The Fleming-Wyfold Foundation in London and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in Edinburgh are working in partnership to bring an annual exhibition of work selected from the RSA’s New Contemporaries exhibition to London, while the Fleming Collection supports the Fleming-Wyfold Bursary awarded annually to an artist exhibiting in the RSA exhibition.
The seventh annual RSA New Contemporaries exhibition displayed the work of 72 of 2014′s graduates from Scottish art schools offering “a unique opportunity to see a selection of Scotland’s finest emerging talent under one roof”. 19 artists from the exhibition are now on display at the Fleming Collection in London, covering painting, textiles, graphics and art and video installations. The artists have created work that seeks to engage with the viewer in a variety of ways – asking questions about individuals, their character and environment with many blanks to be filled in by the viewer’s imagination.
Joe Hancock’s sculptural installation explores how things are made, how they exist and how we relate to them while Ben Martin draws in three dimensional spaces in as minimal a way as he can achieve. Using ropes to create lines in a different way, Paloma Proudfoot creates a vision of the elegant, smiling and risqué “Miss Pompadour”, a woman of elegance from a bygone age, with her hands afloat in space but with emptiness inside.
Samantha Wilson’s work is “a reflective process engaged in moving into and out of the very matter of being”. The characters in her work are incomplete – contrasting the public and private personalities of individuals; the viewer is left to guess at how to complete them.
The centrepiece of the first floor gallery is Tim Dalziel’s “At 32,000,000 Metres” a cross section of an imaginary place, an exotic tropical landscape created using 3D software and with sounds inside echoing the noise of natural habitats, an artificial and empty place where we are invited to use our imagination in order to occupy it, while Alex Kuusik reflects on the 18th century Luddites who protested against new mechanical spinning looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution and on the continual debate against handcrafts and industrialisation.
Edward Humphrey, winner of the 2015 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary invites viewers to engage with his disconnected video and voice recordings, fill in the blanks from their own experience, creating yet another and different story around the images.
Also on display is work by the Calum and Fraser Brownlee (The Brownlee Brothers), winner of the 2014 Fleming-Wyfold Bursary, who have provided a site-specific installation “Standing Alone in the World” where they explore the significance of objects used in remembrance and they manipulate symbols of mortality.
An exhibition which shows the continuing creative talent from the Art Schools in Scotland.
