MA Creative Practice End of Year Show

‘MACP’ is the inaugural exhibition of Leeds College of Art MA Creative Practice postgraduate students. 

Within this exhibition, the four artists present work of exceptional quality, imagination and technical skill, exploring the intersection between researched contextualisation, personal practice and current events. Works involve a cross section of interdisciplinary art united through creative practice. 

Emma Dexter

Dexter is a sculptor and visual/installation artist. Her iconographic works are influenced by such paradoxical experiences as working on the stone pinnacles of English cathedrals and artist residencies in a surreal concrete garden in the midst of the Mexican rainforest. The symbolism within her work materialises into messages documenting topical social, global and economical themes. She balances surrealist and conceptual aesthetic sensibilities within architectural and spatial frames. 

Dexter’s main body of work in the exhibition is a spectral installation holding metaphoric council about the manner in which humans occupy the earth. The destructive impact of mankind, through latent amplified bloodshed and rapid removal of the world’s vital resources is counteracting nature’s golden ratio code.   

Her singular piece in the dome reflects on ancient Egyptian rituals and Voodoo zombification referencing a ‘socially changing world’. Her lenticular is concerned with the nature of capitalism in a society governed by excessive greed and consumerism.

Madres by Andres Jaroslavsky

Andres Jaroslavsky

Jaroslavsky is a self-taught figurative painter. Although he started his career as a music teacher, a few years ago he decided to turn a life-long passion for painting and drawing into a career as a fine arts teacher.  

His main area of research and interest is representative drawing, old masters’ techniques and the use of the Zorn palette. Named after Swedish artist Anders Zorn, the Zorn palette is limited to only four colours: Yellow, Red, Black and White.  

In addition to his commitment to painting techniques Andres has a long standing interest in human rights issues. He is the author of The Future of Memory: Children of the Dictatorship in Argentina Speak (Latin America Bureau, London, 2004, 250 pp). The project of his MA consists in a number of paintings representing Argentina’s last dictatorship, working solely with the four colour of the Zorn palette. 

Patrick Kirk-Smith

Kirk-Smith has been practising as a performance artist for some years, always using OULIPIAN ideals as justification; but over the course of this MA he realised that the truth of the matter was, if he was to really understand and be true to OULIPO, that he is a presenter. 

What he delivers is not a neat series of curated words and sentences, but a messy array of thoughts and ideas; this is where ADSFPTAI comes in. 

ADSFPTAI is a presentation tool, delivering ideas to the public, as well as thoughts that are ‘far-from-gallery-ready’ to galleries. The box itself is almost therapeutic in its deliverance, allowing him a physical outlet for his ideas, reaching beyond the immediate fleeting nature of spoken word. In fact, certain strands of ADSFPTAI have given him outlets for the written word that are almost more immediate that the spoken; presenting live documentation performances have led to several of the essays contained in the box.

Weaving shed print making by Janey Walklin

Janey Walklin

Walklin’s printmaking is about mark making responses, collaging surfaces. In some ways the process concerns editing: an idea of montage, connections and coincidences; deriving a narrative so that the work is specific to ‘life writing’ and location. A process of memorialization.

Her MA project includes a printmaking and collage series Local History, based on images of torn fly-posters on a wall near Leeds College of Art which she photographed whilst an undergraduate Fine Art student at Leeds University. In The Weaving Shed, the exploration concerns the interaction with an existing, derelict space at a former textile mill in Leeds. It is a place subject to abandonment, as part of the process of regenerating and remodeling the mill buildings for creative and business use. The printmaking and video elements in The Weaving Shed are records of moment, place and the incompleteness of the time-line, without the animation of the subject.