Interstices
July 2-12, 2003
Mirja Koponen, Sian Stammers, Jonathon Willet
| paintings | space 3

These three artists have found points of connection around notions of transition and non-stasis. The work is varied in approach and form but examines collectively aspects of a cultural raw nerve: a submerged and diffuse sense of freefall displacement which has come in the wake of the double-edged slick of new technologies, of increased mobility, of the speeding up of time, and of the commodification of everyday states of being.

The artists have exhibited in the UK and abroad. They are completing MAs in Fine Art and Contemporary Art at Nottingham Trent University.

A consideration of the dichotomy between thought and feeling is central to Mirja Koponen's work. Her painted images of location and spaces are reduced, literally, to their trace elements: condensed yet incomplete.

The work hovers between recording the world methodically, in its tangible, separable components, whilst bringing to this elements of a hand-made psychological geography, in such a way as to acknowledge the distance, the void spaces between any emergent parameter.

Sian Stammers' work is positioned somewhere between dream and reality. Infused with an enchanted atmosphere, it flows in and out of an intermediate space-time; a kind of twilight or witching hour. She brings to this notions of time as sensation, time ephemeral, and time retained as fragment in the recesses of visual memory.

This mythical texture is poised at the point of disintegration and reintegration of the sensory and sensual: a place where meaning is forever postponed and shifts in the flicker of becoming.

Jonathon Willet's work takes on the whole constellation of meaning which surrounds the term 'sense', as a set of co-ordinates for considering the relationship between thought and feeling. Because sense has affiliations with emotion, feeling, and the sensual — as well as connections with thought, rationale and logic — it can be used to deconstruct these oppositions.

The work plays with the French term 'sens' (direction) in order to navigate a particular terrain of knowledge which always intersects with the body as a locus for the termination and departure of meaning.