elysium gallery slowly awakens and reopens from where it left off with our exhibitions By Mark Folds and Bourdon Brindille in Galleries 1. 2 and 3
continues until 12th Aug
Gallery open Weds – Sat 12 – 7pm
The Bar and refreshments area will be open but there will be social restrictions and health & safety regulations in place due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
About the exhibitions:
Mark Folds: Crisis
The theme ‘CRISES’ is explored in its meanings and many forms, from Global issues to people’s personal issues, from the massive to the macro. If something is described as a Crisis, this initiates a Response in us, we React in some way and think or act in a way that either confronts or tries to distance ourselves from the issue.
The exhibition in Gallery One attempts to take on these big issues through Mark’s sculptural responses, producing artworks that offer a transformed viewpoint for the viewer/participant at the exhibition. Mark is interested in engaging with the audience Responses and Reactions to the work and the issues it raises. He will produce new work in response to the reactions of the audience, inside and outside the Gallery during the exhibition period.
Folds has also been working with clients from Crisis Swansea on a series of workshops, producing collaborative sculptural artworks for exhibition in Gallery 2. These involve working with wood (carving and constructing) and materials connected with the notion of ‘Home’ (carpet and furnishing materials) to explore and express issues of homelessness.
Mark Folds’ practice uses a wide range of media including sculpture, performative activity, installation, text, video and ‘outstallation’ to explore themes that arise from notions of identity and place.
Bourdon Brindille: Breakage and Repair
Bourdon Brindille is a Swansea based artist who studied at Falmouth University and had a studio space at elysium Orchard St Studios. He creates images and sculptures that are playful, absurd, otherworldly and awash with ideas from the pains and pleasures in life.
This installation in Gallery three draws from the Japanese art philosophy of Kintsugi, the repairing of broken pottery with gold. In a time where many political and social fracture lines seem to be appearing, this ancient practice has perhaps become more than apt for this strange present in which we live. Kintsugi treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an entity. Done correctly, it not only mends but also strengthens and improves the entity.
The artist ponders that perhaps the Kintsugi approach brings hope, knowing that from breakage, through repair, can come strength through beauty.
Despite exhibiting widely this will be the artists first installation piece, hoping to draw the viewer further than ever into his fevered, fetid imagination.
‘Enter a drawing room, stopped in a moment of time. Windblown with sand, as though recently ancient, broken apart and semi buried, standing still at a moment of fracture’