Posts in painting
LOCKDOWN JOURNAL: COVID-19.40 (Howard Eaglestone)

I think it is highly disingenuous and manipulative to suggest that the NHS coped with the pandemic when workers died and doctors, nurses, care workers and others have to work long hours in dangerous and distressing conditions, often without protection.

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LOCKDOWN JOURNAL: COVID-19.17 (Chuck Hamilton)

Many years before BasementArtsProject, in fact quite a few before the Peripheral collective, before I left the Wirral I was involved as a volunteer with an art gallery called The Blackthorn. It was here that I had the pleasure of meeting and working with artist Chuck Hamilton and a couple of his colleagues from Savannah, Georgia USA. Chuck is the owner of the A.T Hun Gallery in Georgia. This post is for Chuck and The Hun

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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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When Worlds Collide

Welcome to My World is the second exhibition in 2016 that has been led by artist and musician Ian Pepper, and it comes on the back of the Leeds Inspired funded project A Feast of Beeston.

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An Extra Seat at The Table...

In 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.

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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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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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Taking The Proud Highway

The system cannot cope with chaos. Randomness and Disorder are anathema to a structure based on predictability. Art, in its multiplicity of forms lies at the centre of a paradox when forced to consider it’s true role in society.

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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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‘Hey Artists, Gotta Dollar . . . Thought Not!’

What began as a slightly tongue in cheek title for the second and third in a series of exhibitions has, for me at least, become a point of serious consideration. Originally the title INHOSPITABLE referred to the site for the second SCIBase exhibition at the Bridewell Studios, a former police station, on the edge of Liverpool city centre.

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Keeping The Aspidistra Flying

And so it is that on a warm sunny morning in late March, with the smell of oil paint and turps hanging on the air, BasementArtsProject turns a corner and enters a new phase in its existence.

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Unravel: the longest hand painted film in Great Britain

In 2010 artists Chris Daniels and Maria Anastassiou were the recipients of the Deutsche Bank Award for Art at the Royal College of Art for their project Unravel - the longest hand painted film in Great Britain.

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