Catalogue Holly Antrum
Preview 1 April, 6–8pm
2 April – 14 May 2016
Monday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop presents an exhibition of artist and filmmaker Holly Antrum’s film work, Catalogue, alongside archival material from the Cobbing Family Archive and the Scottish Poetry Library.
Catalogue (2012-14) is a 16mm film transferred to digital that developed through time spent in the company of artist Jennifer Pike. Evolving from Holly’s background in printmaking, the multi-layered film overlaps elements of Jennifer’s work, such as her Computer Dances with music from her contemporaries (in particular, the jazz saxophonist Lol Coxhill) with footage of Jennifer performing Bob Cobbing’s ABC in Sound. The work constructs the unscripted narrative that took place between the two artists, incorporating the pace, sound and the character of the camera itself.
Holly worked with Jennifer, aged 93 at the time, in her home and studio, where over a period of months the two developed a sense of camera-play, exchanging looks, glances, snippets of speech and performance, and also in the artist studio of Camden Arts Centre, where works of Jennifer’s were arranged by Holly in a temporary exhibition space for the film and for her response.
Supposing what an alternative ‘catalogue’ might be around one artist’s longer legacy or unfixed archive, the film questions how the ongoing creative impulse is revealed at an age when making or producing may have ceased.
Jennifer Pike (b.1919) is an artist who worked across various media; in addition to abstract imagery in painting, photographic and digital formats, as well as performance – she was closely involved with concrete, visual and sound poetry in Britain along with her late husband and oft-collaborator Bob Cobbing (1920-2002).
The exhibition has been made possible with the generous support of Grand Union, Birmingham; Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh and Cobbing Family Archive, London.
The publication Outside Noise with texts by Holly Antrum, Jonathan P Watts and George Vasey is available as a new second edition for purchase at £3 on the occasion of the exhibition at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop.
Catalogue is shown for the first time in Scotland beginning the series of exhibitions, On an otherwise ordinary evening curated by Peter Amoore. Thinking through artist’s practice, the series brings together two artists and one critic engaged with the telling of stories, in attentive homages to other artists – their lives and their works – and in the imagining of impossible encounters between objects.
In the following exhibitions, art history is retold and relocated by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein and objects speak after being given voice by artist and comedian Siân Robinson Davies.
Biography
Holly Antrum is an artist and filmmaker based in London. She graduated from the Royal College of Art, London with a masters in printmaking in 2011.
Catalogue (2012-14) has been screened in the UK and internationally including Flatness: Index, Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, Women’s Filmmaking in Contemporary Britain, BIMI – Birkbeck, London, The London Open, The Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2015; Make Perhaps This Out Sense of Can You (Symposium, Bob Jubile), Chelsea College of Art, London, 2015; as well as within a larger installation for her solo exhibition, A Diffuse Citizen at Grand Union, Birmingham, in 2014. The film project won Elephant Trust funding in 2013 and was supported by Camden Arts Centre, London to film part of the work in the artist studio.
Other work in recent group screenings and exhibitions include Field Work: Of film, sound and voice, ICA (2016), London curated by Lucy Reynolds, In the House of Mr and Mrs X, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2013; Festival Robert Walser, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 2013 and The Stone of Folly, Downstairs Gallery, Herefordshire, 2012. She was selected to exhibit in Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries in 2006 and in 2011. Holly was the first artist in residence at Grand Union (2014) and is a current recipient of the five-year artist in residence awards at the ACME Fire Station, east London (2015).