Mummery + Schnelle is pleased to present a show with recent
works by Jyll Bradley, Paul Caffell, and Terry Smith.
The title of the exhibition, Point-Horizon-Structure comes
from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s study of perception, defining
it as a process of experience and conscious action. The three
artists featured in this show share a similar concern for
the mechanisms of perception, questioning and constantly redefining
its essence through experimental studio practices. The works
included in this show share a common ground, a fundamental
set of elements with which to experience and understand the
phenomenology of perception, namely light and shadow, and
correspondently, matter and void. These elements represent
the binary opposition at the heart of an experience of the
world, which is predominantly visual and photographic. Through
their studio practice, these artists question the intersections
of photography, drawing and installation, blurring the line
between the bi-dimensional and the sculptural.
Jyll Bradley, Three light drawings from
Their flight is knowledge,
space is their alienation, 2010-2011
Jyll Bradley presents a selection of works from
three of her most recent series: ‘Their flight is knowledge,
space is their alienation’, ‘Look at me now and
here I am’ and ‘Airports for the Lights, Shadows
and Particles’. Light is a protagonist in Bradley’s
work, drawing together images, words and form to create inquiring
spaces and unusual meetings. Her “light drawings”
meditate on studio practice and form a personal art history
relating to photography and its history. Her light boxes and
aluminium panels draw on industrial, Minimalist forms and
use them to insist on content vis a vis sexual politics and
identity. For Bradley a light box is a beacon, a navigation
point and a sales pitch. Using them, as she does in two of
the works in this exhibition, to depict women priests performing
acts of obeisance in ornate church interiors raises questions
about power, identity and the nature of religious faith.
Jyll Bradley, Airports for the Lights,
Shadows and Particles
Installation at the Bluecoat
Gallery, Liverpool, 2011
Jyll Bradley (b.Folkestone 1966) was educated at Goldsmith’s
College (1985–88) and the Slade (1991–3). Since
the early 1990s she has exhibited her work in numerous notable
exhibitions both in the UK and internationally including The
British Art Show, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (1990),
Maureen Paley Interim Art (1989), the Walker Art Gallery,
Liverpool (2008) and the inaugural show at the Calouste Gulbenkian
Foundation, London (2009). Bradley has also undertaken major
commissions for the re-opening of Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2005),
and solo British Council funded projects with Museo De Antioquia,
Medellin, Colombia and Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou,
China (both 2004). In 2008 her Residency within Liverpool
Botanical Collection formed one of the significant commissions
for the city’s year as European Capital of Culture.
Bradley’s work was recently the subject of a major survey
show Airports for the Lights, Shadows and Particles first
shown at The Exchange (Newlyn Art Gallery) in 2010 and touring
to the Bluecoat, Liverpool 2011. She is currently working
on a major project for Canberra’s Centenary programme
in 2013.
To fold is an action that allows Paul Caffell to manipulate
light and shadow. His practice entails both a construction,
by means of scoring and folding, and a deconstruction, from
unfolding and flattening. The works from his two series ‘Expansions’
and ‘Envelopes’ experiment with the perception
of structure and volume, employing a very rigorous monochromatic
scale and an essential photographic process - the platinum
print.
Paul Caffell, Expansions, 2011
Paul Caffell has been making art since the early 1960s, when
as an emerging young artist he was mentored by the leading
British modernist critic, collector and painter, Roland Penrose.
After exhibiting internationally during the decade, with work
being purchased by several important collections, he withdrew
to paint privately and developed his photographic practice.
Mummery + Schnelle first showed Caffell’s work in the
group show ‘To Become Like Music’ in 2008, emphasising
the influences and affinities of the paintings in the relationship
between music and modernist painting and performance in the
post-war avant-garde. He had his first solo exhibition at
the gallery at the end of 2011. A book documenting his paintings
and platinum prints from 1961 to 2011 is available from the
gallery.
Paul Caffell, Expansion, 2011
Terry Smith’s practice has often involved direct action
with the space around him and the objects that fill it, open
and close it, contain or expand it. Smith’s work is
a constant inquiry into the perception of space and the poetry
of the everyday. His practice involves multiple processes
and actions, from a physical intervention of space by means
of construction and demolition, through to a sculptural notion
of drawing where the surface of the paper becomes three-dimensional
through relief and indentation, but whose method involves
as least as much erasure as addition. Smith’s work in
this exhibition will be in photography, drawing and film.
Terry Smith, Tate Ladder Parallax,
1996/2011
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