Leanne Collin

Untitled, 2009

New Talent reveals new works by students from Fine Art at Sunderland University, created or selected to accompany each exhibition. Leanne Collin’s work here is ‘carnivalesque’ in the sense it inverts hierarchies of value, and displays low-cost or no-costs goods as precious, ornamental objects. The objects here – bucket, a splodge of concrete, and plastic butterflies all covered in metallic paint – were provided free by a DIY store, being ex-display or unusable. The builder’s bucket contrasts with the somewhat over-feminine, delicate shapes of the butterflies – though both are industrially produced plastic.

Caryll Jack Dawber

‘Ryallac’ 2009

New Talent reveals works by students from Fine Art at Sunderland University, created or selected to accompany each exhibition. Caryll Dawber’s image has been chosen to complement the exhibition ‘The Fool’. Her work shows a 1970s childhood toy – a clown – covered with ‘fool’s gold’ – artificial gold leaf that has no financial value. Covered in gold, the object is rendered useless as a plaything. A child would be unable to identify with the character: the toy is now lifeless and inert. Rather than being an object we could use to project fantasies onto – a source of vivid imaginative play in other words – it is now a hilarious status symbol.

Dawber asks us to think about how memory transforms certain types of ordinary objects into iconic or talismanic ones – into almost sacred objects whose meaning is particular to our own life stories. She asks us to consider how far the adult world is ‘childish’, in fetishising dumb status symbols – cars, clothes, furniture. As children we use objects as triggers to spark imaginative flights of fantasy and chains of ideas: she also asks us how far children occupy worlds that have an imaginative complexity that adults can, quite literally, only dream of.

Wendy Parkin

‘Unnoticed’ 2008

New Talent profiles new works by Fine Art students at Sunderland University. Wendy Parkin’s image has been selected to coincide with the exhibition ‘A Modest Proposal’, The show brings together artists from around the world who develop proposals to improve the world, or situations to change our outlook upon it – all of which are entirely logical, but which remain surprising or startling.

Parkin notes that the work makes concrete the traditional turn of phrase, ‘Time and tide wait for no man’. The characters depicted are “so totally absorbed in a conversation or enjoying an activity that the passing of time has gone unnoticed”. She queries whether we are all, to some extent or other, oblivious to our surroundings most of the time.

Sophie Helas-Kwo

Untitled 2006

New Talent profiles new works by Fine Art students at Sunderland University. Sophie Helas-Kwo’s image has been selected to coincide with the exhibition ‘Fragile Democracy’ which brings together artists from around the world. Helas-Kwo’s mother is originally from Taiwan, though she was raised in the UK. Accordingly, the country of her mother’ birth is strange to her, and she has been able to see it as an outsider. Here, her photograph of the character ‘Gizmo’ from the 1980s Hollywood film ‘Gremlins’ was taken at an industrial processing plant there – specifically a sugar factory – in Guang-Fu. The images capture two sides of a nation which is becoming an industrial giant: the “grittiness” of the country’s massive industrial sites, and the light-hearted, façade of advertising and commercial imagery often adapting Western sources which is prominent in city centres.

Ben Gilchrist

‘Minim’ 2007

“Architecture is ‘frozen music’… the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ben Gilchrist creates both paintings and computer-generated animations. ‘Minim’, the image here, is uniquely something between the two – and created specially for this lightbox. It is a single graphic image taken from one of his animated videos, ‘Secession’. Gilchrist describes his abstract animated works as “moving paintings: I design them the same way I would design a painting, but using a computer instead of physical materials.” ‘Minim’ is, therefore, akin to a ‘digital painting’, a still image created on computer intended to be looked at like a painting.

In part, Gilchrist’s work has developed out of creating projected images to accompany music by his group ‘The Jellycastle Collective’. His abstract compositions reflect the rhythms which structure musical compositions. Gilchrist remarks, “my two main influences are music and architecture. Some of my paintings are influenced by the geometric shapes of buildings, and others are taken from parts of buildings seen at different angles. ‘Minim’ and ‘Secession’ were influenced by Glaswegian architect Charles Rennie Macintosh’s designs for stained glass windows. But it also takes inspiration from other artists, including Piet Mondrian’s grid patterns, and Brian Eno’s ambient musical and visual work. As the beat in a song holds the whole thing together, the black lines in my paintings hold the composition together. The bold colours relate to the feelings which electronic music inspires in me: pure, bold, happy. The artificial, man-made look of such colours echoes the computer-generated sounds of electronic music.”

Michael Gardiner

‘Boxed Roomer’ 2007

‘New Talent’ profiles work by final year students in Fine Art at University of Sunderland. Michael Gardiner’s work has been selected to accompany the main gallery exhibition by Cory Arcangel. Like Arcangel, Gardiner works with new media, video and audio to create his work. He describes the image here acts as his “visual alias” for both his musical and fine art practice: it is, in effect, a “logo” or “tag” for his artistic persona. His first release on the label Cookshop is coming out in the New Year, as the act “Boxed Roomer”.

Gardiner’s work operates through reusing ‘found’ sounds and images, and through principles of repetition. His music often starts with samples, whether from films, other records, or even noises recorded on the street. His visual work also adapts ‘found’ imagery, such as old family photographs. But the image here is re-used in another way: it “repeats” his own “logo”, which features elsewhere throughout his oeuvre, on record labels for example. Like Arcangel, his work complicates the question of authorship: he makes creative use of other peoples’ sonic and visual output to build a new artistic world. The image here is a computer-generated design which has been photographed on-screen using a ‘macro’ lens. The colours of the design are not from any object in the real world, but of the red, green, and blue light which create colour combinations on a computer screen. Gardiner is interested in “reuse and distortion” of new and old technologies across both sonic and visual media. He notes, “the computer has become my paintbrush”: this image shows, in effect, “the tools of my trade”.