Mark Folds: Crises
Preview: Friday 28th February 2020, 7pm
Artist Talk: Wednesday 11th March, 7pm
Exhibition continues until 12th September 2020
Gallery open Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 7pm
Admission Free
To view this information in Welsh, Click here
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.
Employing the intervention of autonomous and ephemeral objects, made for specific locations, his practice has evolved to involve a multi layered response to places, jarring the senses into noticing the everyday. Subscribing to the notion of ‘Art as Verb’ underpins the motivations behind his recent output and working approaches.
This has helped bridge the gap between the Public Art (in the traditional sense of the meaning) and Art in Public (exhibiting, interventions) worlds, creating a unique ‘place’ for the work to exist.
Mark graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Wimbledon School of Art in 1986. Since then he has exhibited, lectured and made Public Art & Art in Public internationally, notably originating and establishing the ‘ilovepeckham’ art project in London in 1996 that continues to present.