some of the cast of 'BLANK'.
L to R; Cheryl, Katy, Martyn, Maff

the cast and crew of 'BLANK'.

from l to r:

Daren, Cheryl, Michael, Kelly, Nigel, Katy, Maff, Victoria

Blank.
An exhibition Devised and Curated By Cheryl L Huntbach.

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Cheryl L Huntbach
Pinhole Drawings ( 60 )
2005

• A4: Administrative formal structures of commerce / business & the intimacy of correspondence.

• Discipline & repetition is used to pit gesture against calculated modes of production. Authorship thrown into question by the irony of procedure.
  
• Repetition alluding to memory, intuition & the fragility of originality.
  
• Concerns with gender / class / taste; the conflation of the hierarchy of domestic decoration & fine art.
  
• Touch: the libidinal, transgressive pleasure of exquisitely puncturing the visceral surface.
  
• Repetition not primarily to induce meditation on temporality, nor Zen contemplation, yet pursuing to its extreme a form of liberation.
  
• Praxis: an attempt to un-pick / deconstruct the surface qualities, in order to explore the poetics of life beyond the facade.

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Pinhole Drawings
Paper (pricked)
Cheryl L Huntbach
all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Pinhole Drawings
Paper (pricked)
Cheryl L Huntbach
all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Prolaritus (16x2)
Card (cut)

Kelly Cumberland

Kelly Cumberland's interest in the link between art and microbiology is
longstanding: as a Fine Art MA student at Leeds Metropolitan University in
1998, she pioneered collaboration between the Microbiology and Radiology
departments and the department of Fine Art.

Dissected objects, drawings and paper works delicately represent the fragility
and strength of the human body. In a multi-layered response to the life of a
virus her 32 piece series of white A4 cut-out's progressively 'decay' and break
apart before reforming in perfect symmetry. They are constructed using
repetitive techniques in a sequence of 16 sections, creating delicate, varied
structures that express a sense of growth, deterioration and fragility that
accompanies disease.

The repetitive action of removal to 'construct' these works echoes the Western
Clinical tradition of (re)production and reduction. Continuous addition and
removal in order to improve or 'cure' results in a coherent body of structural
variations. Working in sequences, the construction process ensures each
component is unique, whilst still retaining the possibility to combine in the
realization of a larger single work.



all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Prolaritus (16x2)
Card (cut)

Kelly Cumberland

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Prolaritus (16x2)
Card (cut)
Kelly Cumberland


all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Prolaritus (16x2)
Card (cut)
Kelly Cumberland


all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Untitled(blank)2005
A4 copy paper in landscape format rolled up to make a cylinder.
Rolling one sheet at a time, paper is added to the previous sheet, contributing to the growth of the cylinder's diameter. This action continues until the two short edges of the paper meet determining the cylinder's final diameter.
The pragmatic and mechanical nature of the work though simple, does need to be executed with sensitivity and precision. However, this said, it is to be expected that there will be a human touch and individual tolerence in evidence and that nuance and incident will emerge.
Perhaps it is this 'margin of error' between an idea, and its realisation, that is the location for what we call art and the poetic.

walkerhill

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Untitled Work (Blank)
paper (rolled)

walkerhill

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Untitled Work (Blank)
paper (rolled)

walkerhill
all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Daren Higham


"Thank you for believing in me…?" (blank) 2005
300 sheets of A4 paper cut and folded into the form of origami bombs, suspended and arranged as a ‘bomb shower’.
The standardised process by which each sheet of paper is subjected to, the cutting, folding and inflating which creates the form of origami bomb, is theoretically identical. But the repetitive process does not necessarily create exact copies. The minor inflections and differences in fold and handling results in a similarity, but no two are the same.
Each is a simple but unique form.
Each a character with a potential that takes up space.
Each is a bomb with potential.
If each was filled with….
Daren’s interest in multiple’s as installation is driven by and attempts to offer a confrontation, a commentary on current affairs. Our individual insecurities and indifference towards them, our apparent inability to accept and address the long histories behind these recent events and the ever growing list of named suicide bomber and victim.

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

“Thank you for believing in me…?”
paper (folded), nylon filament

Daren Higham

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

“Thank you for believing in me…?”
paper (folded), nylon filament
Daren Higham

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

“Thank you for believing in me…?”
paper (folded), nylon filament

Daren Higham

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

A4 Variations
paper (photocopies)

Katy Devine


CUT COMPOSITIONS i, ii and iii
Three compositions based on the dimensions of A4 and governed by the activity of cutting

EMBOSSED LAYOUTS
Representing three different forms of correspondence - a memo, a formal letter and an informal letter

A4 VARIATIONS
A series of nine photocopies which explore ways of manipulating blank sheets of A4 paper


all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Katy Devine

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Katy Devine

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Katy Devine

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Melvin and Stencil
Cd, paper (laser-prints), text

M.Walters: the consequences of a note typed to a neighbour on a sheet of A4 paper.

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Melvin and Stencil
Cd, paper (laser-prints), text

M Walters


all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Melvin and Stencil
Cd, paper (laser-prints), text

M Walters

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Victoria Holt
Untitled
2005

Victoria Holt

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Untitled
Card (cut and folded),
connector bolts


Victoria Holt
Untitled
2005
I take art and my art work very seriously but then again l don’t.
I like to play l like to bend the rules.
I take notions of minimalist art, serious, untouched by hand.
Keep your distance, if you don’t know
l’m not telling you art.
I extract, nick, borrow elements that
fascinate and keep me coming back
for more.
Aesthetic harmony, order, clinical and
obsessive precision,
I love that.
I like paper,
I like the purity of it,
I like origami but l don’t make paper
animals.
I work physically, impulsively with irrelevant, dumb,
mundane and everyday materials.
Why can’t they be beautiful ?
I work small, minumental
Each singular form, carefully and honestly
Created by hand
but then repeated, multiplied,
massed produced.
I work big, huge, monumental sometimes
But sometimes l don’t.
I like to compare, contrast and contradict,
I ask questions
You please just enjoy !

Victoria Holt
all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Untitled
Card (cut and folded),
connector bolts

Victoria Holt

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

Untitled
Card (cut and folded),
connector bolts

Victoria Holt

all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist

details about the Leeds City Art Gallery can be found by clicking the image. The link will open the web site in a new window.
all photos � 2005 the blank group and the artist

In an exhibition opening at Leeds City Art Gallery on 20 August eight artists from the Yorkshire region respond to the most modest and basic of resources - a blank sheet of A4 paper - to create a series of new works for the Gallery's lower Café Zone gallery, a space dedicated to showcasing work by artists based in the region.


In "Blank",which runs until 9 October, Cheryl L Huntbach, Kelly Cumberland, Katy Devine, Daren Higham, Victoria Holt, Matthew Walters, and walkerhill
prick, scalpel, fold, cajole, curve, clip, emboss sheets of white paper and card, often using the slightest means of intervention, both celebrating it as material and releasing it into new realms of possibility.

Devised and developed by Cheryl L Huntbach, who is course leader of Dip Foundation in Art & Design at Harrogate College of Art, the exhibition's title, "Blank", suggests a pragmatic starting point but from there the artists have responded by working through a range of possibilities, methodologies and processes. Some, such as walkerhill who create a robust geometric form, Cheryl L Huntbach who painstakingly pricks out of paper a bank of delicate wall-drawings and Victoria Holt who disrupts the formality of the grid-system, are concerned with the language and legacy of 'modernism' and the formal possibilities of the material. Others incorporate intuition and personal histories - writer Matthew Walters uses the idea of paper to release a halting narrative that incorporates text, sound and images, while Katy Devine's pieces which explore the hidden architecture of letter-writing are notable for their absence of words and the starting point for Kelly Cumberland seem to be viral maps of diseases that she carefully cuts and then teases out of sheets of paper into hanging three-dimensional forms.
all photos © 2005 the blank group and the artist