exhibition

Dirty Nature

Artists Fiona MacDonald, John Holland

19.Apr.07 - 19.May.07
Wed-Sat 12-6
£ Free advance

Standpoint Gallery
45 Coronet St
London N1 6HD
020 7739 4921
standpointgallery@btconnect.com
www.standpointlondon.co.uk
Tube Old Street, Liverpool Street, Shoreditch / Hoxton

Holland and MacDonald create mutating or abused landscapes, echoing current fears for the environment, but with a twist of overactive, gothic imagination. They make alternate realities, scenarios or details, whether as backdrops for potential dramas to unfold, or to re-investigate the lived experience of being this human creature at once embedded and alienated from the natural world.

Holland and MacDonald pick their way through the philosophical and aesthetic fracture between nature and our cognitive experience of it, seeking some useful interpretive framework, but being repeatedly drawn back to worrying places where the writhing roots of feral leylandii enfold ancient, snail-eaten copies of Readers’ Wives. They may not always know what they’re doing, but they do know that the ethereal and sublime can only be approached through the physical – the moist, the lumpy, the cracked and the seething, the lovely and the embarrassingly unpleasant. The stuff of which the work is made is never allowed to sink behind the act of representation, but must surface. This push and pull between seduction and refusal is wilful, is there to turn the viewer this way and that, draw them in, then revolt them or confuse them. This may be more or less subtle, but it keeps the work active, unsettled, contradictory.

John Holland’s installations portray a kind of nature that’s at once intimate, romantic, and totally adulterated by man made tat. He uses a plethora of ordinary but out of context materials – sawn timber, plasticine, silicon rubber, gaffer tape, fibreglass, polystyrene, vaseline, house paint, fur, air freshener – making landscapes in which realistic birds and animals inhabit a space toxically laden with barely transformed matter. ‘I assert the primacy of material specificity as a tool against the bad generalities of ideologies, strategies, metaphors and literary interpretations. The job is to avoid everything bar facts, sentiment, and the hope of a little bit of sympathetic magic.’

John Holland was the last person to leave Maidstone Art College’s Fine Art degree (he did turn out the lights). He has had solo shows in Brighton and Lille, France

Fiona MacDonald produces fictional worlds and details constructed from found objects, living organisms, natural and artificial materials. Her sculptures and paintings portray the desire for - and the necessary failure of - new spaces of the imagination. Unashamedly beautiful, but never without dark undercurrents, MacDonald’s work evokes sensations of overabundance and stagnation. Alternately seduced and brought up against the kind of wrongness that only occasionally appears in nature (in such ways as the duck-billed platypus looks stuck together with glue), she positions us at the edge of illusion and materiality.

Fiona MacDonald studied at Leeds Metropolitan and Chelsea College of Art. Solo shows include Habitat 2006 (Phoenix, Brighton) and Long and Ryle, London in June 2007. She has been selected for the Celeste Art Prize 2007 and the Creekside Open 2007.

Also working in collaboration for the first time, the artists have produced for this show ‘Nature versus Nurture’, an epic fight to the death between the forces of Nature (small furry animals) and the forces of Capitalism (cheap plastic superheroes), constructed on a table football pitch.