Peering Sideways, Project Space Leeds, 2011

Photos by Simon Warner

Burngreave Cemetery Chapel Sheffield 2014

Photos by Andy Lord

clay paints, (SHARROW VALE HARDWARE SHOP)

slug trail drawings from booklets

‘DRIFT’ THE ART HOUSE MEMBERS’ OPEN EXHIBITION

Reviewed by Wil Law, Art House Volunteer, September 2014 Wakefield

Members of The Art House were this year asked to submit work for the annual Members’ Open Exhibition to the theme of Drift. The theme, explained by the curator, Emma Bolland as:

Drift vb. 1. To be carried along by or as if by currents of air or water.

Drift n. 2. A literal translation of the French word dèrive.

A dèrive or drift is an unplanned walk or wander, during which the walker allows herself to be surprised by and to pay attention to the details and events of the everyday, and whose route is determined by the emotions of the landscape. The streets become the current of air or water upon which the walker is supported and carried along, and the duration of the walk and the streets of the city are the time and space in which the walker has time to notice and to think about the world and their relationship to it. In allowing ones thoughts to drift the unexpected and surprising can enter the mind, and take the thinker, the artist, in directions of which they might not otherwise have thought. Far from being an aimless and unproductive exercise, the drift creates the time and space in which the walker (the artist) can reimagine their relationship to their environment and to their work.

Instead of examining how each artist individually interpreted the drift theme, I’d like to channel how all of the artwork presented together did this, something I found particularly striking. I’d first like to mention how Emma Bolland has presented the artwork: she has made walking around the exhibition space feel like a drift experience. The art is hung at different levels and sat on various sizes of podiums, one even on the floor. As you walk around you have to look up, down and around and are met with an array of different textures and mediums. This resistance to uniformity stops the walk around the space becoming unified in itself. You’re sometimes confronted with a burst of many different types of art in one small area. One work may catch your eye first, making the route determined by your emotional response to the space. You’re then made to look further at the surrounding art, in directions you perhaps wouldn’t be looking if the works were hung in one, orderly line. Thus, you drift around the exhibition.

Each piece of art was picked for how well it meets the drift theme. All, in some way, features the environment. Whether that is photographs, such as Amy Lilley’s seascape of drifting waves, or Bob Clayden’s trio of photographs entitled ‘Sun Cycle Solograms’, which feature industrial landmarks (a pylon, school etc…) drifting with striking rays of light which arch through the frame.

photos by Andy Lord

Lois Palframan has provided slates, which sit in a row, each respectively titled ‘Face’, ‘Mountains’, ‘Rivers and Blood’, ‘Pine Needles’ and ‘Giant Woman/Striding Edge’. They’re made with/from ink, clay, paint, wood and plaster, each a different colour contrasting with the others. They present the different textures you’d notice side-by-side whilst on a drift. Other artists provide other textures. Sophie Littlewood’s ‘Plankton Forms’ are beautifully crafted wire shapes hanging from the ceiling above dainty knitted pieces by Carrie Scott Huby, her contribution entitled ‘Sow Seeds if Mothering’.

Next to these pieces and along the way you experience other mediums such as photography, collographic prints, acrylic on paper, thread, drawing, etching, screen prints and letter press, some artists using a combination of these. The white walls of The Art House are punctuated with contrasting bold textures, each requiring time to absorb the richness of the work.

Among the exhibits sits a television displaying four video pieces that make you stop and watch the differently interpreted drifts that unfold. The final one, by James Cook, depicts a graphically recreated message in a bottle, carried by a stark, flat-coloured sea. It drifts across the screen for over three minutes and - in doing so - forces you to experience a moment that you would whilst drifting. You’re totally absorbed by the floating object, as you may be if encountering such in a natural environment. The length of the film, which is presented with the artist’s name, made me consider if I have ever been absorbed by a similar spectacle whilst on a drift and whether the duration actually felt that long. It confronted me with what a drift actually is: the space in which time moves differently, as there is room to notice and think more about the world.

Alongside a bold letterpress print hanging on the wall, text-based artist Aiden Moesby is displaying a collection of leaves spelling ‘touch’ on the floor. It’s only when you notice the piece is called ‘Nettles’ that you might resist this command. If on a natural drift, or even in the exhibition, you may be compelled to touch. The leaves may offer a sting that awakens you from the alternate time-space of the drift and, as this is the last piece I encountered of the exhibition, it’s a fitting finish to experience.

- Wil Law, Art House Volunteer

'Room 311’ Fell House, Wakefield, Art House Residency 2014

Photos by Andy Lord

Over 10 days in November 2014 Lois Palframan will create a temporary, site-specific, installation in Fell House - a disused office building and former Police HQ in the centre of Wakefield. The installation will take the form of a drawing created directly onto the walls of this former police office. The work will be open to the public for Wakefield Artwalk, 26 November 2014, after which time it will be removed.

To create the installation Lois will carefully highlight in pencil the shadows and incidental marks visible on the walls of the office. This contemplative process and the resulting work will reflect on the past use of the room and the way we inhabit working spaces physically and emotionally.

For Lois, the tranquillity of this process, noting and responding directly to her surroundings in the moment of making, will act as a counterbalance to the controlling nature of paid employment.

In making the work she sees herself as not deliberating, but instead freely responding to what is already there to ‘see what happens’.

Much of Lois’ recent work has focussed on a careful exploration of surface and mark-making, working intuitively without an obvious reference point, but always grounded in the site of presentation. Be this a chapel, allotment or elsewhere, the works invite in the viewer an attentiveness to their surroundings. Lois wishes herself to be invisible in the works, allowing viewers to find their own responses.

Like John Cage’s 4’ 33’’, where the orchestra are silent and the audience are allowed to experience the incidental noises of the auditorium, her works invite us to contemplate the physical environment, existing only in the moment of encounter.

Lois’ installation follows in a long line of visual artists whose work could be seen as in some way being about absence. From Robert Rauschenburg’s ‘Erased De Kooning Drawing’, where he quite literally rubbed out a drawing by the artist Willem De Kooning, to the Hayward Gallery’s 2012 exhibition ‘Invisible: Art about the Unseen’, the act of allowing the viewer to envisage the subject by removing or excluding spectacle has a rich history in our visual culture. She likens the work also to that of Cy Twombly and his spontaneous, freely scribbled drawings.

In a fitting end to the piece the work will be carefully erased after the closing of the event and the room once again returned to the order of the workplace.

Words by Lesley Farrell

Lois Palframan is currently nearing completion of the temporary, site-specific, installation she is creating in a disused office space in Fell House, Wakefield. The installation has taken the form of a drawings created directly onto the walls of the former police office. The work will be open to the public for Wakefield Artwalk, 26 November 2014, after which time it will be removed. I spoke to Lois within the space, where she showed me around the drawings, told me what influenced the work and talked about her experience of residencies in general.

The room where I met Lois, previously a blank space, is now filled with a variety of pencil marks, some small, and some elaborate, spanning and adding interest to the white walls. These markings are traces of where the light and shadows have reflected and Lois has preserved the lines and patterns that they temporarily left upon the wall.

Room 311 isn't Lois' first work with tracing, nor her first residency. Earlier this year she did a 6 month-long residency at Burngreave Cemetery Chapel, a derelict, grade 2 listed building in Sheffield. After doing an exhibition at the chapel, Lois approached them to and asked if she could undertake a residency, being drawn to the building. They agreed, allowing her a small, pew-space, where she created booklets for the entrance of the chapel. The technique she used to create the booklets is not dissimilar to what she is doing at Room 311. She collected the trails from slugs, creating drawings of these and then displayed them in the booklets. She also worked with canvas monochromes, adding little black marks over any textures she encountered.

Tracing is Lois’ way of engaging with her love of writing. She is interested in the psychology of writing, the process of it, but avoids forming actual letters or words in her art, believing that these often impose upon a space. Although the tracing of textures, trails and shadows is a form of writing, it’s one that lets things be, as Lois puts it, and it leaves little space to regret what has left upon a surface. To supplement the creation process, Lois has been reading Derrida’s ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’,an essay that has become a strong influence on the installation.

Although Lois doesn’t like to integrate words with her artwork, she’s thinking of writing a short piece about an experience she had whilst creating Room 311. The piece will document a particular day she had on the site, where the light was so extraordinary that it cast a multitude of striking shadows and pink reflections around the room, that moved and changed shape, all of which Lois traced. She hopes that one day the pink light will return so that she can colour match it in order to introduce another element of interest into the room.

As the installation is temporary, Lois’ tracings will eventually be erased. She wants to preserve some of Room 311 though and is planning to stick A4 sheets on the walls so that she can trace the shadows that fall on these and then keep the drawings.

Listed below are some of Lois’s influences for Room 311.

Adorno- Aesthetic Theory

Alan Johnston - Drawing a Shadow: No Object

Bill Evans- Kind of Blue

Cy Twombly- 24 Short Pieces

Flann O’Brien -The Third Policeman

George Orwell- 1984

Heiner Bastian- In Twombly above

Jacques Derrida- ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ in Writing and Difference

John Cage- 4’33’’and Silence: Lectures and Writings

Lai Chih-sheng- Life Size Drawing

Lisa Le Feuvre- Documents of Contemporary Art (Failure)

Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn

Roland Barthes- ‘Cy Twombly: Works on Paper’ in The Responsibility of Forms

Roland Barthes- The Neutral

Rosalind Krauss- Cy was Here; Cy’s up/Art Forum

Samuel Beckett- Worstward Ho.

Yoko Ono- Shadow Painting

Words by Wil Law, Art House Volunteer

Cupola Gallery Sheffield 2016 exhibition:- ‘ the beautiful is always bizarre’

photo by Karen Sherwoodoo

allotment soup sheffield 2016

photo by liz searle

Access Space, Unit 1, AVEC Building, 3-7 Sidney Street, Sheffield, S1 4RG

lois palframan “score” 1st February 2018

Access Space invites you to the first performance of the latest work by artist lois palframan, “score”. In this collaborative concert a trio of musicians explore the implications inherent in the word, while projections of the artwork, running concurrent with the performance, provide the audience with added insight into the process. “The live and spontaneous interpretation by the musicians is some kind of resolution of the conflict between title and artwork”.

BEATRIX WARD-FERNANDEZ violin
CHARLIE COLLINS waterphone & percussion
FAYE MacCALMAN clarinet & tenor saxophone
lois palframan visuals

lois palframan is an artist. She lives in Sheffield
https://www.loispalframan-artist.com/
...
Beatrix Ward-Fernandez is a UK based violinist and theremin player with an interest in all forms of improvised and contemporary composed music. Her trio has performed at the international theremin symposium "Hands Off", while her audio installation, “Castillo de Luna “ (for theremin & waterphone) has been exhibited at the AC Institute in New York. Her music has been released on Discus, Found Property, Singing Knives, and Classwar Karaoke.

Charlie Collins is a creative percussionist, free polyrhythmic drummer, and sound artist, based in the UK. His work continues to explore the boundaries between pure sound and rhythm, frequently incorporating metal percussion and free improvisation. Early recordings for cult labels Industrial, Fetish, and Doublevision were soon followed by collaborations with many of the pioneers of free improvisation, while his interest in East Asian percussion and rhythm technique is displayed in current work with komungo player Eun-Jung Kim, pianist Yoko Miura, visual artist Bongsu Park, composer Ryoko Akama, and Butoh dancer Tsukasa Kamidate. He is one of a handful of musicians to have played both Derek Bailey’s Company Week and Top Of The Pops.

Faye MacCalman is an improviser, performer, and composer based in the North East of England. Playing clarinet, saxophone, and sometimes her voice, she works in a variety of contexts, exploring melodies, rhythm, story telling, and sound.
She currently writes for and leads the garage-jazz trio Archipelago, is a member of bodhran-reeds-piano Trio F-C-T, and The Ornette Coleman inspired John Pope Quintet, while also having a duo with percussionist Charlie Collins. Alongside this she has also recorded and toured with eclectic folk group The Unthanks, and teaches saxophone at Newcastle University and elsewhere.
Since being immersed in the creative music scene of Montreal in 2015, Faye has continued to forge links with artists internationally as well as nationally, including Wilbert De Joode, Olie Brice, Ab Baars, Ellwood Epps, Corey Mwamba, Graeme Wilson, Charlie Collins, Greta Buitkute, Rhodri Davies, Shelly Knotts, Ig Henneman, and Beatrix Ward-Fernandez.

DOORS OPEN 7:00pm
£5.00

Beyond the Real Cupola Gallery Sheffield

Selected Group Show 31 August – 12 October Cupola Contemporary Art peers behind the veil of reality to what resides beneath.

The exhibition will feature work exploring spirits from the suicide forest in Japan, our own perceptions of body image, a surreal take on a piece of furniture and our perceptions of reality.

The exhibition will feature 9 artists working in a range of media:

Marta Wapiennik,Ruth Hart, Nina Paiva, lois palframan, Hathaikan Kongaunruan, Fumi, Emma Whiting, Nicola Lebon, Cos Ahmet

lois palframan ARTIST

slug trail drawings from booklets

Beyond the Real Cupola Gallery Sheffield

Selected Group Show 31 August – 12 October Cupola Contemporary Art peers behind the veil of reality to what resides beneath.

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Website designed by Annie for Lois Palframan - Artist.

slug trail drawings from booklets

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Beyond the Real Cupola Gallery Sheffield

Selected Group Show 31 August – 12 October Cupola Contemporary Art peers behind the veil of reality to what resides beneath.