Posts in Art as Education
Does Humour Belong in Art?

Upon entering ‘The Basement’ the first thing you encounter is someone trying to zip themselves into a suitcase accompanied by the bold statement ‘Pack Your Shit and LEAVE’, scrawled on the wall as if in anger or madness. Welcome to the surreal absurdist world of Phee Jeffreries.

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Gatekeepers of The Body/I've Got You, You've Got Me

Gatekeepers of The Body is an exhibition by Middleton based Artist Annabelle Richmond-Wright. It is also the first stage of a public sculpture project, the second in four stages designed to revive the fortunes of our community here in South Leeds

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Born At The Kitchen Table

Visual art is also a language, one which many people would suggest that they “don’t understand” but, I would argue, that it allows for a form of dialogue between people that the spoken word does not encourage.

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Diving In The Cool Depths Of A ‘Wine Dark Sea’

It is the position of BasementArtsProject when commissioning projects, to do so in such a way that allows a project room to grow and develop over time. In doing so it allows a multitude of reference points to emerge; the intention of the artist, the purpose of BasementArtsProject and the needs of the audience.

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Working Beyond The Realm of Experience

And so in the darkness of the winter months of 2024, we open our programme for the year with an exhibition that creates a sense of place, whilst also being somehow dislocated from the realm of the real world.

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Degrees of Separation

The Metaphorical Museum really exists, we just don’t realise it. Just like our memories It exists in a place where time, the 4th dimension, collapses and inhabits the 3 dimensions of physical space. It is a place of invention, innovation, excavation, examination and learning.

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Fray: Exhibition Guide & Text

Dismantle everything
and meet the edges (the edges bleed)

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Ars Longa Vita Brevis | Bruce Davies w/ Ruby Jean Waterhouse

Beware of Artists, they mix with all classes of society’

A popular meme from the internet of today allegedly has its origins in a warning from King Leopold of Belgium to Queen Victoria, when in 1845 he wrote

‘​​dealings with artists, for instance, require great prudence; they are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that reason are dangerous; they are hardly ever satisfied, and when you have too much to do with them, you are sure to have des ennuis’

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All Roads Roam To Leeds

Route Motif represents a first for the artist Chloe Harris and another first for Basement. Chloe is a young artist at the very beginning of her career, educated at Exeter School of Art, and who has recently become a full member of the Society of Women Artists. Over the last three years she has exhibited as an Associate Member in their Annual Group Exhibitions. Her show at BasementArtsProject represents her first solo project as an artist.

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Nature vs Nurture

The exhibition ‘Squaring the Circle’ by Loane Bobillier comes at a point where we can look back at National and International events of recent years and question our place within the framework of a rapidly changing society.

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Apocalypse Wow! The Life and Times of Crazy Eddie

Crazy Eddie can often be found sat in his local coffee shop with a random object  before him on the table. The job of understanding comes from observation. Edward Mortimer has been creating sculptural artworks for some thirty years. His works are simultaneously humorous, nightmarish and weird but crucially, always well observed.

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Living In Eternity: Tomorrow Never Comes

The clock stopped at the time of birth; marking a transition between worlds as the first breath is drawn.

The anguished screams of birth, become the rhythmic sigh matching the cadence of a weary world

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Decompressed Time Frames and the Interconnectedness of Things

‘Decompressed Time Frames’ (the exhibition formerly known as ‘Compressed Time Frames’) opens with the extension of a work begun as part of the 2017 Leeds Light Night, in which Bradley mobilised his audience, attached by an unsafe rock climbers rope, and traversed the city from art venue to art venue.

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A New Weird Albion

It is hardly surprising, that since reopening BasementArtsProject in August, the nature of the exhibitions have been somewhat political. Pushing through a time of great turmoil and upheaval as we are doing right now, things that have been bubbling under for a long time have quite predictably and reasonably come to the surface.

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Once More Unto The Breach (Repeat Ad Infinitum)

The work of Lou Hazelwood and Chris Graham, when working as a duo, seeks to make sense of the slippage from one political and philosophical state to another.

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The Entropic Effect In A Zero Sum Universe

The ‘Emergence’ exhibition looks at the energy that transforms material and gives new form to that which already exists. It is about the hand of the artist in the transformation process, the mind of the artist in the conception of the work and it is about the nature of the material being transformed.

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A New World In The Morning

As we emerge into a post-pandemic world, rubbing our eyes and blinking in the sunlight, the importance of the root system becomes apparent. The things that we thought may not survive did in fact just die back for an exceptionally long winter.

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Lou Hazelwood: A Conversation

I still love Leeds, I guess you always do when it’s your hometown. I studied my foundation at Jacob Kramer 1990-91 after doing Photography O & A levels at my school. I failed my art O level and am really glad I did!

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It Will Come To Me

‘It Will Come To Me ‘ is a title that came in to being during a late night conversation via Facebook chat messenger with Samela Otoviç. The main thrust of the conversation was concerned with what the title of the aforementioned exhibition should be.

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What Is Being Subjected To Change?

When I first encountered Alistair’s works it was strikingly apparent to me that he was meddling with paradoxes, playing, flirting & enticing viewers to decode this special language he had built from his practice.

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