Dean Hughes – M-KOS

Alan Currall, Silent dog whistle, 2014. Wooden stick, bite marks, beeswax, acrylic stands. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Ideas in Things
27 June – 26 July 2014
at Maria Stenfors, London

Artists:
David Blackaller
Juan Cruz
Alan Currall
Siân Robinson Davies

Curated by Dean Hughes

“Now I am not what I was when the word was forming to say what I am.”
– William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel

Ideas in things presents an equal sense of wonder between both ‘things’ and ‘language’. The artists included in the exhibition are collected here for their resonance in how each charts the movement of the making of an artwork from a natural to an artificial phenomenon. This transition presents a classic artistic or, more commonly associated, poetic problem of the desire to evoke uniquely personal experience through a public medium. The drive to force the conventions of a language to express the private nature of experience is the bedrock of creative work. In working with quotidian objects the dilemma that presents itself is that in choosing to talk about ordinary matter is to risk falsifying – yet equally and at the same time to remain silent or speechless is to risk creative annihilation. Continue reading ““Ideas in Things” at Maria Stenfors, London”

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Dean Hughes, Windowless work, 2013. wood, dyed calico and thread. 64 x 42 x 4.5 cm, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

Dean Hughes
24 January – 8 March 2014
at Maria Stenfors
London, UK

“the art of making knots, which is the peak of both mental abstraction and manual work, could be seen as the human characteristic par excellence, just as much and perhaps even more than language…” – Italo Calvino

In his first exhibition at Maria Stenfors, Dean Hughes introduces a new series comprised of hand dyed, stitched calico shapes composed upon identical wooden slats. Calico, being unbleached and not fully processed, absorbs colour easily into the threads of equal weft and warp. Once the fabric is saturated with dye, it does not return to its original flat and uniform appearance and shows the definition and contours of the lines of dots and dashes that constitute the fabric. The geometry is allowed to relax and demonstrate the nature of the material. The work does not focus on its physicality but what the material reveals.
Continue reading “Dean Hughes at Maria Stenfors, London”