Exhibitions

Venue: Spike Island, Bristol

Dates: 14th July–16th September 2007

Preview: 13th July 2007

Notes: with Richard Forster, Sara McKillop, Jonathan Owen, Andy Wake, Haroon Mirza, and Milo Brennan

WORKING THINGS OUT brings together seven British artists operating in the field of contemporary sculpture.

The artists are linked by a common commitment to reworking the everyday. They produce objects that can be read as prototypes, prototypes that suggest ways of imaging the world otherwise, rather than blueprints for living. WORKING THINGS OUT is therefore not a show about artists assuming the role of designers or vice versa, but rather the productive space in between these categories.

For this exhibition the artists are responding to three loose but interconnected interpretations of the title:

The ‘working out’ that is an artist’s practice, process being integral to practice rather than purely an ends to make things for exhibition. The private, on-going side of practice.

The ‘working out’ that objects go through in an evolutionary sense - the trajectory art works and design objects go on to be ‘completed’. The difference between a design prototype and an artwork.

The working ‘out’ of function - what happens when something is stripped of its function yet gestures towards function. How things operate on us.

The artists will be presenting new works, some of which are made in response to the architecture of the gallery; a newly created structure within a former tea packing factory, a space within a space.