DONT CRY ITS ONLY A RHYTHM
DONT CRY ITS ONLY A RHYTHM
Sarah Forrest, Amy Marletta
25 FEB – 18 MAR 07
Location: GENERATORprojects
Sarah Forrest and Amy Marletta’s new site-specific work combines drawing, collage, sculpture and performance, and demonstrates the artists’ shared spontaneous and playful method of working. The exhibition explores the process of developing drawing into sculpture, attempting to break physical and spatial boundaries and blurring the edges between the work and the space it inhabits.
Although the work has been made individually, the installation results from a collaborative process experimenting with scale, structure and light. The encompassing environment, entered via a custom-built stage, aims to make the audience feel part of the exhibition as they manoeuvre around the facades and large sculptures.
Sarah Forrest
Through the process of drawing and construction, Forrest’s work explores the fragility of being, and questions her own placement and identity within this. Her practice is underpinned by an ongoing exploration of balance and friction between structure and uncertainty. Inherent to her drawings is their feeling of temporality, as though they might move or change - she is interested in carrying this tension and possibility of movement into her sculptural work.
Forrest’s intricate structures appear focused on balancing upon their tiny points, hopeful of the possibility of moving, walking and grasping onto objects in their path. These structures often represent the act of questioning, of scratching the surface, allowing spidery stems to hold onto more ambiguous thoughts, marks or incomplete ideas.
Amy Marletta
Marletta uses photographs representing personal experiences as a starting point. This biographical material undergoes a process of selection and reworking - drawings are cut up and reconstructed, figurative elements are coupled with pattern and saturated with colour, allowing new images and patterns to emerge. These collages continue to develop, either in the form of small models or large theatrical constructions.
Just as the visual images are reworked, so is the narrative. Marletta’s practice encompasses fiction and non-fiction, with the outcome undetermined due to the intuitive nature of her process. Many pieces may never be fixed down and remain in a temporal condition; the work exists in a constant state of flux. For this exhibition her ideas and initial small-scale collages have developed into the production of a stage set which will in turn provide the backdrop for a live performance from the artist and her own dance troupe and band on the opening night. Having rehearsed for the past few months under the disco ball of a local community hall, the troupe will now use her work as the setting to showcase two routines in the gallery.
Both Sarah Forrest and Amy Marletta have exhibited nationally and internationally. Recent projects include ‘Ganghut, Melbourne, Next Wave Festival’, Melbourne 2006 and residencies at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop as part of Ganghut Lumsden Project to be completed in March 2007. Forrest exhibited in ‘Lands of Freedom’, University of Maryland, 2006 and Marletta in ‘Romantic Detachment’, a major live project exhibition for PS1/MoMA, New York, 2004.
The artists both graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee; Sarah Forrest in 2003 and Amy Marletta in 2002. Both live and work in Glasgow.