Fehily Contemporary is presenting three artists’ work at stand C46: Abdul Abdullah, Sally Smart and Gosia Wlodarczak.
I was lucky enough to chat to Gosia about her work, and how the process of making the work becomes a performance of the artists’ consciousness. The images are made by placing linen onto and into spaces such as bathtubs, kitchen sinks, toilets or onto an ironing board, and recording the marks that she sees created by the light and shape of the underlying object. The representation is altered by time and shifting of the linen, producing recurring shapes of the objects , such as taps and sinkholes, and a changing consideration of the negative space of the objects – an acknowledgement and representation of space which usually goes un-noticed.
On the back wall of Fehily’s space are four Sally Smart works, one of the highlights of the fair. Her dark canvases of velvet cotton and fabric create intense black backgrounds overlayed with various collage elements of body parts, fabric and pattern, the act of cutting a prominent aspect of both the process and final product of the work. The figures that are created speak of disjointed human form, a destruction of identity and narrative, and abstract dream-like qualities with an anatomical twist.
Also seen in Fehily’s stand is the photographic series by Abdul Abdullah, who explores his cultural and religious background within the context of his family’s history. The titles of his works use the names from each generation of his family, referring to lineage, dynasty, and personal cultural revolution.
The three bodies of work shown at Fehily’s create a dynamic and punchy exhibition. In different ways, they point to process and performance as an integral part of the final work, with an exaggeration on spatial arrangement and human form.
