Digital Exhibition: Bridewell Studios: RE-FORM, Wirral Met BA Fine Art 2nd Year Exhibition

“make changes in (something, especially an institution
or practice) in order to improve it.” 

RE-FORM consists of 6 BA Fine Art Students exhibiting at the midpoint of their degree at Wirral Met College. The exhibition is titled in reference to the formal processes of making and in reference to the setting of the Bridewell Studios as a discontinued police station.  

The exhibition draws significance to how artwork is made and the spaces in which it can be exhibited in. The relationship between the artwork and its context is an ongoing facet of an artist’s practice. 

The show is a group exhibition that assembles a collective range of sculptures, paintings, and installations. 

View the exhibition video below, followed by images & details of all work:

Olivia Hendrie.

Artist Statement:

Using archival resources, I have been researching spaces that have witnessed sensitive and intimate events. 

My current practice is a personal response to the historic material relating to the Prescot Street Bridewell, specifically its previous function as a police station. Although I do not exclusively define myself as a photographer, my research is represented visually through photography and psychically recreating relevant items. My work is left to be open to interpretation, creating a unique experience for each individual viewer.

Jennifer Smith

Artist Statement:

I have created a body of work that is an attempt to encapsulate memories and horrific emotions. The intense fear and dread that a woman can feel at the hands of an abusive partner is my central concern. My motivation has been to take personal experience and to transform this into a self-healing process. By casting my own body, I have intensified the personal aspect of this project. By producing life-size studies my aim has been to encourage thought processes, responses and evoke questions in the viewer about violence against women.

I would like the viewer to feel empathy and understanding.

Shona Kirkham

Artist statement:

By using everyday objects that are familiar to us, such as clothing, photography and objects, I want to take the viewer on a sentimental journey that triggers an emotional response, through a sensory experience, recalling images and experiences from their own past into the present. We keep mementoes as a way of remembering. These objects are the raw materials of my practice. The artist who inspires me the most in my work is Christian Boltanski, he has spent a lifetime creating art installations that trace the lives of the lost and forgotten, engaging their memory into memorials.

Zoe Roberts

Artist statement:

My work is inspired by walks in nature, and the changes that occur within the landscape. These changes mostly include weather conditions and seasons, as I am fascinated by how the landscape is so drastically changed by time, and the variations of temperature and light, that create different atmospheres. I often choose to include subtle changes created by humans, such as fences and pathways within my work, as I like to think they resemble us within the natural world. I create paintings from photographs I have taken whilst walking in the woods and parks. My work mainly consists of Acrylic paintings, because of the bright colours that can be achieved using this medium. I like altering colours slightly to make them brighter, or to match the feeling of weather.

Daniel Marsh

Artists Statement:

My work is a reframing of the characteristics of the city into new definitions of space. 

Simultaneously overlooked and commonplace, the rips and tears on the city’s surface are the source of inspiration for my work. I use these, and other, visual notations to create compositions that are both sculptures and paintings.  Recently, I have included found objects in my work. The states in which the objects are found in presents evidence of a material culture this is seen in contemporary urban environments. These objects create a sense of the sculptural – which is a reflection of the city as a 3-D space. 

Scott Hesketh

Artist Statement:

My practice has led me to focus on the effects of found objects on one another, I work with a range of everyday objects from the banal and industrious to the ornate. Allowing them to become animate within space through the process of denoting a theme or idea such as the gendering and associations of objects. My practice is driven by my interest in the actants that make up this animation, the context if these objects through to their material signifiers are elements that I play with and subvert to create tensions that further animate these objects.