POTHOLES was an exhibition during Lockdown 2 showing new work by London based artists Sarah Davis and Alex Stone and Liverpool based artists Josie Jenkins and Max Mallender. The collective was brought together by Alex Stone, who recognised connections between the artists’ practices after following Sarah Davis’ time at City and Guilds and exhibiting with Max Mallender and Josie Jenkins in Threshold Festival, Liverpool, in 2018. The work exhibited explores the urban environment through a variety of mediums, made in direct response to the exhibition opportunity at SET Lewisham. The collective has worked with the boundaries presented by the lockdown restrictions to present an exhibition that is viewed from outdoors, through the windows of the exhibition space.
Max Mallender creates paintings and sculptures driven by intuition using materials found and observed in the urban environment. Mallender has worked quickly on-site to produce the sculptural work Ode to Yellow in this exhibition. Accompanying Ode to Yellow is Biro Drawing 1, the first of a series of paintings made with diluted biro ink applied to canvas through weed sprayers.
Alex Stone draws upon the built environment within which she lives, obsessively focusing upon the often-overlooked traces of time and human activity. She explores ways that making art with these seemingly insignificant traces can give them a platform to be seen as valuable. Two minutes by the Thames is a modular concrete floor made out of three repeating tiles to form a fossilised shoreline of the future. A two minute litter picking session on the beach of the Thames, created the discarded plastic waste that is cast into the slabs. Red Bag is part of a series studying colour and form of found plastic shopping bags. Exposed to light sensitive paper in the darkroom the colours are reversed highlighting the haunting and ethereal qualities of plastic. This print was made using a red bag found on Atlantic avenue, Brixton.
Sarah Davis is a multimedia artist using allegory, spoken word, sculpture and installation to unpick concepts of recovery and agency in medical spheres. Drawing on her own experience with illness as well as collective health, Davis’ work presents a series of disjointed narratives that explore how we process and remember medical trauma. For POTHOLES, Davis has created Wolf Tap, a new sculpture that references a particular Victorian water pump in the City of London, whose sinister waters caused a mass outbreak of sickness in 1876. For the full experience please follow this link to hear the accompanying sound piece.
Josie Jenkins is interested in the innate human sense of order and our need to impose order on the world. For her painting, Red Double Yellow Lines, Jenkins has assembled imagery of SET Lewisham and the surrounding area, taken from Google Street View, producing a single image that skews the truth. Reproducing the mundane patterns of the ex-Mothercare store that now houses SET has become an obsession for Jenkins, made yet more profound by her being unable to visit the site in person.
