This year The Hide will be showcasing the work of eight established woman artists whose practices align around themes of transience and impermanence. The artists come from London, the South East and West of England as well as Stroud.
THISS 2024 will include performance, site responsive work, sustainability, elemental influence, and structures on the point of collapse.
The selected artists all consider the amount of ‘stuff’ in the world, so they re-cycle and re-use to make ideas visible, and their actions are un -monumental and economic, often rooted in their bodies or in nature. Their work, repeats, shimmers, dissolves, and passes through their breath.
The exhibition is curated by Alice Sheppard-Fidler, who approaches the role of curator as a caretaker of work and ideas, encouraging artists to take risks and explore a dialogue between their practice’s within the outdoor setting of the garden at The Hide.
At a time when war, poverty and global consumption are at a monumental scale, and power often feels in the wrong hands, THISS 2024 aims to lean into the micro, to pay attention to, pick at, tease and soothe very human moments and feelings. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to enter into the flux of the garden, hover with the work in its fleeting state and be open to engage through the work’s absurdity and awkward tenderness.
Underfoot, 2021
Abi Spendlove
Abi Spendlove (b. Portsmouth, UK, 1985) is a visual artist based in Luton, UK. She studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw and Central Saint Martins in London and completed a Fine Art MA at the University of Hertfordshire in 2018. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Key solo and group exhibitions include Mediator at Broadway Gallery Tributary at Storefront Gallery, and Accumulate at St Albans Museum + Gallery. She is currently the recipient of an Artist Network Bursary to support the development of a new series of sculpture. Her work is included in collections including Zabludowicz, Franks Suss and Olivier von Schulthess.
My practice is fuelled by a search for invisible processes and movements. I’m drawn to movements and details which are both microscopic and earth-sized. The colours and shapes of nature, water and light recur the texture of my drawings, sculpture and films. My work stands as witness to the shimmering and shifting multiplicities to be seen in the objects, spaces and materials that are at the edge, hidden-from-view, disintegrating, in the air and under the surface.
For many years I have worked with materials that don’t last- ice and firework smoke. I’ve traced their natural shapes and patterns through ever evolving making processes. Invisible movements, for example the transformation of ice into air put the viewer in a place of unknowing or wonder— a rare and valuable space to be in a world where all things seem known. In addition to this, I nurture practice of paying attention to the subject matter, slowing down, taking time and believing in a language which can be entirely visual. I seek to echo the fluidity of the materials that create and inspire the work.
Redwood, 2013
Lucinda Burgess
Lucinda trained as a painter in the 1980s at Bath Academy of Art in Corsham and, after gaining a post-grad qualification in art teaching at Goldsmiths, she combined painting with teaching. She then became involved with oriental philosophy, and spent time studying in a monastic setting and lecturing on the subject. Continuing a pattern of dramatic change, she went on to become a successful landscape designer, winning several awards at Chelsea and Hampton Court flower shows, including two golds.
Since 2010 she has resumed her fine art practice, working primarily in three dimensions, and in 2014 she gained a distinction in the Masters in Fine Art course at Bath School of Art and Design.
Her current work is clearly informed by her former lives: the natural processes of change, which often involve the ongoing maintenance required of a gardener, are integral to her pieces, while oriental philosophy drives her thinking.
“I emphasize transience: the constantly changing nature of materials and the constantly changing nature of the viewer’s direct experience.
I choose materials that are capable of dramatic visual transformation: wood, steel, paper, liquid and glass. By putting these materials through the same process repeatedly, I highlight the infinite variety, unpredictability and lack of control that are so characteristic of the natural world. The use of repetition serves to underline the truth that there is no repetition in fact.
By incorporating natural processes such as rusting, burning or reflecting, there is an implication that change is inevitable and cannot be avoided. The requirement, for example, that mild steel be repeatedly polished in order to maintain a reflective surface accentuates the fact that nothing ever stays the same, regardless of any desire to hold it still.
Through the use of a minimalist aesthetic, the greater simplicity, geometry and uncomplicated display of materials allows the viewer to more easily appreciate change and difference at a subtle level.
In recent work the emphasis has shifted to the ever changing nature of direct experience, as opposed to the notion of a permanently existing art object. Thus circumstance and context become integral aspects of the work. The ‘same’ thing is repeated and placed in two different situations; a threshold and a wall. The changing context affects the way in which each is perceived and experienced so that it is not the same thing in fact.”
Sharon Wylde
My practice is essentially a sculptural one that is informed by architecture and it's impact on the human form. I move between making small scale objects and larger scale interventions that create direct physical relationships with the viewer and the surrounding environment.
These installations and interventions are often temporary and fleeting, dependent on site-specific cues. I enjoy the 'in the moment' activation of space and like directing the objects in response to the space or site I am working in.
I use a range of resistant and malleable materials - wood, fabric, plaster and found materials to create forms that disrupt a sense of order and balance. Each piece
conveys ideas and sensations activated in the body as it inhabits or moves through a place or space, forging relationships to scale, form, light, surface, gender, history and place.
Complete tool, 2023
Emma Gregory
Emma Gregory is an artist living in Bristol - formerly of London, Leeds and Liverpool.
Her material practice deals with the business of human emotion. The medium is chosen to suit the content and switches: drawing, writing, painting, stitching, carpentry, print.
Emma also creates ‘learning communities’ around the questions in her practice. These communities often outlast the questions. This happened with the course Press Play (2016 - 2022) and the residency Body as a Tool for Visual Arts Research (2023).
In the nineties and the ‘nought-ies’ Emma worked as a programmer and programme manager (Riverside Studios, Yorkshire Dance and The Bluecoat, Liverpool); workshop leader (The Hayward, Whitechapel) and scenic artist (National Theatre, Souvenir Scenic Studios).
Sandcastles, 2019
Erika Trotzig
Erika is a London based, Swedish artist, working with sculpture. She is a current holder of the Gilbert Bayes Award for emerging sculptors from the Royal Society of Sculptors. She has participated widely in shows including most recently a duo show at Fold Gallery in London: upcoming shows includes APT Gallery 2023 and Royal Society of Sculptors in 2024. In 2021 she was selected for the Pada Studios residency in Lisbon. For several years Erika had her own clothing label, making one off, handcrafted pieces which were shown internationally.
She makes precarious structures, using temporary and unstable construction methods. Often mirroring aspects of architecture, her work questions the process of remembering, both individual and collective, and evolves into space-dividers, obstructions and fragments that alludes to ruins. Her works have anthropomorphic qualities; They occupy a space between the human and the architectural, presenting tragicomic impressions in their absurd struggle to hold themselves together. Her works are humorous: un-heroic, un-monumental and absurd, teetering on collapse.
Central to her art practice is the notion of failure: failure as a political statement, failure as protest, as a methodology. Erika is a graduate of the BA Fashion and MA Fine Art from Central Saint Martins, where she is also associate lecturer.
The belief in things disappearing, 2023
Jo Lathwood
Jo Lathwood is an artist whose practice includes drawing, sculptural works, film and large installations, made for both gallery settings and the public realm. The starting point for many of her works is a response to a particular site, event, material or process.
Working with recycled timber she has built a meandering staircase that travelled across three storeys to facilitate the audience to touch the roof of a church. Experimenting with foundry technologies, she developed a way of casting lava into contemporary forms. These ideas have grown from a focus around making and an examination of our impact and relationship with the natural and built environment. Themes such as transitions, viewpoints, illusions, aspiration, environmentalism and anti-capitalism are woven through her practice.
Jo Lathwood studied Fine Art Sculpture at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2006. Between 2012 and 2018, she co-directed Ore and Ingot, an artist-led travelling bronze foundry. She has a studio at Spike Island in Bristol and has been on the studio selection panel (2017-2022). Lathwood is currently on the Board of Trustees for BRICKS Bristol and is part of the EARTHart council at the University of Bristol. She has shown work in galleries around the UK and internationally and has taken part in various residency programmes and biennials in the USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Lithuania and Austria.
Thief, 2024
Freya Gabie
Freya Gabie studied sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art.
Her practice is site-responsive and often takes place, stories, archives, or collections as a starting point; working in conversation with different contexts, and materials. She works across media, employing unorthodox materials and incorporating historic processes to create new objects or interventions that share a language and connection to past practices; her hands echoing previous hands in the making.
She is interested in drawing out unnoticed narratives manifest within different places, objects, artifacts, songs, and stories. Transforming the familiar to reveal and consider the ways we confront and express our histories; how these objects may re-tell the past, portray a version of the present, or predict a future, that frames both our personal and cultural identity.
Her work attempts to occupy the space between poetry, documentary, the surreal, and the conceptual; to re-tell something in new form, that sings a new song, and creates a new material inheritance.
She is currently based in central London, as artist in residence at Picton Studios, for Selfridges London.
Movement recycled, 2020
Alice Shepard Fidler
Alice Sheppard Fidler is a founding member of Studio Voltaire Gallery and Arts Charity and runs the artist-led initiative The Hide Artist Retreat. Before completing her MA in Fine Art at the University of the West of England in 2020 she worked in design for television, film, and fashion. She is currently a recipient of the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors, the CAS Emerging Sculptor Development Award, and is a Spike Island Associate.
Recent projects and exhibitions include: RWA Open, Bristol, 2023, Mother Art Prize finalist, London, 2023, Imagining the fluidity of Permanence, solo show, Casa Regis, Italy 2022, two-person site-specific exhibition leave / stay / arrive with artist Rebecca Stapleford, Three Storeys, Nailsworth 2021. Residencies include: PADA Studios, Portugal, 2023, Casa Regis Italy, 2022. Commissions include: Bricks, Bristol, support for new work, 2020.
Alice Sheppard Fidler works with found spaces and materials, intervention and action, to create sculpture, installation, performance, and works on paper. Her work is sited both in and out of the gallery. She often begins by identifying a zone of rigidity (a rule, a social code, or a hard physical surface), and then working into the space around it, rubbing up against everyday conventions until their obviousness disintegrates, toying with oppositions until their hard edges loosen.
Her installations are temporary re-stagings often assembled from modular elements that travel between contexts, searching for new narratives to unfold. By transforming spaces and materials with minimal adjustments and subtle gestures, and leaning into rules and limitations, her work invites us to experience oscillations between absurdity and poignance, pointlessness and tenderness.
Her approach is often performative, critically repurposing skills from her previous career in set design and using objects to stand in for bodies or traces of human contact. She leverages the distance between the viewer and the art object to draw attention to loss of connection or contact, and deploys found materials, with their past life of damage and care, filled with unanswered and unanswerable questions, to open us up to the unknown.