Posts in Sculpture
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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Sharon McDonagh | Preserving The Past

Born in 1969, Sharon is a York based artist strongly influenced by past experiences, current social issues with a hint of nostalgia.  Sharon uses a variety of medium from spray paint and emulsion, to plaster and items that have been rescued and ‘acquired’ from undisclosed locations. 

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Hit The Deck! Doors Closing,Lift Going Down…

Ian Thomson reflects on the nature of his sound work ‘Underground Lift’ and the connection between the inner ear and the Holbeck interchange.

‘Lost Portals’ continues at BasementArtsProject until Friday 26th April. There will also be a Lunchtime Conversation event on this day.

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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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Excavating The Future

The unusual texture of printed plastic, slightly warped due to AI filling in gaps, allow onlookers to discern between works cast in pewter and jesmonite. These ‘copies’ of works usually guarded behind glass evoke cultural memory yet leave viewers with a sense of remembrance just out of reach

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That Which We Thought We Knew: The studio practice of Jeffrey Knopf

…my process is a hit and run technique, I can be anywhere and I might see something that grabs my attention, a shape a form that is different so like a photographer I want to capture that moment but instead of it being two dimensional it’s in the three dimensional realm.

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A Tale of Three Birthdays (and some reminiscences)

2023 was, for me, a tale of two birthdays. It was the year that I turned fifty-one and resigned from my job of nineteen years with the Henry Moore Institute. It also represented thirty-four years, to the day, since I took on my first proper job, beyond a paper round, with Sainsbury’s.

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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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Jacob's Ladder: an impact report of sorts

Whilst I always understood that Jacob’s Ladder would be a labour of love for both myself, as BasementArtsProject: the commissioning organisation, and for sculptor Keith Ackerman, I knew that it would definitely take longer than the one-hundred days of the Yorkshire Sculpture International 2019. But we never imagined the three year odyssey that it would become thanks to the C***d pandemic lockdowns.

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Looking To The Future: Emily

For the last few months I have been in discussion with artist Paul Digby about his latest sculpture project ‘Looking To The Future: Emily’, and talking about BasementArtsProject’s position as co-creator on it. 

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Entering the decompression chamber and a new era

Beneath the surface of the locked down world the oxygen is running low. The tiny life support capsules sustaining our presence in the airless vacuum of millions of hard-drives, can only sustain three dimensional life for so long. It is time to head for the surface, but not too rapidly.

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Abandonment Issues and the Language of Art

So how do we get past the problem of perception, access and desire. Life is about dialogue, that is how we learn. We educate ourselves through experience, we find the edge of our zone of comfort and understanding and we push past it, through to what lies beyond.

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Art From The Ground Up: Not Letting Culture Lose!

So, 2023 is still a thing; by which I mean Leeds2023. Despite the fact that Brexit put paid to any opportunity for UK cities to present their wares on a European stage, Leeds has committed itself to ensuring that 2023 remains an important year for the city in terms of culture; despite the funding and exposure being cut off by political dispute.

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Back To Life, Back To Reality

When we lose a sense of purpose we lose our sense of the future, and that is where hopelessness slips into the void and feeds our deepest fears. That is the point at which the sun sets never to rise again.

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