Stanley Picker Gallery

Nicole Wermers’ sculptures, collages and photographs connect formal considerations with a discussion about urban space and its social, economical and psychological aspects.

Visible and invisible structures of the city and their manifestations within architecture, advertising, and designed objects that influence our physical movements and actions, all form frames of reference for her artworks. The ways in which modern surfaces and materials, two- and three-dimensional spaces construct desire and communicate emotions and power is the principal area of her ongoing research practice.

Most of Wermers’ work, although appearing abstract, refers to concrete objects and structures of everyday urban life, such as the gate-like security devices at the exit of departments stores, or gallery-based sculptures that appear to double as standing ashtrays.

Examining the urban experience and the production of public and private space, Wermers will investigate transitional spaces within the city such as museums and cafés, the artist’s Stanley Picker Fellowship focussing on her research interests around the interface of art and design, investigating the grades of utility and functionality of sculptural objects.

Nicole Wermers was  nominated for the Turner Prize 2015.

Andy Holden’s work incorporates a wide variety of media and forms of presentation, from plaster, bronze and ceramic objects, to music, performance and large outdoor sculpture.  Recent exhibitions include Pyramid Piece and Return of the Pyramid Piece  for Art Now at Tate Britain and Chewy Cosmos Thingly Time at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. He curated Be Glad For the Song Has No End – A Festival of Artists’ Music at Wysing Arts Centre in 2010.

For his Stanley Picker Fellowship Holden developed the exhibition  Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape,  an elaboration in space of the ideas presented in the lecture of the same name. In the lecture staged by  Andy Holden  together with curator Tyler Woolcott, the pair put forward an idea that we can use the laws of physics as they appear in cartoons to help us devise a possible way of understanding the landscape “after the end of art history…a landscape where it seems like anything might be possible, but not everything is, there are rules that begin to emerge as we make observations”. The  Laws of Motion in Cartoon Landscape Lecture was restaged at Swedenborg House, Bloombsbury, in January 2013 to accompany the Stanley Picker Gallery exhibition.

In parallel, Holden continued to develop work that focussed on a key moment in his evolution as an artist; his involvement with the art movement known as MI!MS (Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity), which took place in his home town of Bedford in the first few years on the 21st Century.  The movement posited a coupling of Irony and Sincerity, the extreme points of the two poles operating together simultaneously. As it’s manifesto stated: “MI!MS is about the willingness to be lied to and the will to believe!”. As an integrated part of this project, concluding his Stanley Picker Fellowship, Holden staged The Music of Mims with Grubby Mitts band member and the chamber orchestra and children’s choir from Tiffin School, Kingston, recordings of the live event forming part of a subsequent exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection, London in Autumn 2013.

A documentary, commissioned by the Royal College of Art MA Curating students for Resonance 104.4FM, gives a good introduction into the intentions and activities of MI!MS through a series of reflections by many of the original members.

Marloes ten Bhömer’s work consistently aims to challenge generic typologies of women’s shoes through experiments with non-traditional technologies and material techniques. By reinventing the process by which footwear is made, the resulting shoes serve as unique examples of new aesthetic and structural possibilities, while also serving to criticise the conventional status of women’s shoes as cultural objects.

Her research into technology, materials, feet and footwear has resulted in a variety of experimental and conceptual pieces, some of which have been developed into technically sound (wearable) shoes, others which are produced solely as sculptural works. The existence of both directions within her practice generates a layer to the work that comments on the perception of functionality, commerce and production in a larger system. The context within which they sit (in galleries, museums, or in boutiques) challenges the audiences’ preconceptions about the shoe.

Her work is published and exhibited internationally, notably in the Krannert Art Museum in Illinois, Modemuseum in Hasselt, Galerie Lucy Mackintosh Switzerland, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Design Museum Holon, Israel, Spring Projects Gallery in London and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Ten Bhömer was nominated for the Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010 and the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2009 at the Design Museum London”¨and she has been awarded the Creative Pioneer Programme, Nesta Award, the Crafts Council Development Award”¨and the Startstipendium Fonds BKVB.

Recommended Reading:

*Available to view at the Stanley Picker Gallery during the exhibition

*Beukers, Adriaan and Van Hinte, Ed, Lightness: The Inevitable Renaissance of Minimum Energy Structures. 1951-1998 ISBN-13: 978-9064505607
Gordon, James Edward, Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. 1978* ISBN-13: 978-0306812835
Hans, Annette, Karla Black: It’s Proof That Counts. 2010 ISBN-13: 978-3037640845
*Kirkham, Pat, The Gendered Object. 1996 ISBN-13: 978-0719044755
*Lima, Manuel Visual Complexity: Mapping Patterns of Information 2011 ISBN-13: 978-1568989365
Menges, Achim, Material Computation: Higher Integration in Morphogenetic Design Architectural Design 2012 ISBN-13: 978-0470973301
*Quinn, Bradley, The Fashion of Architecture 2003 ISBN-13: 978-1408110584
*Reas, Chandler Casey Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture 2010 ISBN-13: 978-1568989372
*Salvadori, Mario, Why Buildings Stand Up: Strength of Architecture from the Pyramids to the Skyscraper 1990 ISBN-13: 978-0393306767
*Scott, Linda M, Fresh Lipstick: Redressing Fashion and Feminism 2006 ISBN-13: 978-1403966865
Spector, Nancy and Taylor, Mark C, All in the Present Must Be Transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys 1945-2007* ISBN-13: 978-0892073559
Van Hinte, Ed, First Read This: Systems Engineering in Practice 2007 ISBN-13: 978-9064506437
Wosk, Julie, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age 2001 ISBN-13: 978-0801873133