This month’s Artist Profile focuses on Holly Hendry, who is one of the featured artists in the Arts Council Collection touring exhibition Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women since 1945 and the focus of a new film by the Arts Council Collection.

Holly Hendry is interested in defining the architecture of spaces by exploring the possibilities of space, colour and density, which is inherent in the wide range of materials she uses in her site-responsive sculptures and installations. She is interested in what lives beneath the surface, from hidden underground spaces to the inner workings of the body.

Her process positions casting at it’s centre where she uses a wide range of materials including plaster, steel, silicone, cement, jesmonite, plywood, rock salt, soap, aluminum, marble and even lipstick and chewed gum. Her works bring up questions about consumption, the environment, and bodily implications. In the new film she explains, “I guess it becomes about the agency of objects and our relationship with them.”

Material unknowns are an important part of her process, as she states “A lot of making in my work relies on instinct or changing things at the last moment or material emergencies or slippages then become a really essential part of the work and that is something that is almost impossible to predetermine.”

The focus of this month’s Artist Profile is Rachel Jones, whose work lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021, was recently acquired by the Arts Council Collection and features in the current exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today at the Hayward Gallery.

Rachel Jones’s practice, which includes painting, installation and performance, approaches abstraction through an exploration of her own identity in relation to the depiction of Black figures in art from the eighteenth century to the present. She examines the potential role of these representations in dismantling power structures. Rather than repeating figurative models from history, she experiments with motifs and colour as a way to communicate ideas about the interiority of Black bodies and their lived experience. 

“I try to use colour to describe Black bodies. I want to translate all that lust for self-expression into a language that exists outside of words, and instead relates to seeing and feeling with your eyes.”

Jones often repeats symbols and textures, creating close relationships between her works of varying size, from the monumental to the miniature. In her recent series of oil pastel compositions on paper or canvas, such as lick your teeth, they so clutch, 2021,  Jones repeats the motif of abstracted mouths and teeth. Portrayed to such a large scale that any sign of the face or body they belong to is obscured, the vibrant patches of paint and pastel seem to form a dense, vivid landscape. Upon taking a step back and viewing her work at a distance, the familial bodily forms begin to take shape.

This month’s Artist Profile focuses on Marketa Luskacova, one of the featured artists in the Arts Council Collection touring exhibition Found Cities, Lost Objects: Women in the City curated by Turner prize-winning artist Lubaina Himid, on view at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Marketa Luskacova’s work is marked by her own lived experiences. Themes like cultural identity and social behaviour are at the core of her candid photographs. Born in Prague in 1944 during the communist regime, Luskacova graduated from Charles University with a degree in Sociology in 1967 and studied Photography at FAMU (1967-1969). Around this time, she began to take photographs as a means to document local traditions in some of the poorest communities of Slovakia. 

She moved to London in 1975, where she continued her career as a photographer. She began to document her surroundings, producing captivating portraits of everyday life in some of the least privileged areas of the city. She felt particularly drawn towards the cultural atmosphere of Brick Lane and Spitalfields street markets, where she used to buy her own groceries. 

'I was poor and I needed to do my shopping there as it was the cheapest place to buy things. I could identify with the people in Brick Lane because they were immigrants and they were in need of cheap goods. Once I had done my shopping, I would leave my bag with a stallholder while I took my photographs.'

In her series London Street Markets, Luskacova documents daily life in the city, capturing powerful and emphatic portraits of its people and their traditions and offering a glimpse into the diverse cultural fabric of London East End’s society in the seventies.

In our latest Artist Profile, Curator Brian Cass, Head of Exhibitions at Towner Art Gallery, focuses on the work of Keith Arnatt.

Keith Arnatt was one of Britain's leading conceptual artists and a key figure in the history of British photography. He used photography initially to document his work which often took the form of complex physically realized actions. In later series, however, such as his Pictures from a Rubbish Tip 1988–9, the photographs themselves become the artwork.

Pictures from a Rubbish Tip is a body of work devoted to images of decomposed food that had been dumped at a local tip a short walk from his home. In this series he used the medium of photography with the sensibility of a painter, turned to vivid colour in order to monumentalise the discarded food that lie on clear and pale-coloured plastic bags. Photographed in warm afternoon light, and employing an extremely shallow depth of field, the images make us consider the difference between knowing something and seeing something.

Their emphasis on beauty and decay is both a critique of the disposable dross that mars the countryside, while also being a nod to the sublime and the romantic paintings of Samuel Palmer and JMW Turner. Arnatt plays with our preconceptions about what the countryside means to us. His eye for a strong picture seduces the viewer into an appreciation of a scene that would otherwise be considered ugly and, in experience a pleasure from looking at his work, we are drawn into his bitterly comic world view.

This striking series, investigating the traces of human intervention in the British landscape and how the detritus of modern living becomes assumed into the rural environment, is a key work currently on show as part of Towner Gallery’s National Partners exhibition A Green and Pleasant Land. British Landscape and the Imagination: 1970s to Now, from 30 September 2017 – 21 January 2018.

Brian Cass

Head of Exhibitions Towner