Ingrid Pollard “Carbon Slowly Turning” at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
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MK Gallery presents a key survey of Guyanese-born British artist and photographer Ingrid Pollard – the first exhibition to fully check out Pollard’s revolutionary and experimental follow, from the 1980’s to the present day, and examine her considerable contribution to British art.
Ingrid Pollard is renowned for using images as social observe, functioning with portrait and landscape photography to problem our connection with the pure environment and interrogate social constructs such as Britishness, race, sexuality, and id. Operating across a remarkable variety of approaches, from photography, printmaking, drawing and installation, to artist textbooks, online video, and audio, Pollard’s follow brings together meticulous analysis and experimental imaginative processes to make art that is at as soon as deeply private and socially engaged, addressing concerns that are urgent and pertinent now: the human overall body, race and migration, our romantic relationship with the all-natural environment.
A profound interest in the processes of photography has been a consistent throughout Pollard’s profession. She has experimented with digital and analogue procedures, generally working with Victorian photographic procedures, acquiring illustrations or photos on wood, fabric and slate. In the course of her job she has documented the English landscape, uncovering hidden and unseen histories and stereotypes. Her operate normally offers proof collected in excess of prolonged periods of exploration in which she observes and explores a specific put, generally imbedded within the local community who dwell and operate there. Considerably of her perform is made on residencies absent from property, discovering suggestions of illustration, landscape, and identity.
The exhibition at MK Gallery, supported by Freelands Foundation through the Freelands Award, is the to start with to existing an overview of Pollard’s vocation to day, showcasing works from essential sequence from the earlier 40 several years along with new perform.
In Pastoral Interlude (1987), a sequence of hand-tinted pictures depicting black people in rural settings this kind of as the Lake District offset conventional idyllic representations of the English landscape against unseen histories of exclusion, demanding the stereotype of black people as principally affiliated with city environments. Created 30 many years right after Pastoral Interludes, in the series Valentine Times (2017) Pollard used this very same hand-tinting method to late 19th century illustrations or photos produced by Valentine & Sons, at first made to endorse Jamaica as a spot for redevelopment, an archive Pollard ongoing to check out all through her time as the inaugural Stuart Corridor Foundation Fellow at the College of Sussex.
The exhibition will also feature vital performs from the 1990s and Pollard’s desire in representations of the human body and sexuality, such as Deny: Imagine: Attack (1991), in which fragmented pictures of the system are overlaid with scientific, homophobic remarks, and Contenders (1995), a series of daily life-dimensions fragmented images of the male system that concern the hyper-masculinity of the boxer. The exhibition will also present some of Pollard’s most enduring tasks, made over decades of intensive exploration. For in excess of 30 several years Pollard has identified pub signs across England which refer to or depict the determine of the African In the installation Seventeen of Sixty 8 (2019), images of these figures expose this neglected element of English heritage alongside associated objects and texts. For the exhibition at MK Gallery, Pollard has ongoing her experimentation with ‘the body’, presenting a new kinetic sculptural installation inspired by characters in colonial movies. The sculpture is manufactured from acquainted uncovered objects and elements like household furniture, rope, and saws, employing their seems and actions in eerie, unfamiliar means.
Pollard was 1 of the very first artists involved in the Black British art motion in Britain, participating in several seminal team exhibitions in the 1980s which includes Black Women: Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre (1983) and The Skinny Black Line, ICA (1985). Through a time of urgent conversations in between black artists, writers and thinkers exploring their connection to Britain’s colonial previous and art heritage, Pollard documented daily life in communities in London and conferences on women’s liberation and racial equality. In the 1980s she labored at Lenthall Street Workshop, a local community-primarily based feminist collective in East London that served distribute radical political strategies and contributed to grassroots actions of feminism, anti-racism, and LGBT+ legal rights. She performed an important position in documenting black people’s creative imagination and existence in 1980s Britain, which includes the operate of performers, actors, and writers such as Alice Walker, Theatre of Black Females, Ellen Kuzwayo, Jackie Kay, and Maya Angelou. In 1988 she was just one of the 21 founder users of Autograph, an company supporting black photographic apply and championing photography that explores troubles of race, identification, illustration, human rights and social justice.
Anthony Spira, Director of MK Gallery, mentioned: “This exhibition is an critical possibility to truly see and rejoice Ingrid Pollard’s inventive practice on its own phrases, which is amazing in its selection and innovation. Her work is at after individual and socially urgent, guiding us by way of some of the most crucial issues we experience nowadays by her extraordinary use of impression building as a sort of social follow.”
Gilane Tawadros, Curator of the exhibition, claimed: “Ingrid Pollard exercise has extended been focused on the human body, astro-physics and geology, and in specific geology in the formation of the stars and planets. The title of the exhibition “Carbon Slowly and gradually Turning” invitations us to replicate on geological time in relation to human time. On the a single hand the millennia in which carbon, rock and other purely natural elements are created, and on the other the brevity of human existence by comparison and the impacting nature of geology on the human sort. A selection of Pollard’s will work replicate on the cyclical character of historical past and human expertise, exactly where everything is matter to transform, at times around hundreds or hundreds of a long time, at other times in the blink of an eye.”
Curated by Gilane Tawadros in collaboration with the artist.
At MK Gallery, Milton Keyne
until finally Might 29, 2022
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