In Your Hands is a group exhibition connecting international artists with people in Cornwall in collaborations to realise or fabricate their artwork. The artists have put the making of their art into the hands of others, placing their trust in them, and embracing serendipitous outcomes.
While the pandemic has brought restrictions to travel, there is an ever-growing desire to be part of international networks. Touch has been very much missed, and In Your Hands explores new connections, inviting a dance between continents; a call and response with words and flowers; and an ode to the home we have all spent so much time in.
Arinda Daphine, a poet and dancer, and civil rights lawyer, in Kampala, Uganda, has devised a new multi-discipline performance-for-camera with Shallal Dance Theatre, who have been celebrating diversity, ability and community in Cornwall for 25 years. Daphine is supported by BLACK* Artists on the Move.
Watch Foraging Nectar, a 40-minute film by Shallal giving a walk-through experience of the collaborative installation of In Your Hands.
Lenka Clayton & Phillip Andrew Lewis, both based in Pittsburgh, USA, commissioned the oldest existing net-maker in the UK, Henry Cowls, still working from a factory in Helston, to make a vast single net that incorporates every variation of mesh that they produce. One impossible net that theoretically could catch everything, and nothing.
Benny Nemer, a Canadian artist based in Paris, will send a personal card each week during the exhibition to a local florist, who will respond with a different floral arrangement for the gallery – an intimate conversation developing over the summer.
Klaas Rommelaere, a textile artist based in Antwerp, has created Home, a fabric room, furnished with cross stitched objects, ornaments and possessions created by over 80 people across Cornwall and the UK, including members of our Tea, Cake & Art group, and others who took part in our recent Extraordinary Postcards exhibition. View a 360 model of Home that reveals the photos and texts that inspired the cross stitch designs. See ‘Read More’ below for a list of participants
Georgia Gendall is inviting her international networks to participate in her ongoing project Forced Collaboration, by devising instructions for our collective of young artists The Collaborators to create new artworks for In Your Hands. Georgia is leading a Workshop Walk on 21 Aug, taking Forced Collaboration on a circular walk from Newlyn Art Gallery.
Kate Rich, artist and trader currently based in Tasmania, presents Interdependence, a redefinition of enterprise as ‘any productive activity that could bring us sustenance’. For In Your Hands, she will link Newlyn Art Gallery to a number of international endeavours by artists to establish alternative economies.
International artist networks will be represented by selection of books, including Mothers’ Days by An Artist Residency in Motherhood, The Videoart at Midnight Artists’ Cookbook and Sonntag – A Recipe for Social Practices
In the Studio, the artist instructions created for Forced Collaboration are displayed again for visitors to make their own artworks in response.
We have a short audio piece made in response to the Interdependence display in In Your Hands – Artists Will Save Us by Lu-p Listen on Soundcloud.
In Your Hands is curated by Blair Todd, Programme Curator.
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QUIET TIME visits are available on Tuesday mornings 10.00 – 12.00
Booking essential
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