artworks studio

 

artworks studio was founded in 2012 in Birmingham UK by Andrew HarrisonSarah Sutton as a response to the post postmodern state of mind in which we (try to) find ourselves. We see art not as currency but as the social creation of value, through its relationship with the truth of human experience.

Sarah Sutton‘s work explores the resonance between external and internal landscapes & investigates the use of material to represent the immaterial. Her interest is in the polarization of identity and place among other constructions, and the question of where we locate states of mind. She uses metal, wood, slate, charcoal, and photography among other materials & processes. She has a painting practice using oil paint, ash, grit and other materials where provenance is part of the resonance of meaning. The paint is layered, scratched, scraped and dissolved, in an effort to distil some essence of a state of mind and place, with all its conflicting undercurrents and attempts at resolution.

Andrew Harrison‘s sculpture and drawing practice explores form and the tension upon which it depends. He is intrigued by the relationship between surface and depth, and how the one can represent the other. Much of his work centres on the physicality of gesture. He finds that in making, the form is defined but never final.

artworks studio statement

Modernism notices the frame around the self portrait we make of ourselves as a body, a society, realizing that the form of expression is more powerfully significant than content. It sets the terms of what can be said, shown or even thought.

Postmodernism plays with the frame, taking its forms apart and re-arranging them. The parts are used ironically enough to express distance and detachment from them, and perhaps from the experience they contained.

We live now in a world that is post postmodern, in which it sometimes seems that the frame has been dismantled altogether. It has been disassembled, left in pieces after repeated interrogation & unable to be put together again. It’s as if, having noticed that we built the frames, we have climbed out of them and feel bewildered and dizzy. At the time of writing, in the summer of 2020, such frames as we have are under attack; distortion & confusion prevail as political intention.

reframing

The real framing of experience, though, goes on internally, in our looking – which brain science tells us is predisposed to seek confirmation of what we already know. Much of this knowledge is outside conscious awareness. In his book Incognito, the neuroscientist David Eagleman likens consciousness to “a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot”. We need the undercurrents of feeling, too, to make visible what’s really happening. As Paul Klee wrote: “One eye sees, the other feels”.

So it looks like there is no such thing as objectivity, and only an anxious or preoccupied state of mind would strive to achieve such a goal. Maybe experience is only ever relational, our perception of reality inevitably mediated through past experience.

The artworks studio offers relationality as a new perspective on modern and postmodern ideas about framing, on Yeats’ feeling that “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”.

Holding together, integrity, is not an individual act, nor can it be brought about by the duress of external construction. It is an internalized, internalizable relationship, which honours the truth of relational experience. It offers integrity of being and experience through the process of realization, rather than its achievement.

artworks studio themes

The following themes are key elements of the studio of the mind in which we make our work, in response to the times in which we find ourselves. Click on the links below the images for more on each theme:

dark horizon
sarah sutton dark horizon

landscapes of the interior

sarah sutton motherland

the female gaze

andrew j harrison metamorphosis

memorializing

andrew j harrison ossuary head

dis-membering/re-membering

sarah sutton
sarah sutton dissolved landscape

reframing value

At the artworks studio, we see the work of art as:

materializing

An idea emerges in response to experience of material, which can be anything: time (William Kentridge) space (Richard Serra) light (Le Corbusier) paint, pain, clay, land, power, history, text, thread, value, the relationship between these.

practising

Forms evolve, merge & emerge as they are tried, erased, repeated, added to…

framing

The work of art is presented, i.e. made present in a context. It is realized, takes place, is made real in relation to context, to relationships between people, places & institutions: framing relationships.

socializing

Other people respond, or the artist responds in a different frame of mind, which prompts a new response to material. Our joint work includes social studio practice, in which we respond to the material of people and relationships. This involves a reframing process, looking at what the prevailing frames are in a particular context. This way, we see how value, power and meaning are currently distributed. We have worked with the Gulbenkian Foundation among others on reframing value. See our social studio page for more details.