We missed 99% of the degree shows in the North West this year, but I was so happy to catch ‘Studio 6?’ by graduating students on LJMU’s MA Fine Art.
It’s a small course, with just five students this year, but clearly one that pushes context and crit. Every single artist produced something worth remembering, and having missed the performances on launch night, I still managed to find joyful detail in their remnants.
Distraction, distortion, mishearings and misgivings, all thread through the work of the five artists. All add up to a scrappy but massively engaging exhibition, and rather than breezing through, from one snapshot of a practice to the next, this felt like a properly considered series of installations, each giving the whole of the work.
Harriet Morley’s installation, ‘Ad-just, Ajar, Just in Cases’ was an audio visual, mixed-media mess or stuff that threw me into a difficult-to-decipher space. I had to sit down and leaf through every piece of acetate to really know what was going on, because even the wall text was part of the work.
It’s a holistic approach to presenting an idea that could probably be done on a sheet of A4. But if it was, I’d have been done with it in moments, and the voice, intonations, and relief of the artist herself would have been missed entirely.
And then there was Olivia McIntosh, who literally used distraction as a medium. Paintings produced in situ make it harder to produce, and limit the outcomes, but that means the relationship between the artist and the paint is rawer. The paintings, un-stretched, are loosely hung over-sized frames, embracing the space they were made in, and giving viewers a chance to get distracted while viewing.
And then there’s the collectiveness of the show itself. Studio 6. Where is it? What is it? Does it exist? To add to the narrative of this fictional studio, a running joke between students and staff on the course, when I ask at reception, I’m taken to an office on the wrong floor. Studio 6, it turns out, is studio twenty-something on the fourth floor. It doesn’t exist, apart from for now, for this.
Being brought into the joke is warm. So being in a studio space covered in ragged walls covered with visible tape, with no sign of masking to be seen, is ok. It’s forgivable, because you’re part of it now.
So as well as a show full of work by artists worth knowing, is an idea for a show full of work by artists worth knowing properly. Like really just being in a space, and not feeling like a viewer, but feeling like yo’re part of the process that got it to this point.
It’s lovely. It’s engaging. It’s a really good way for art to be seen and for art to be.
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Studio 6? was only open for a week, 17th-23rd July 2024, but you can find the work of the artists on Instagram at:
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith