Sluice__ 2015 Art Fair

In 2014 we went international because only in relation to others is the local local. We went to find fellow travellers and learn from them, people who work with extreme craft skill, poetic agility, and actual real in-your-face objects, artists not always very visible in the UK. We went Swedish at the amazing and inspiring University of Gothenburg Högskolan för Design och Konsthantverk in Steneby, where hardcore skills are taught alongside Bauhausian design courses. It is the mother-lode of all the values we hold dear.

We went Lithuanian at the Vilniaus Dailės Akademija where Soviet era national identity is being re-crafted, where loving the local is a bulwark against the juggernaut neighbours. We went American, with Wayfarers and Theodore:Art in Brooklyn and Season in Seattle.

We developed a long term relationship with Brooklyn based performance artist George Ferrandi who works with performance, vulnerability, impermanence, fallibility and spectacle, often through experimental approaches to story-telling. Employing a unique humour and a deep sense of humanity, her work is filled with love. She has sent us a parcel of extraordinariness to show at  #Sluice__ 2015  from Japan where she has been working for the last few months.

As director of the Brooklyn gallery Wayfarers George Ferrandi  introduced me to Brent Owens with whom I exhibited at Wayfarers in 2014. It was a very happy pairing and so we decided to includes Brent’s work in our #Sluice __2015 presentation.

George describes ‘Brent Owens’ sculpture [as] ambitious and delicately clunky – appropriating the rough-hewn aesthetic of chain-sawed country bears or driftwood sculptures, but applying those sensibilities to less much predictable imagery – like ice cream cones, loaves of bread, submarine sandwiches or piles of hair.’ All I am saying is Zombie Toast…

In 2014 Freddie Robins was deeply embedded in the English Folk Song and Dance Society. We have taken this engagement as a spring board for our psycho-folk theme for our 2015 Sluice__ presentation which could be embodied in the paintings of Simon Collins whose mysterious allegories and parables chart his personal journey though love and history.

If you’re going to be rural you might as well get right down in the bosky mire with the faeries, sprites and spirits. We embrace the pink shiny glittery as well as the massive scary teeth, truly awesome power of death wielding elementals. It’s not nice in the woods.

Hope to see you there, all the best Ben

Invite Sluice 15 general