Responder today is Robin Hutchinson, director of the Community Brain, and Honorary Freeman of Royal Borough of Kingston.

Ann Kopka

First Responder: Robin Hutchinson

“Not waving, but drowning”

Small World Futures - Last Day

Thank you to everyone who has visited the Small World Futures exhibition on the streets or who has joined us online throughout February. The exhibition draws to a close today amongst the melting snow around London Bridge. Many of the mini sculptures have already been picked up but we'll try and visit all the locations in the #unsettledgallery over the next month to find if any still remain. You can see a full portfolio of the street placements HERE.

As this is the last day of the exhibition we're placing all the sculptures that we couldn't quite fit into the 28 days of February. That means no imagined worlds from the writers but some fantastic treasures to find around London Bridge. Thank you to Kevin Acott, Dean Reddick, Natalie Low, Rebecca Lowe, Ed Arantus and Alban Low for your diverse and evocative writing throughout the month.

#unsettledgallery locations

The artists have given us a real insight into what future worlds could look like. The project has been a genuine success and a joy to organise, it is one that we would like to develop in the future. The next chance to see these miniature dioramas is in Aabenraa, Denmark from the 3rd May until June 2018. Eskild Beck will be organising this Small World exhibition and we'll post up some images when the time comes.

Thank you finally to all the artists involved - Sara Lerota, Ann Kopka, Bryan Benge, Bethany Murray, Wayne Sleeth, Dean Reddick, Lesley Cartwright, Melanie Ezra, Natalie Low, Stella Tripp, Tracy Boness, Jill Hedges, Jenny Meehan, Francesca Albini, Alan Carlyon Smith and Alban Low.

Below are today's Small World Futures.......

Bethany Murray at unsettledgallery No.3

As an artist Bethany Murray takes seemingly empty space, juxtaposing it with physical matter in an attempt to make the intangible tangible. Through the use of cast space, poetry and found objects she attempt to describe a sense of ‘otherness’. Exploring the distinction between the known and unknown that is directly linked to her research of the ‘sacred’. These mere encounters with material and language sit in the hinterland between that which is considered earthly and the ethereal.

http://bethanymurray-artist.blogspot.co.uk/

Bethany Murray

You can find Bethany Murray's Small World Future where the pavement meets a brick wall on Melior Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.3.

Dean Reddick - #unsettledgallery No.7

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.

Dean Reddick

You can find Dean Reddick's Small World Future at the bottom of a brick gully on Magdalen Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.7.

Wayne Sleeth - #unsettledgallery No.8

In his mature work since moving to the Lorraine region of France in 2001, Wayne Sleeth reiterates and re-explores the source and schema of his more formative sensations; the big skies above the flat lands of both the Lincolnshire coast of his father and the polders of maternal Flanders, where he also spent his childhood. The Lorraine region for this confirmed European is not only geographically strategic, but offers an echo of that very play of horizontality and verticality where the artist draws freely on “l’espace” as he knows and feels it, as far as the canvas edge…

http://www.waynesleeth.com/

Wayne Sleeth

You can find Wayne Sleeth's Small World Future behind a pick pillar at the back of the Greenwood Theatre on Snowsfields (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.8.

Lesley Cartwright - #unsettledgallery No.1

Lesley Cartwright was born in Liverpool but later moved to Essex to run a Hostel for homeless teenagers. She made her name in the commercial graphic field and music photography until she developed MS and now paints portraits from her Billericay studio. Cartwright is a multitalented artist who is not bound by genre nor convention. The work you see here is an extension of a fabulous Pokémon Go project where she knitted small versions of Pokémon characters and left them in public places for collectors to find. Cartwright has been exhibiting with CollectConnect since the Cardboard City exhibition in 2013.
https://twitter.com/ley9

Lesley Cartwright

You can find Lesley Cartwright's Small World Future between two concrete bollards where Weston Street meets St Thomas Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.1.

Ann Kopka - #unsettledgallery No.4

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/

Ann Kopka

You can find Ann Kopka's Small World Future inside the orange dispenser on Snowsfields (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.4.

Melanie Ezra - #unsettledgallery No.1

Melanie Ezra is a Wales-based fine artist who works using her own original photographs to create beautiful and intricate collages. She often works in series, providing visual responses to external stimuli such as literature, science, and music. She considers herself a specialist in the deconstruction of time and the extension of the moment. Recent works have evolved her practice to include three dimensional mixed media art forms based on dolls, mannequins, and the human form. The theme is always deconstruction and reconstruction, whether this is through a photograph or through her mixed-media works. Ezra openly describes herself as a ‘renegade arts experimentalist’ and is happy dabbling in anything that pushes her work to the limit and broadens her own potential.
https://melanieezra.com/

Melanie Ezra

You can find Melanie Ezra's Small World Future sandwiched between a corrugated wall along Weston Street where it meets St Thomas Street (London Bridge) at #unsettledgallery No.1.

Goodbye everyone, and see you in the future.

Don't forget to send us your images for the Art of Caring exhibition (deadline 6th April) - More details HERE.

Year 5046 - Ann Kopka - Small World Futures

Ann Kopka #unsettledgallery No.8

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
The Year is 5046...

We have been released. There are infinitely many of us but we are each on our own. That was made clear at the briefing. Each of us is deliberately unique as uniformity has proved to be our undoing. We must learn to trust, nay celebrate, chance - hard after decades of attempting to master it. Our leader was inspired by the legendary dandelion plant which after centuries of presumed extinction was found thriving, evolved, imperfect. Not all of you will survive or be happy, she said, but I realise now that uncertainty is life and we have been keeping you from it. I cannot come with you, she said and we all saw that her eyes were shockingly wet, on behalf of the past, I apologise.

Natalie Low

Ann Kopka

You can find Ann Kopka's Small World Future at the back of the Greenwood Theatre on Snowsfields, #unsettledgallery No.8. 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/

Natalie Low enjoys putting words on paper and believes that everyone has a book of some sort inside them. She lives in Twickenham, UK with her rather charming family. She has published two chapbooks Dementia (2015) and recently School Run (2017).

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. 

Secret Art Sale 2016 - Heath Robinson Museum

Heath Robinson

The Secret Art Sale returns for another year! One of our regular exhibitors, Ann Kopka, is once again helping to organise this fantastic opportunity for artists to exhibit their work and help support the building of a Museum to legendary thinker and artist Heath Robinson. Your art will be sold through a Secret Art Sale in aid of The West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust in the Upstairs Gallery at West House during the first weekend of November 2016.

Below is an invitation to UK artists, don't forget the organisers will supply the small canvas on which you work on. 

CALLING ALL ARTISTS.

Help raise funds for the Heath Robinson Museum opening in Pinner North West London this year. We invite you to take part in a Secret Art Sale at The Upstairs Gallery West House Pinner Memorial Park, 4-6 November 2016. To register email  sas@heathrobinsonmuseum.org. Deadline 31 August.  We would love you to be part of it.

Heath Robinson Exhibiting Opportunity

Uncle Lubin in his airship
(W. Heath Robinson, 1902)

One of our regular exhibitors Ann Kopka is helping to organise this fantastic opportunity for artists to exhibit their work and help support the building of a Museum to legendary thinker and artist Heath Robinson. Your art will be sold through a Secret Art sale in aid of The West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust in the Upstairs Gallery at West House during the first weekend of November 2015.

 

Below is an invitation to Artists with all the details. Don't forget the organisers will supply the small canvas on which you work on and pay the postage too. 

 

An invitation to help build The Heath Robinson Museum

Secret Art Sale, 6-8 November 2015
Upstairs Gallery, West House, Pinner Memorial Park, West End Lane, 
Pinner HA5 1AE

We are raising funds for The West House and Heath Robinson Museum Trust - registered Charity number 1086567 - to build a new Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial Park.
And we would like you to be a part of it!

You are invited to produce a small work of art on a 6” x 6” canvas, which will be supplied by us. You may choose your favourite subject and medium – painting, drawing cartoon, textile or simply words of wisdom. 
Please print your name in block capitals, sign and date your piece on the BACK only in order to keep the work anonymous. You may include your website, email address and any other information if you wish the purchaser to contact you after the event. You will be able to return your work of art in a prepaid envelope that will be delivered with the canvas.
All work will be sold anonymously for the same price. The artistʼs identity will only be revealed at the end of the exhibition. Whether you are a local artist, well known celebrity or one of our patrons, you will all be treated the same. 
The artistʼs names will be displayed during the exhibition as well as being publicised and promoted through the West House and Heath Robinson Trustʼs PR, communications and social media, although names will not be connected with a painting.

Each work of art will be sold at the same price - £35. All proceeds raised from the exhibition will go directly to The West House and Heath Robinson Trust.

Deadline for Submission of Work Friday 23 October
Exhibition launch and Private View Friday 6 November 6.30-9.30pm
Public Sale   Saturday 7 & Sunday 8 November
10am-6pm

Any unsold work will be donated to the Museum shop and displayed for future purchase.
We do hope you can join us. To confirm your participation in the exhibition please email your details including your full postal address to:
Deena Dwala, Email: westhousepinner@gmail.com 

For more details on the Heath Robinson Museum http://westhousepinner.com/the-appeal/

Submissions are open to UK based artists only

 

Ann Kopka - Social Advent 5

Social Advent no.5 - above the
National Theatre

So here we are, at day number 5 and after yesterday's fantastic launch of Angela Malone's cardboard city contribution; Augustine no.9 it's now time to introduce a new artist to the project.

Ann Kopka shares with us her poignantly themed piece; 'Gimme Shelter' which has found refuge on the stairwell of the roof area above the National Theatre.

As you can tell, we have been winding our way along the Southbank in an Easterly direction this time - this could be setting a trend for the following releases……

More about our artist of the day:

Anne Kopka - Gimme Shelter

Ann Kopka’s current painting practice is inspired by encounters with the architecture of man made and natural urban landscapes. Based on curiosity, research and experimentation with her own digitally manipulated images,

Ann’s paintings are underpinned by a strong visual emphasis on structure, colour and light. Her paintings are built up in multiple layers of saturated colour, giving the finished results vibrant surfaces with distinctive three dimensional qualities. 
Ann is also engaged in researching the properties of discarded ephemera with little or no intrinsic value, drawing attention to the throwaway nature of consumer society and questioning our perception of its value systems. Discarded paper items, packaging, teabags and charity shop finds are subjected to investigative processes and may be transformed into tactile reliefs and wall hangings or used in installations.

Gimme Shelter by Ann Kopka

Ann has exhibited her artwork extensively in London, the UK and also the USA. She has been selected for solo exhibitions at The Barbican Centre Library in the City of London, Harrow’s white cube space The Gallery@HAC and Brent Civic Centre London. Her work has been exhibited in many group shows including exhibitions at the Menier Gallery London, Bankside Gallery London, Espacio Gallery London, RED Gallery London and Coningsby Gallery London. 

With such diverse and engaging artworks being released every day what will Social Advent no.6 offer us tomorrow. Tune in to find out as my co-curator and Collect Connect artist, Alban Low launches the big reveal somewhere along the Southbank. 

SJS