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.
Read MoreThe city streets do not seem to be very busy with cars. There is a hire system for electric scooters, they are everywhere and people just leave them parked at the edge of the pavement. Bikes are also popular. Dortmund feels like a city with an environmental conscience.
Read MoreAfter 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.
Read MoreNo 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.
Read MoreOver 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.
Read MoreAs the city fills with art world luminaries in some of the swankiest venues London has to offer, so to do the train arches and un-let spaces with artists whose worlds are similarly governed by this most strange and incomprehensible of life choices.
Read MoreNow We Have Met is, strictly speaking, not entirely about performance but about closure and treating a body of work, which just happens to be performance based, as a point of departure.
Read More…the sedimentary nature of her creative practice seemed to run parallel with another strand of thought, present in much of her work, surrounding kitsch objects; that which is cheap and mass produced.
Read MoreFor BasementArtsProject, Borkowsky proposed the re-creation of two artist’s studios; one of whom he had met before but did not know well, and the other whom he had never met at all, but both of whom he has exhibited alongside in other circumstances.
Read MoreIn January 2016 artist Ian Pepper began a project, commissioned by BasementArtsProject and supported by Leeds Inspired, to realise an exhibition that had at its core life in South Leeds.
Read More‘MantlePiece’ is a sculptural installation by Leeds based duo Lens&Chisel; sculptor Keith Ackerman and light artist / photographer Adam Glatherine. Gallery of Images
Read More“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)
Read MoreThe 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
Read MoreIn 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.
Read MoreA lecture by Dominic Hopkinson
Sunday 26.04.15 | 3pm – 4pm
(The following lecture and tour of the work took place on a sunny Sunday afternoon in the cool subterranean exhibition space that is BasementArtsProject)
Read More‘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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