projects Overview

HANDS ARE FOR TOUCHING

SOLO EXHIBITION AT SADDLEWORTH MUSEUM AND GALLERY

“Hands Are For Touching” is a solo exhibition by Katya Kvasova. It’s a collection of mostly recent works made on paper, small boards and canvases. This exhibition, as well as the artist’s practice at large, focuses on hands. The artworks are categorised as portraits, but not in a traditional sense. Kvasova is looking at her subjects through (the prism of) body language, understanding that this is a mirror of their emotional state as well as character. The artist is fascinated by hands as she sees our humanness in them. Hands are such an incredible tool: we build – we break, we kill – we heal, we stroke – we punch, we hug – and we push away. As for an artist – it’s an ultimate instrument to create. Touch – humans are social creatures and physical touch is among our most basic needs. In fact, our need for touch is so vital that it’s been dubbed “skin hunger.” During pandemic we all felt the importance of it more clearly. Although the name of the show may suggest people hugging or touching, the artist’s work is often speaks about a different kind of connectedness. Her subjects are often “hugging” themselves, you can see them touching their faces or holding their hands together that suggests an inner dialogue, inner connection and soothing.

Participating artists:

Richard Baker, Tom Down, Fiona Fouhy, Katya Kvasova, Anna Levy, Robyn Litchfield, Junko O’Neill, Nicole Price, Fiona Roberts, Russell Terry, Adia Wahid

Between the Bars

“It is the space between the bars that holds the tiger, it is the silence between the notes that makes the music.”

This exhibition, like these Zen philosophies (sayings), considers the significance of spaces and voids (between objects).

There is a perception of space as the emptiness into which material objects are place. Physicists understand space as having a stretching, bending and distorting plasticity. Mystics might feel ranges of energies in different spaces. We ourselves feel differently in different spaces.

This exhibition is about this space, the emotive space created by artists within the confines of a two dimensional frame. Artists have endless freedom to manipulate this space, and whether they do this to convey the personal, political or universal, the positive and negative space creates tensions, emotions and atmosphere.

Russell Terry’s work display at no format gallery, London, July 2021.

Participating artists:

Helen Booth, Neringa Dastoor, Laura Edmunds, Tom Hemming, Katya Kvasova, Juliette Losq, Russell Terry

TIME

A group show that explores aspects of temporality through artistic practices.

Exhibition at The Nutshell, Winchester, 2020.

Participating artists:

Tom Hemming, Katya Kvasova, Nicole Price

only human

ONLY HUMAN is an exhibition of paintings and drawings of three artists, who, through their work, talk about human experience, either personal or shared, directed inward or out.

The Human condition is our ever present, multi-layered, intertwined and evolving experience. 

ONLY HUMAN is an exhibition of paintings and drawings from three artists, who, through their work, interrogate the human experience, be it through personal, collective or introspective lenses.

Katya Kvasova’s work focuses primarily on the inner experiences of her subjects, Tom Hemming on the dialogue between artist and sitter and Nicole Price uses painting to evoke ideas of narrative and memory.

Exhibition at Surface gallery, Nottingham, 2019.

Participating artists:

Katya Kvasova, Trevor Simmons, Russell Terry, Jane Walker

SOUND. IMAGE

The correlation between music and visual art can be traced back at least as far as ancient Greece, when Plato first talked of tone and harmony in relation to art. The term "visual music" was first used by Roger Fry in 1912 to describe the work of Kandinsky, whose lifelong preoccupation was to evoke sound through sight, creating the painterly equivalent of a symphony that would stimulate not just the eyes but the ears as well. Although Kandinsky’s devotion to visual music is considered a result of synaesthesia, it is evident that sounds can be read from visual marks in many different ways. Even basic tools of visual language like Formal Elements (line, tone, shape, colour, rhythm etc) have a logical readability, and the myriads of associations (common and personal) put different filters on our perception of an image. It’s not just that images can evoke sounds and vice versa, but simultaneous sensory inputs can interweave producing new interpretations.

This exhibition brings together 4 artists whose work in some way uses or evokes the various correlations between image and sound. The group sets up to explore the diversity of perceptions or filters through which sound can be read, and the subsequent personal connotations. Each artist approaches the subject from a different point of view and has his/her own reasons for their interest in it.

For Jane Walker it is unfulfilled desire to become a musician that unavoidably appears in her painterly creations - she “writes” musical compositions using her own visual language and transfers the tension of city sounds onto canvases.

For Katya Kvasova - it’s the need to “break the quietness” of her paintings; in this case the artist visualizes “single” sounds converted into straight lines which then are applied in order to complete the image. They create visual rhythms that reflect her subject’s mood.

Russell Terry will be showing a harmonograph, which is a pendulum based drawing machine invented by Hugh Blackburn in 1844. This simple, mechanical apparatus can be used as a visual guide to the mathematics of music. Each drawing traces multiple frequencies into a single image showing the apparent order (and beauty) of simple ratios.

Trevor Simmons’ work includes marks made on several clear perplex sheets, they repeat like echoes in varying states of completion. A mark becomes in a sense like a note suspended, worthless on its own, but layered, repeated and traced through successive layers it resonates.  Much like music needs a listener, the dispersal drawings need a viewer.