CONVERSATIONS: Brownsword, Launder, Mydland & Suul

From the common platform of clay and ceramic their individual artistic practice is highly diverse, from site-specific, performative work, to social/political critique, through sculpture, appropriation and installation. Portraying the current status of their collegial conversations on the thing/object quality and potential of clay and ceramics.

Opening 17 November at 7pm Rom 8, Vaskerelven 8, Bergen.
Open Friday 18^th to Thursday 24th , at 1-4pm. Closed Mondays.

Neil Brownsword (UK)
Neil Brownsword's work explores the social, cultural, and economic impact of the decline of British ceramic manufacture in his home town of Stoke-on-Trent. Assuming the role of artist/archaeologist, Brownsword unearths/ salvages remnants from the histories ceramic production and regenerates vestiges of labour into poetic abstract sculptures and installations. Through his metaphoric exploration of fragmentation and the discarded, his work cites the inevitable effects of global capitalism, which continue to disrupt a heritage economy and its associated patrimony of skills.

Richard Launder (UK)
The transient, the un-fixed, the nebulous, have been axis points of his on-going works for some years. 

The relationship between the time-based 'held' works & the expanded works that result from this type of restless strategy creates a range of phenomena: works. Installation, which are sculptural, performative & contextual (various materials).  Video, which are ceramic & culturally specific, & illusional.

Picture (above): 'CHOCKS & STRUTTS: Air Mechanic WRNS S.Jacques', Original photo: Air Mechanic WRNS B.Vicarey, circa 1944, Worthy Down, Winchester, UK. Digitalised photo, collage, drawn, A4. 2011.

Anne Helen Mydland (NO)
Mydland's work is questioning the object's role, status and value. By juxtaposing the objects private and public history, different hierarchies of value and class become evident. In montages and installations both using found objects and modelled sculptural elements she is exploring the different ways we use and relate to objects, both as cultural signifiers and personal souvenirs.

Øyvind Suul (NO)

My artwork is a fusion between organic and industrial inspirations, aiming to create as many associations as possible and opening for a wide range of individual interpretations. I consider all my work to be the product of an absurd combination of associations - always expressed in the form of a visual question and addressed to assumed denominators in the public's cultural background and experience. It is often both positively and negatively charged, capable of generating uncomfortable and macabre associations as well as humorous ones.