Image above by Paul Masotic

SHAPE THE FUTURE Recycled Art Competition

Exhibition dates:  Thursday 9 May – Wednesday 5 June 2013

SHAPE THE FUTURE: Living and Design the City is a Recycled Art Competition that aims to develop an art platform of artists who use recycled material to express their visions and ideas. SHAPE THE FUTUREwas created by You Are Home Itinerant Ecovillage, (http://www.youarehomeweb.com/) an organisation working on green economy, sustainability, ecology and self-resiliency.

With more than 80 competition entries received in less than a month, the selected artists will have their work displayed in the Riverside Gallery at Watermans from Thursday 9 May to Wednesday 5 June as part of the “ISOCULTURE” exhibition.

Gary Harvey, renowned for his stunning recycled couture, is one of the competition judges attending the final event on 22nd May.

Closing event and presentation: Wednesday 22 May 2013, 6.30pm-8.30 pm

Selected artists:

Katrin Spranger
Best Before

Concept and jewellery: Katrin Sparnger, Photographer: Tim Wendrich, Fashion Designer: Heik Grabeljan

Materials: Crude oil and its products (plastics), metal skeleton (inside)

Best Before a science fiction narrative draws a dystopic picture of the future and refers to consumption and depletion of resources. It deals with questions what jewellery will look like in the future and what kind of materials and value perception we might have after this. Due to crude oil depletion, the material turns into a valuable jewellery matter like that of gold.

The jewellery pieces were developed with shapes referring to disposable goods, reflecting our consumer culture today and melt with traditional jewellery elements from the past. Furthermore, gold was combined with oil. Acting as symbols for power and wealth, gold has been consequently treasured for its everlasting properties whereas oil has been valued for its endless consuming abilities. Mining gold and extracting crude oil both cause severe environmental problems and sometimes even human violence such as war.

Telling a story about depletion, the work was executed the same. As soon as a jewellery piece is worn, oil parts are slowly melting and eventually collapsing through body temperature and movement. Transformative and time-based jewellery materials were invented, thought-provoking new ways of value perception were signposted and also ecological aspects of interdependency were demonstrated.

As a German jewellery designer/artist based in London, Katrin started off her education with a traditional apprenticeship as a goldsmith. Later on she continued to study jewellery on a diploma design level and further she completed a Master of Fine Arts in jewellery at Konstfack University in Stockholm.

Since graduating in 2011 Katrin’s work has become more conceptual and thought-provoking towards a hybrid practice, as she uses different media and disciplines to showcase her future scenarios and ideas about jewellery. Her recent body of works focuses on socio critical themes like consumer culture and depletion of resources. Katrin is very interested in experimenting with various materials striving to reach their physical limitations as well as changing their characteristics to develop new innovative and expressive results.
www.katrinspranger.de

bLuELab (AKA Alex Barchiesi, Juditta Marinaro)
MOXE’

MOXé ! is a conceptual work of art based on an “originally fake” advertisement campaign that will be ideally spread in London in parallel with the exhibition at Watermans.

MOXé! is a potency skin care products formulated with Mixed OXides Enriched created by bLuELabo’multidisciplinary laboratory of physicists and artists to deliver youthful, smooth skin that radiates great health.

MOXé ! contains the active ingredient U and Pu, which has been demonstrated to help reverse the effects of aging skin, as shown by scientific research since the beginning of the last century.

MOXé ! is a 100% eco­friendly product based on recycled U and Pu that are the majority of the waste originated from the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear weapons reprocessing. With MOXé ! we also contribute to save the Planet from the longstanding problem of management of nuclear waste. If you are green and desire a skin that looks younger in its glowing: MOXé ! from bLuELabo’ is your environmental choice for beauty.

bLuELab is a project ideated in Rome by two creative physicists.

Alex Barchiesi: Creative Physicist, studied in Rome La Sapienza University, fellow in Fermi Institute Chicago; PhD in Paul Sherrer Institute (PSI) and La Sapienza University of Rome, researcher for GRID project in Atlas experiment at CERN; Postdoc at Ecole Politecnique Federale Lausanne (EPFL) and head of the SINLAB Project, an experimental laboratory in Switzerland, situated at the intersection of Performing Arts, Architecture, Science, Engineering and Philosophy. Instructor of PXS Personal Interaction Studio course in the department of Computer Science of EPFL.

Juditta Marinaro: Creative Physicist, studied in Rome La Sapienza University; PhD in Polar Science on an experiment held in Antarctica. Researcher at the Marine Unit of the Environmental Department at the Italian Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology. She is responsible of several multidisciplinary seafloor experiments for environmental monitoring and research all around the world.

Stavros Kotsireas
The Awakening (Diptych)

The Awakening is a diptych, comprising the source of inspiration [still life – mixed Technique construction], and the inspired work [painting – oil on linen] which are experienced as one piece of art work.

In the source: Nature finds herself wearing a gas mask that is ineffective in protecting her against the onslaught of consumerism and its impact on the ecosystem.

In the inspired work: The barcode, symbol of consumerism, moves to the foreground and dominates the composition – as Nature weakens in the background.

Stavros Kotsiréas was born in Athens, Greece in 1960. His family immigrated to Brisbane, Australia in 1963 where he spent his early childhood. In 1984 Kotsiréas began studying at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, The Netherlands, specializing in painting, drawing, and graphic art. After graduating in 1989, he pursued a masters degree in set and costume design and then moved to England, presenting his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in London and around the world. He had numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the Florence Biennale, art expos in Dubai and New York and at many other international art venues. Kotsiréas’ recent body of work marks a return to the artist’s origins as a painter and the intensity and rigour of his early still life classes at the Royal Academy.

Jane Webb
Cybernetic Humanoid

We live in a throw away society, replacing our electronic gadgets, not because they are broken, but because they are not the most up to date technology. Commercial culture bombards us with messages telling us we need it. Mobile phones becoming a status symbol, the need to keep up with the Jones’s no matter at what expense. I use recycled electronic components which I finds in the streets of London that have been thrown away with the rubbish just adding to land filling and create futuristic illuminating sculptures.

Jane Webb is a mixed media, illuminarie artist. Jane’s exhibiting works consist of mixed media, futuristic, illuminating sculptures and installations, where recycled computer and electronic components are assimilated. The simplicity and complexity of circuit board patterns are a strong influence along with imagery of robotics and technological advancements in the area of prosthetics and cybernetics, which give humans a better way of life. Jane’s interests also lie in the ways in which technology is abused by society today. www.artistjanewebb.co.uk

Michael Szpakowski
Like a Caged Beast and The Bluebird of Happiness

‘For me, at least, even more than any ecological/economic arguments, it’s the idea of the chain of use of found materials, the links with other people, other makers and users, that makes re-use so exciting. Human beings are irredeemably social in all we do, including art.’

Michael Szpakowski is an artist, composer & writer .His music has been performed all over the UK, in Russia & the USA. He has exhibited work in galleries in the UK, mainland Europe & the USA. His short films have been shown throughout the world. He is a joint editor of the online video resource DVblog.

Paul Masotic
A+B=cc(an); Sorry About the Mess; Signs of the time

A+B: short film of a found object installation. Each take edited into very short cuts creates a soundtrack that can itself be seen as “found sounds” organised in a similar manner to the objects in the installation.

Sorry About the Mess: short film of an installation made in Holland using all the items from the venue storeroom. The act of excavating this repository of forgotten objects, the left overs from previous artists installations,  enabled the venue to do an audit of what they had available. The sound clips are arranged into a 17 beat raga.

Signs of the Time: short film based on shop signs and experiment in digital collage work based on text manipulated in photoshop translated into the moving image.

Paul Masotic is an artist filmmaker concentrating on the use of recycled materials.

“In today’s disposable consumer society the urban environment offers a considerable amount of material, this is generated through packaging and built in obsolescence. I continue to be fascinated by this ‘free’ material whilst looking forward to the day when I run out of materials to use, only then will we live in a society that puts the environment at the centre”.

paula roush
found photo foundation

Installation with orphan photography, archive and publications, 2010-2013

The Found photo foundation, set up to rescue work produced by professional, amateur, and anonymous photographers, has a focus on orphan photography found in flee markets and car boot sales from Lisbon and London, whilst containing additional photographs found world-wide.

There are multiple reasons these photographs became orphan: they may have been abandoned following the death of their owners, they may have been stolen, or they may have simply ceased to be useful and thrown in the garbage, from which they may have been rescued and put back in the market.

The photographs are organised in informal thematic archives, and open to the public in workshops where the contents are made available for non-destructive editing and for both printed and electronic publishing. The workshops open up these images to multiple methods of appropriation including re-photography, narrative fictionalization, experimental auto-biography and editorial authorship,

paula roush was born in Lisbon and is currently based in London where she works as an artist and educator. Her work explores the aesthetics of installation art, referencing history, collective memory and forgetting, the materiality of archives and gendered subjectivities. Additionally the focus of her academic research is the photobook, artists’ publications and self-publishing. Her curatorial projects include Hetero q.b., at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea – Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, April – June 2013 and Spaces, Visibilities and Transcultural Flows: Diasporic Strategies in the Local Worlds, at the Centro Cultural de Lagos, 2008.  She is a Fulbright alumni and a lecturer at the London South Bank University and the University of Westminster.

Maria Korporal with a poem by Marcia Theophilo
Among the Leaves

Crumpled paper balls are picked up from the road. Agile hands transform them into pages of a book, on which the images show parts of a broken car dispersed in the grass. What is the meaning of this? It is revealed when the hands begin to flip through the pages, bringing the poem light.

Maria Korporal was born 1962 in Sliedrecht, the Netherlands. She studied at the St. Joost Academy of Fine Arts in Breda. After her studies, in 1986, she moved to Italy. The artistic production of Maria Korporal includes video art, digital imaging and installations. During the last years she has worked almost exclusively with video art. Besides she is active as web- and graphic designer.

www.mariakorporal.com

Marcia Theophilo (born 1941 in Fortaleza) is a Brazilian poet. She studied in Rio de Janeiro, San Paulo and Rome, where she graduated in anthropology. She has lived and worked in Rome since 1971. She has published short stories, essays, and several books of poetry. The Amazon rainforest is the topic of Marcia’s life and work: its river, people, myths, the animal and plant life, and the effort and persistence to save the Amazon’s natural and cultural heritage.

Nikki Whitlock

‘Conversations With Nature’ I may be green, but this is the only conversation I’m having, it points to the ultimate truth.

Sound activated, mosaic & Neon light sculpture, Recycled – glass (Picture frame glass), recycled ‘green house’ glass substrate, recycled wrapping paper, tempered glass (windscreens), recycled fused bottles tiles, wooden base (cupboard doors), recycled stained glass, recycled molded neon tube, beads and EL wire.

My evolving hybrid work is based across various mediums and context, specializing mixed media mosaic, fused glass, painting, poetry and sculpture, using 95% recycled materials, harnessing natural and electric light through interactive installations and site specific based artworks focusing on, form, surface texture, intensity and colour. I am interested in crossing barriers between materials, concepts and manipulating the effects of light through glass.

Della Rees
Mandala Series IV

Our insatiable appetite for using and discarding plastic is causing an ever-increasing problem for our environment, globally. With this piece I aim to create a visual focal point, a Pattern created out of rubbish (plastic bottle tops) to raise awareness and provoke discussion around the environmental impact. The abstract design grows from a central point, creating an aesthetic Mandala, a transitory ornament for contemplating the consequences.

www.della.eu.com

Born in New Zealand, Della has lived and worked in Britain for over twenty years. She graduated BA Hons. in Fine Art from Liverpool John Moores University in 1994 and gained her MA Fine Art, from Sir John Cass School of Art, Media and Design in 2011. Della’s work often responds to a particular space or location, exploring concepts of social and environmental issues. She has a multidisciplinary approach, re-purposing materials, and techniques to create intriguing aesthetic forms or interventions sometimes located outside the conventional art space. Her Pieces can be ephemeral or transitory in nature, their appearance and disappearance intended not only to provoke discourse but to engage a different experience of art by a wider audience.  Exhibiting regularly since 1994 in both England and Wales she now lives and works in London.

Beccy Mccray
#2 from The White Painting series

This artwork is the second in a series of paintings by Beccy McCray which render the domestic ephemera of everyday consumer-driven life-styles useless and without meaning. The objects become simplified; whitewashed with the use of household paint. Turning the manmade into an organic form, this painting in an explosion or implosion – a tipping point image.

Beccy McCray explores playful, socially engaged art and design using diverse media in whatever realm necessary to create imaginative acts of resistance and more human moments in the world; elevating the everyday and the things that really matter, breaking down boundaries between art, activism and everyday life. Her practice ultimately aims to spread a little joy and inspire positive change at a grass roots level, using creativity to communicate environmental and social ideals that go hand in hand.

Her recent projects and latest artworks have been commissioned by the Turner Contemporary, The Olympic Park Legacy Company, The Barbican, The National Theatre, Secret Garden Party, Home Live Art, Hastings Council, Coastal Currents arts festival, Create London, and the Women’s Institute.

www.beccymccray.com

Yannick Perichon
Metamorphosis III; Apotheka; It’s a Girl!
Marine Plastic on mounting board

My creative journey is a quiet and contemplative one where I am both the child at play and the artist at work. I am a maker, a poet and a story teller with my intuition always a step ahead of logic and reasoning. During my long solitary walks, I scan the grounds for relics of abandoned objects. Exposed to sporadic climate for months, sometimes years, these humble fragments emerge as a new generation of hybrids, carrying some unique traits of both natural and man-made worlds. My many years of nomadic life enable me to deeply relate to the loss of their identity and sense of belonging. I collect and bring home to my creative womb thousands of these injured treasures, deemed by all worthless and untouchable. My work is an attempt to lift the blindfold of prejudice and reveal the delicate beauty and disarming elegance that I see.

I am a sculptor, maker and designer, looking at ways to explore and develop the potential of materials beyond their original context.  The youngest of three children, I was born in Brussels in 1959. I spent my childhood on the Belgian coast of the North Sea. The beach and the dunes were our garden and the WWII remaining bunkers our playground.

Later in life, as a wife and mother of three, I spent a great number of years moving from one part of the world to another. While meeting new environments, languages and countless culture differences, I had the privilege to come across some of the most spectacular sites of ancient civilisations as well as exquisite examples of traditional crafts.

With a keen interest for both relics of the past and fragments of our modern mass consumer society, my practice has expanded into two clearly defined branches; stone carving and sculptures made with found objects. While studying in Cyprus for my postgraduate, carving the local stone, an unexpected encounter with marine plastic presented a unique opportunity to further explore the other branch of my practice.

Ruth Martindale

Rope Making in London

Ropes and Twines made from leaves collected from London Woodlands.

Ruth Martindale is an artist based in London; she graduated from Wimbledon Art School with an MA in fine art in 2008. She has undertaken several residencies in the UK including for Art in Romney Marsh and was recently selected for an International Drawing Exhibition in Croatia

Ruth’s work is concerned with our relationship to the natural world, how in our modern cities we are very much removed from nature and natural cycles and yet many of us crave it and we all rely upon it. Her work also looks at the history of places and how that history affects our perceptions of those places. She also focuses on the history of objects and the materials used to make them, focusing on traditional crafts and manufacturing techniques.

www.ruthmartindale.com
http://www.postartists.com/

Massimo Saverio Maida

KRINO 01 “Crisis”
Duration: 9 min.
Performer: Barbara Ughi

Dance is the only way to resist to the emptiness of a place taken as a symbol of self-resiliency. People pass by in a parking lot, and daily movements become the root expression of beauty. Common gestures turn into the only possible form of expression for a sustainable-self. We own the possibility to re-invent and re-shape our immediate environment.

Massimo Saverio Maida studied animated cinema at the ISA in Urbino and cinema direction at the School of Cinema Television and New Media of Milan. Massimo has won many prizes for his work including the Fedic 1997 prize, the Paesaggi Umani prize at Milan’s Filmmaker Festival with the shorts Acquario and Fili, second prize at the Future Film Festival in Bologna 2001 for Sotto di me and in 2008 the Visual Identity Retequattro at the More Than Zero Crossmedia Festival .

At present he is living in Milan and working on new video format on the concept of Crisis “KRINO, on the Italian crisis”.

http://www.massimosaveriomaida.com
http://massimosaveriomaida.wix.com/krino