ARTBankside Transformed
Date: September 19th to October 21st 2012.
Time: 24 hours
Various Locations:
FREE EVENT
Artists transformed disused hoardings on derelict buildings throughout Bankside with site-specific original artworks. Artists Fiona Banner, Heather and Ivan Morison, Andy Harper and SheOne were each given a space to create a piece that was sensitive to the environment and enrich an otherwise neglected area. The public was invited to watch some of the paint performances throughout the festival.
FIONA BANNER
Title: Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron
Location: Flat Iron Square, SE1.
This hoarding designed by Fiona Banner introduced us to a special adaptation of Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron, which alludes to the battle between cartoon beagle Snoopy and WW1 fighter pilot, ace of aces Manfred Von Richthofen AKA The Red baron and the 1966 hit pop song of the same title. For one night only a musical and visual colloboration was performed at the Welsh Congregational Chapel, with artists and musicians Fiona Banner, Viv Albertine, Steve Beresford, Origamibiro and duo Ted Milton and Sam Britton.
Shortlisted for the Turner prize, Fiona Banner is one of the UK's most highly regarded artists, included in the Young British Artists explosion in 1995. Since 1994 the conceptual artist Fiona Banner has been interested in language and text as a semiotic (but also sculptural) construct, and in the limitations of linguistic expression. Investigating the reciprocal relationship between images and language.
ANDY HARPER
Title: Town and Country
Location: Southwark Street London, SE1 0AB
For the hoarding, called Town and Country, Harper wanted to negotiate a conversation with the site. Resisting the temptation to paint onsite, Harper worked on the existing marks and imagery that currently inhabited the hoardings; the remains of the fly posters, graffiti, and various layers of signage and redecoration. Working with oil paint on newsprint paper, Harper engaged and entwined his own painted language with the existing images and surfaces. The results of this collaboration with anonymous contributors to the hoarding was to be fly posted back onto the site: the work did not operate as a final and obliterating statement but as an addition to its ever evolving facade.
TOWN AND COUNTRY
Andy Harper is a painter. His practice is predominantly studio based but he has always taken on specific projects to site his practice in unconventional spaces. He has placed work in deconsecrated churches, dis-used factories, on river paths and most recently in the woods at the Latitude fesval.
Born in 1971, Andy Harper attended Brighton Polytechnic 1990-93, the Royal College of Art London 1993-95 and Middlesex University 1997-99.
He teaches part time on the MA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London.
Harper is represented by Danese in New York, Morgen Contemporary in Berlin and The Page Gallery in Seoul.
SHEONE
Titles: Teardownlove and Promises made in smoke
Location: 2 Stoney Street and Great Suffolk St, London, SE1.
SheOne produced two pieces of work for the festival. The hoarding titled Teardownlove on 2 Stoney Street, Borough Market, London SE1, was an abstract image of two lovers facing each other in anticipation.
James Choules, who adopts the alter-ego of SHEONE, is a London based artist with a unique brand of abstract painting rooted deep in the new wave graffiti era of early eighties New York.
In October 2010, at the personal invitation of the mayor of Ville De Niort, France, SheOne and artist 0 TWO were asked to make a mural to adorn Ville De Niort's Cultural Arts Centre. The artists spent three days making the mural and held a special public opening to celebrate its completion.
SheOne has been painting and making graphics for twenty years, exhibiting in Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, Berlin and Milan. His own brand of abstract typography is rooted deep in the new wave graffiti era of the early eighties but his stylised shorthand and uniquely expressive approach to paintings keep him firmly in the present. His highly personalised work has crossed over into fashion, product and audio collaboration, causing ‘Refill’ magazine to refer to him as a ‘leading cultural artist.’
Side-lining the usual multi-coloured pictorial approach to graffiti painting SheOne focuses on the visual language of writing and the expressive possibilities of the name.
TEARDOWNLOVE
PROMISES MADE IN SMOKE
Location: Great Suffolk Street, corner of Prices Street, SE1.
A short story about promises told through the smoke of abstracted words.
HEATHER & IVAN MORISON
Location: At the southern side of Tate Modern, near Sumner Street , SE1
Title: Skirt of the Black Mouth
Exploring the potential of the south landscape of the Tate Modern project artists Heather and Ivan Morison created Skirt of the Black Mouth. Their practice was an attempt to realign the rigid grid of the modern world into a more unstable, more beautiful geometry. They employed simple folds and cuts and transformed elemental forms, materials and ideas into monolithic structures. When introduced into public spaces they acted as catalysts to agitation and provocation. Heather and Ivan Morison were looking for people to be unsettled by what they saw, but also to find hope through this confrontation.
A place for everyone, Skirt of the Black Mouth began with a rethinking of the traditional hoarding, using it as a sculptural element to redefine the space it framed, leaving glimpses of what lies behind. Transformed by this folded structure that articulates the outline and contours of the site, it was a space stolen back from the construction site, a dividing strip between one world and another, made distinct by the strong twisted geometry of the key elements of wall, bench and path. It is now a space of light and dark, silences and shadows, contrasting materials and conflicting ideas, leading visitors to begin to question what this space is now and what is to come: a blueprint for happiness.
SKIRT OF THE BLACK MOUTH
Heather and Ivan Morison work collaboratively and make art that actively engages with materials, histories, sites and processes. The Morisons’ have produced sculpture, photographs, installations and buildings. They have worked internationally on site-specific projects, including the establishment of an arboretum in a remote village in Wales. More recently they are known for their architectural structures that relate to ideas of escape, shelter and refuge, the transformation of the modern city, weight and levity, solidity and transparency; the construction of which are very often part of a broad community effort.
Heather and Ivan Morison are based in Brighton, England, and Arthog, Wales. Their work has been exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, including the 52nd Venice Biennale. Their book, Falling Into Place, a fictionalized account of their large shelter works of the past few years, was published by Book Works in late 2009.