Posts in Community
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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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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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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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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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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Jacob's Ladder: Phase II

A long time ago, on a project far, far away…

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Keith Ackerman: Jacob's Ladder

After a career as a Chartered Electrical Engineer I came to sculpting late. Following sculpting courses at Bradford and York colleges, including 7 years with the sculptor Dominic Hopkinson, I concentrated on stone carving and glass casting as my main artistic processes. My sculptures are abstract and often made from local stone.

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Unmanaged Reproach: an essay.

No two projects in the last eight years of exhibitions at BasementArtsProject more clearly amplify this than May’s exhibition by Claire Bentley-Smith ‘Unmanaged Reproach’, and its predecessor ‘Mellifluous Arcana’ by artist Paul Walsh. Both of these exhibitions came from a very personal place, anchored in past experience whilst depicting what are very much concerns of the here and now. 

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Mellifluous Arcana: An essay

Over the last eight years BasementArtsProject has become something of an immersive project. It is immersive for the viewer in so much as when you enter this subterranean space you become at one with it, the outside world temporarily an irrelevance.

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Daily: an essay by Garry Barker

“Daily’ the Basement Arts exhibition of the work of Phill Hopkins, is entered through a lively domestic kitchen, you open an unassuming paneled door and descend steep stone steps into another world. Above that door there should be a warning, “THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO THE CITY OF WOES.” (2)

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Looking Forward to the Age of STEAM

The city of Leeds is home to three major educational establishments that deal in some way with art education. Over the years these institutions have served as a Launchpad for the careers of some of the most famous British artists of the twentieth century such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Damien Hirst. They have also played host to the radical ideas and practices of the likes of George Brecht, Robert Filiou, Allan Kaprow and Yoko Ono

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The Project: A Report

In January 2015 six students from Leeds Beckett University met up with six family groups located in the South Leeds area to begin a film project that had been in the starting gate for some time.

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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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Nostalgia Is Not What It Used To Be

Alistair Woods has something of a Steptoe and Son approach to the production of artworks. For Woods the hedgerows, back alleys and gutters are a veritable treasure trove of nostalgia, a world in which objects relinquish their histories and meaning in favour of a new lease of life.

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COLONIZE: Jamestown, New York USA

SCIBase was established in 2012 as a collaborative vehicle for artists associated with SCI (Soup Collective International), based primarily in the Northwest of England and run by Wendy Williams in collaboration with BasementArtsProject Leeds.

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ArtRun Run and Boy What Fun!

The ArtRun began life as a simple idea; the commitment to, and execution of, an idea. For Debs, the originator of the concept, this meant using a physical activity to consider what it means to be an artist. Debs is not an artist, but neither is she a runner so both aspects of the idea were essentially a meditation on perseverance.

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