THISS 2024
Methods of Making
Alice Sheppard Fidler invites the exhibiting artists to share their processes.
As a facilitator, I am bringing these artists together to foster community and connection; as a curator, I see strong relationships in making processes.
I am interested in the similarities of attitude as well as potential challenges faced when producing work that is not always object—or outcome-focused.
For these artists, hands-on making is crucial, but engaging with materials is to reveal narratives and meaning, not to add more stuff to an already full world.
I am placing their works alongside each other so both artists and audience can reflect on what making means in 2024.
- Alice Sheppard Fidler
Abi Spendlove
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
'Making' is the revealing of forms, ideas and resonances through some sort of human interaction with material. I love to explore materials and learn new techniques.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
In much of my sculptural work, I say that 'the work makes itself'. When I'm working with ice, my role is to set things up and allow the elements to change and affect the work.
And why do you make like that?
I enjoy this process of 'making' as it takes the emphasis off what I do, and enables me and others to really focus on the materials and the environment that they're in. In that way the work can become a sort of meditation. Or a constantly shifting and changing artwork, with which each viewer can have a unique interaction.
Alice Sheppard Fidler
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
To transform spaces and materials with minimal adjustments and subtle gestures.
To recycle and re work ideas.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
My work originates in found materials and responses to architecture, sites, situations, and places. I use my body as a tool to tune into the dimensions of a space, the feeling of the light, and the qualities of materials. I borrow, gather, assemble, and physically labour, testing my limits and attuning to narratives, resonances, and the histories imbued in materials.
I often begins by identifying a zone of rigidity (a rule, a social code, or a hard physical surface), and then working into the space around it.
And why do you make like that?
With or without the body, my work attempts to reference the human form by using man-made objects to stand in for bodies or traces of human contact. The positioning of these objects is used to elicit interactions from and movements by the viewer.
I work with broad concepts in pairs: freedom/control, connection/separation, and presence/impermanence. I often produce works that can transition between intervention, sculpture, and installation, and I investigate these shifts as opportunities to activate specific meanings, experiences, and affects.
Emma Gregory
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
With regard to my practice the word making relates to production and the manifestation or exploration of an idea. These two activities are linked and codependent. The activity itself prompts more ideas and so one ‘make' leads to another.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
My primary making process is drawing, a tool I use to record ideas and explore form. From this starting point a material or process will suggest itself although I don’t feel I have to remain loyal to the initial idea or material.
And why do you make like that?
I draw initially because it’s the most effective way to record the half idea or partial thought. I move as quickly as possible to the making stage with the understanding that everything I make can be unmade, keeping it loose and light in the first instance, more like drawing than building, because i’ve found that if I set out with a very clear idea of what I want to make I am hardly ever satisfied with the outcome. The best makes are discoveries whereby I see something I recognise emerging during the make, usually an association or a series of associations rather than a literal representation.
Erika Trotzig
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
Making is how I think, how I respond to research and how I make sense of the world.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
I wrap, I wrestle, I balance, I teeter, I cobble things together badly.
I dip things, I drip things, I contain things and I let things go.
And why do you make like that?
Chance and the possibility of failure are my most important methodologies.
Freya Gabie
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
Making for me, means re imagining - turning something inside out, upside down, breaking it apart to look at it again, pushing it off kilter so that it holds itself differently or sings a new song. I often use objects and materials already in the world - things we have instinctive associations with - by abstracting, disrupting or destabilising them, I'm hoping to reveal other, quieter truths which can tell a new story of who we are, and who we want to be.
Jo Lathwood
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
Making is really the action of my art practice - the facilitation of doing. Even if I am not sure what I need to create for a particular project the act of playing around with materials or drawing, triggers ideas, which later develop into more refined works.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
Drawing probably comes first. Such a great tool to workout logistics and map out ideas. If I know I am going to be working in a particular material then I would obviously have that present in the studio but the simplicity of drawing, even if they are very basic sketches allows me to expand ideas.
And why do you make like that?
Not sure I have a definitive answer for this. I enjoy the relationship between the simplicity of pencil and paper and ability to document or capture an idea which is more complex. I believe making is essential and an instinctive desire - we have been doing in for centuries. The challenge I (and others) now face is how to continue making within our current climate.
Lucinda Burgess
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
The word to me describes the act of making marks and the act of arranging or altering materials.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
Brushing with ammonium chloride, soaking in vinegar, burning with fire, dipping in water, covering large areas in graphite. Often repetitively.
And why do you make like that?
Material transformation emphasises one of the main laws of life – transience. And repetition shows that there is in fact no repetition, every outcome is unique.
Sharon Wylde
What does the word ‘making’ mean to you within your practice?
Making for me is a way of thinking around a form or a subject, as well as a process of problem solving. The handling of materials and the shaping new and different objects is fed by broader narratives about the wider world and a sense of being suspended in the moment of creation.
How do you make/what is your primary making process?
I don't have a primary process, sometimes things appear fully formed in my head and I have to find a way to realise them. Other times I just intuitively make something in response to a site, place or something seen, this can be immediate or more often halting, involving lots of iterations and then a period of waiting for the right 'thing' to arrive to complete the object.
And why do you make like that?
I wish I knew!