Artificia

A group exhibition of four artists, curated by Edward Chell and shown during January 2016 with funding support from the Vice-Chancellor's Award scheme that was running at the time. The show was timed to celebrate one of the recently graduated MA students who was awarded an Artist in Residence position, Chihiro Yoshikura (Kurara) and who was leaving the UK at the end of that month to return to Japan. The exhibition explored different aspects of the artificial taking its roots meaning from the Latin term 'artificium'. The four artists' practices variously interrogated what it might mean to produce and work with visuals and materials that were by their nature highly artificial. The exhibition also hosted a symposium on Thursday 14th January in the Herbert Read Gallery that was open to all schools within Canterbury and was very well attended by both staff and students with standing room only. The event was recorded on video and the whole event is to be archived. The four exhibiting artists were Sean Dawson, Chihiro Yoshikura, Alicia Paz and Yuy-Chen Wand. The exhibition was curated by Edward Chell

Carbon 12 - Gestures of Resistance

Gestures of Resistance was curated by Jean Wainwright and originated as part of the School of Fine Art & Photography's newly emerging creative identity. In Gestures of Resistance, artworks by sixteen international contemporary artists were exhibited at the Romantso Cultural Centre in Athens during Documenta 14 from 20 April to 30 April 2017. Carbon-12 was originally part of the group exhibition Drive Thru held at the Cavendish Square Car Park in West London during Frieze Week, 2016. Accounting for the urban context of this car centred site, the installation consisted of twelve manufactured car number plates detailing the UN’s twelve most threatened global tree species. These were mounted on the concrete walls like signs designating personalised parking spaces, using fonts specific to ‘show plates’ used in the automobile industry often on customised cars. In terms of resistance, here we have two extremes pitted against each other: species bordering on extinction through man made, often commercial / environmental interactions with a potent visual symbol of one of the worlds indices of freedom and emancipation and yet the most pervasive and environmentally damaging of instruments – the automobile. The world’s most endangered species is the aptly named Bastard Gum Tree. There are only two survivors in existence – both on opposite sides of the same island, St Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic and still a remote outpost of a dwindled one-time British empire. Kew Garden’s seed bank located at Wakehurst Place collected seeds to germinate. St Helena is an essay in environmental degradation. The island has now in some eastern slopes been largely overrun with Jute, an imported species used in rope production (the last factories here closed in the 1970’s) and many more rare species specific to this habitat are clinging on to ever shrinking bits of available ground. One such is a species of daisy that grows into a tree – a tree daisy, a most unlikely species imaginable. The plates are manufactured to the standard UK size in laminated plastic. The piece is flexible enough to be configured in a range of different ways from a single cluster to a linear installation, clustered in groups and scattered like seeds or germinating weeds around an exhibition

Bloom

Edward Chell's fascination with collecting and classification led him to the Horniman's rare folios of cyanotypes by Anna Atkins, the 19th century botanist and pioneering photographer. In 'Bloom', an installation of forty new painted panels, Chell responds to Atkins' work by portraying both live plants from the Horniman Gardens and pressed specimens from the museum's herbarium. Chell's exhibit spotlights diverse narratives surrounding natural history and ecology, bringing into question the values and emotions that emerge when we make images of plants. Atkins was a scientist and while the 'sun prints' she produced are exquisite, her objective was to document and understand natural genera. Through this process Atkins created repeat motifs and patterns that resonate with the decorative arts of her time, such as Willow Pattern china, floral wallpapers and Wedgwood's blue and white Jasperware. Chell explores the tension between the scientific drive to define, understand and control, and the aesthetic impulse to capture the unruly gorgeousness of natural life. Silhouettes bring associations of memorialisation and loss. While Atkins' recorded newly discovered species, today such images are premised on conservation and the threat of extinction. An accompanying display which Chell, drawing on the museum's collections, conceived as a Cabinet of Curiosities, echoes these themes. Carboniferous fossils, 18th century ceramic plates imported from China and one of Atkins' rare folio volumes are displayed alongside Chell's ornamental pairs of car silencers, etched with roadside plants. An accompanying colour illustrated publication 'Bloom' further unpacks these themes and ideas, with essays by Anna Ricciardi, Edward Chell and Hugh Warwick. Published by The Horniman museum and Gardens this was launched on Saturday November 14th 2015 in the Pavilion

Common Ground

Common Ground was a solo exhibition, hosted by Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London, a highly regarded independent gallery with an international profile. The exhibition featured a selection of wall and floor works exploring a conflation of the precious or revered with the overlooked or discarded, questioning how our ideas about taste are inherited. The works explore themes of consumption and waste, through the aesthetic elevation of ordinary objects and industrial landscapes such as weeds, transportation pallets and spoil tips: high value porcelain cheek by jowl with blue and white depictions of common plants and waste sites

Synthetic Landscapes

'Synthetic Landscapes' opened on Sunday 4th June running until 3rd September, 2017. The exhibition, curated by midlands based Arts Council NPO and Tate Plus organisation, Meadow Arts took place in the walled gardens and the Granary Art Gallery at Weston Park, famous both as one of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown's early landscape gardens coupled with building designed by 18th century architect James Paine, whose tercentenary took place in 2017. The exhibition explored the contested notion of what constitutes a landscape and how the idealisation of the idea in country parks like Weston Park as superb man-made manifestations might also be aesthetically and culturally critiqued as a reaction to this art historical reading. The exhibition also took place in Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery's new Music Hall venue where emerging midlands artists David Bethell explored the eighteenth century transformation of landscape through the tools and inventions of the industrial revolution combining new works, objects and a film with those of the museum collection. New works on paper by myself, not previously exhibited, were shown for the first time, along with some existing large paintings and three dimensional objects. These painted works on paper further explored the margins of our still largely un-noticed road network margins

Carbon-12 - Drive Thru

Twelve manufactured car number plates were installed in six parking bays like personalised parking signs, manufactured to automobile show-plate specifications with fonts and design templates unique to this side of the car industry. These always have the possibility of being re-installed in different locations as the narrative threatened tree species is transportable and the narrative’s connection to global consumption and lifestyle can easily be reconfigured. Carbon-12 is the most stable form of the Carbon element. Drive Thru was conceived by Roger Clarke who has curated and exhibited at this unusual venue for the last three years. He negotiated individual requirements with the owners for each of the contributing artists. The exhibition included over sixty artists and on the Saturday 8th October 2016 included a day of live events, performances and film screenings. My ten-minute film Orbital was screened at this event. Taking inspiration from the experience of seeing things out of a moving car, the artists are invited you consider presenting work or works that can be quickly viewed and are of a scale that can be digested in the fleeting moment or otherwise pertinent to the car parking environment and its associated narratives. The exhibition encompasses artists working in a range of media - sculpture, video, performance and painting. The work can be encountered from the car travelling either moving or parked. In this case the number plates will take up position as the nomenclature of private parking bays

Phytopia

The visual idea of a Tree of Life is one that manifests itself in many cultures and traditions and is understood in a multitude of forms from the genealogical to evolutionary and from cultural and political hierarchies to growth forms. The exponential nature of branching structures and the diversity this represents is a metaphor for life itself. Phytopia seeks to harness the energies embedded in such structures and to celebrate the influence plants and organic forms have on nearly every aspect of visual culture. Phytopia includes a range of artists not usually seen in the same context and includes a number of works exhibited for the first time, with sculptural pieces by Derek Jarman and Paul de Monchaux, drawings by Marc Quinn and Rasheed Araeen and some 19th century nature prints among these. Participating artists: Rasheed Araeen; Alois Auer; Karl Blossfeldt; Henry Bradbury; Edward Chell; Peter Fillingham; Ori Gersht; Joy Girvin; Fay Godwin; David Heinrich Hoppe; Derek Jarman; Paul de Monchaux; Rosa Nguyen; Pia Ostlund; Alicia Paz; Sian Pile; Marc Quinn; Hilary Rosen; Suzanne Treister; Yu-Chen Wang. Also including 'Flicker & Pulse', A Film by Brian McClave and Tom Wichelow The exhibition and tour are accompanied by an illustrated publication

Soft Estate

Soft Estate, the title of which derives from the Highways Agency term used to describe the natural habitats that have evolved along motorways and trunk roads, looks at how these borders and marginal spaces offer a refuge for wildlife and a modern form of wilderness in the midst of intense urbanisation and agrochemical farming. Artist and academic Edward Chell investigates these contemporary motorway landscapes, linking them to 18th century ideas of the Picturesque and exploring the interface between history, ecology, roads and travel through a series of new works including an installation of 60 silhouette paintings of motorway plant life. Launched in conjunction with the exhibition, Soft Estate the publication features a number of photographs and paintings shown in the exhibition, as well as essays by the artists, the Bluecoat's curator and the environmental writer and broadcaster Richard Mabey. Other artists who interrogate themes of 'edgelands' - those familiar yet ignored spaces that are neither city nor countryside - exhibit alongside and in conversation with Chell. Their works present juxtapositions commonly experienced in edgelands, such as beauty and pollution, wilderness and human agency. Chell said: "While 18th Century tourists travelled to areas such as the Lake District to capture images of wild places, in today's countryside uncontrolled wilderness only springs up in the margins of our transport networks and the semi-derelict grid plans of industrialised corridors. These soft estates invite a new kind of tourist, new ways of looking and new forms of visual representation." The Bluecoat's Exhibitions Curator Sara-Jayne Parsons said:"When Edward approached us with the idea for a show we saw the opportunity to make a bigger exhibition encompass his solo project but also include the work of a selection of artists working in similar territory. In this way Edward's work acts as a critical centre for a wider discussion about space, place, memory and identity in our contemporary landscape.

Soft estate

Soft Estate is the term used by the Highways Agency to describe the natural habitats that line our motorways and trunk roads. While roads play a major role in opening up land for development, their verges offer a refuge for wildlife and a modern form of wilderness in the midst of urbanisation and agro-chemical farming. Our road network, the site of some of our most carbon-intensive activity, is flanked by Britain's largest unofficial nature reserve. This practice-led research aims to visually investigate these under-represented areas of wilderness, both as ecological and metaphorical spaces and as reflectors of the changing relationships between travel, the environment and landscape imagery within British culture. In framing this research I draw on the English Landscape and 'picturesque' tradition of the 18th century, which still informs understanding of landscape. Early tourists travelled to areas such as the Lakes to capture images of wild places; today, uncontrolled wilderness only springs up in the margins of transport networks and the semi-derelict grid plans of industrialised corridors. I argue that these Edgelands invite a new kind of tourist, new ways of looking and new forms of visual representation. In drawing on the landscape tradition, and capturing details of the flora and fauna of the verge, my work engages viewers with landscapes that appear familiar and uncanny, traditional and strangely futuristic. The book incorporates a range of Edward Chell's related art works including gesso panels, installations, larger canvases and paper works. The publication, with foreword by Bluecoat director Bryan Biggs includes essays by curator Sara-Jayne Parsons, artists and academic, Edward Chell and the environmental activist and author Richard Mabey. This project has been supported through a year long AHRC Fellowship under the Highlight Theme, Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past

University for the Creative Arts staff research 2011

This publication brings together a selection of the University’s current research. The contributions foreground areas of research strength including still and moving image research, applied arts and crafts, as well as emerging fields of investigations such as design and architecture. It also maps thematic concerns across disciplinary areas that focus on models and processes of creative practice, value formations and processes of identification through art and artefacts as well as cross-cultural connectivity. Dr. Seymour Roworth-Stoke