If There’s A Battle I Will Remember You Always \ Muskrat Hokum \ Marchland

11 August 2009 – 28 August 2009

If There’s A Battle, I Will Remember You Always – Nick Barlow

I was collecting for a while. You know those kinds of things that just turn up in your life, like the stones in your shoe or the toys you get from those egg dispensers outside the supermarket. My mother never let me have toy soldiers or toy guns. The closest I came to fulfilling my childish militaristic impulses was a few of those plastic model plane kits and a computer game where you built armies and tried to take over the world.

Muskrat Hokum – Symon McVilly

Muskrat Hokum is a collection of single moments visually translated in the form of little sculptures. Starting with a simple idea taken from ordinary seemingly mundane events, each piece creates its own story and place. They are private moments captured with a quiet humour.

The pieces are all mixed media, combining found objects and materials with building, gluing, cutting, drawing and painting. The style is loose and expressive.

Marchland – Sharon Billinge

Marchland, noun: The line or area separating geopolitical units, a buffer zone.

Marchland is part of my ongoing attempt to examine human identity and interaction. The installation explores the process of finding a balance between isolation and connection and attempts to break down the accepted roles of artist and viewer. It shows two people caught in the act of pushing against and simultaneously retreating from their own marchlands. Above these figures hang pieces of charcoal that visitors to the exhibition are invited to draw with. This invitation to leave a mark on something seen as permanent – a wall, in a place visited by people who want to look at things on the wall – is an opportunity to present a piece of our own experience to be seen and remembered by others.

The creation of the work will continue on the opening night as a performance, singling me out to be the creator of the work and as such open to questioning about the installation, breaking down my own marchlands and the established barriers at work in a gallery situation.