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