Addendum: 475 days by Laura Eldret and Paul Vivian
Exhibitions
Friday 9th July – Friday 13th August 2021
God's House Tower, Town Quay Road, Southampton, SO14 2NY
About the Work
In March 2020 the exhibition Those Who Look Out and Those Who Look Back was installed in GHT but never opened to the public. Now sunk beneath in the Barker Mill GHT project space is an addendum exhibition of new works by Laura Eldret and Paul Vivian. Eldret’s saltworks and poster, and Vivian’s fabricated objects are brought together in an enigmatic and oneiric lament.
About the Artist
Laura Eldret makes installations, posters, drawings, textiles, videos, and events. Operating as an artist, researcher and educator she is interested in the commonalities that bring diverse things and people together and the productive tensions of togetherness. Her art offers a gentle nudge towards communal consciousness and action, bringing alternative voices to the fore.
Her projects have involved working locally and transnationally, in both metropolitan and rural areas. Recently, she has become interested in growing practices, communing, ruralities and the interconnectedness of humans and nature. Drawing on practices of ethnography, social ecology and conversation, she is exploring ways to contest art’s autonomy and affirm the value of social encounters.
Laura is founder/director of More Than Ponies, an ambitious though occasional artist-led programme of contemporary art for/ about the New Forest and surrounding areas. She was co-founder/director of CollectingLiveArt 2007-10 and for many years worked in art galleries and the public realm. Currently she is an Associate Artist on ‘Schools of Tomorrow’ at Nottingham Contemporary. She also works as an artist mentor and visiting lecturer.
Paul Vivian is a UK based artist who studied at Norwich School of Art and Design and Chelsea College of Art and Design.
Interested the animism of objects, Vivian’s current research centres upon encounters with Neolithic Stone Circles. Visiting sites across the UK and Europe Vivian makes field recordings directly from the stones themselves.
This sonorous audio work becomes the basis for an installation and performative practice encompassing film, projection, objects and sound. Interested in capturing the interior animism of these stone circles Vivian aims to identify new ways of encountering these sites through sound. Alongside this work he examines these spaces and surrounding landscape through images and film.
The motivation behind Vivian’s Object and Textile based works is the theme of intersection, i.e. two habitually incompatible frames of reference (a meteor and beach towel). Vivian aims for this to be thought of as an incitement, a means by which the viewer may imagine narratives beyond the works modest dimensions.
The exhibition ran from 9th July 2021 to 13th August 2021 in God’s House Tower.
