Contemporary Artists and Barbara Hepworth

This online symposium explored the material practices of selected contemporary artists. It aimed to reveal the working processes of these artists, and make connections between their work and Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre.

The symposium focused on two themes, Still | Moving and Tension | Void. Each artist was invited to consider one of the themes and the interstices between the paired words. In doing so each artist revealed the methods they use to ask questions, find meaning and frame historical and contemporary perspectives on the world.

Artists

Emii Alrai

Eleanor Duffin

Nwando Ebizie

Hannah Leighton-Boyce

Olivia Louvel

Elizabeth Price

Hosted by the Hepworth Research Network , this online symposium was run by Dr. Anneke Pettican, Subject Group Leader in Art and Communication at the University of Huddersfield.

Emii Alrai

Emii Alrai is an artist based in Leeds. Alrai’s practice is informed by inherited nostalgia, geographical identity and post-colonial museum practices of collecting and displaying objects. Focusing on the ancient mythologies from the Middle East alongside personal oral histories of Iraq, Alrai weaves together narratives by forging artefacts and visualising residues of cultural collision. Drawing references from objects in museum collections, ancient writing from the Middle East and cultural memories, her work questions the value and origins of artefacts, as well as navigating the experience of diaspora. She studied her BA in Fine Art and an MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at The University of Leeds. In 2020, she undertook a residency in Calabria with In-ruins, Italy, and was selected for the Triangle Asterides Residency, Marseille. In 2019, she participated in the Arab British Centre Making Marks Project in Kuwait and the 2018 Tetley Artist Associate Programme. Upcoming and recent group and solo exhibitions include: Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (2022), Visual Arts Centre, Clarington, Canada (2021), Threshold, Leeds, UK (2021), Jerwood Arts, London, UK (2021), The Tetley, Leeds, UK (2020); VITRINE, London (2019), Fallow, Rectory Projects (2019), Two Queens, Leicester, UK (2019); GLOAM, Sheffield, UK (2018); (2018); Caustic Casual, Salford, UK (2017); Hutt Collective, Nottingham, UK (2017).

Hannah Leighton-Boyce

Hannah Leighton-Boyce is a Manchester (UK) based visual artist. She works in a variety of sculpture formats, creating work for the public realm and gallery ranging from intimate actions and discrete objects to site-specific installation and durational performance. Hannah works across a variety of media, disciplines and processes, incorporating the environmental and architectural elements, and the social and material histories of a particular place, into her practice. Her work contemplates these relationships and the politics of labour through invisible processes such as energy transmission, the passage of time, cumulative and reductive forces. The interrelations between people, objects and their environment, are central to her research, making process, and audience experience. In August 2021, Hannah participated in the Interdisciplinary residency in Hospitalfield, Arbroath (Scotland) where she spent time reflecting on a long term health condition and practices of care in relation to her research and making methodologies; looking at her body as both medium and site of her relational experience with place and process. Hannah is currently artist in residence at Darwen Terracotta & Faience in Blackburn (UK); an ‘Art in Manufacturing’ organised through the National Festival of Making. Recent exhibitions include: The Position of the Sun in the Sky, White Columns online (2021); Personal Structures, PAPER Pavilion, Palazzo Mora, Venice Biennale (2019); Each Toward the Other, Bury Sculpture Centre (2019); Major Conversations, Platform A Gallery (2019) touring to the Turnpike Gallery (2019); Ruth Barker & Hannah Leighton-Boyce, Castlefield Gallery (2018) touring to Glasgow Women’s Library (2019).

Eleanor Duffin

Eleanor Duffin is a visual artist, born and raised in Wexford, Ireland and currently lives and works in Bristol, UK. Eleanor’s works are predominantly sculptural incorporating film, audio and text. Recurring concerns within Eleanor’s practice are the role of verbal and text-based language in theprocess of making, the relationship between the female body and traditional sculptural materials and the nature of co-working with both human and non-human entities. Her work has been included most recently in Overburden, Yellowfields Publication (2020); A Phantom Limb, MIRROR Gallery, Plymouth, UK (2020); Women on the Moon, Klaipeda, LT (2019); A Scaffolding, Tique Projects, Antwerp, BE (2019); Scratch Lab, Caraboo Projects, Bristol, UK (2019). Eleanor is currently conducting a practice based PhD project at PXL-MAD, University of Hasselt, Belgium (2017-2022).

Elizabeth Price

Elizabeth Price makes immersive video installations, which feature diverse historical materials including film and video, documents, plans, photographs and popular music. She punctuates the visual material with bold, graphic interventions. Satirical texts and slogans recall the vernaculars of advertising as well as of political protest and summon their respective theories of the world. Aural motifs such as finger clicks, claps, percussion and samples of vocal harmonies are used to provide rhythms and create urgent, ritualistic undertones. Price has exhibited in group shows internationally, and has had solo exhibitions at Artangel, London; Tate Britain, UK; Chicago Institute of Art, USA; Julia Stoschek Foundation, Dusseldorf; Index Gallery, Stockholm; Musee D’art Contemporain, Montreal, and the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid. In 2012 she won the Turner Prize for her solo exhibition, Here, at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. In 2013, she won the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award with the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers Museums, Oxford. She was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1966 and grew up in Luton, Bedfordshire. She attended Putteridge Comprehensive Secondary School and studied at the Royal College of Art, London and Leeds University. Throughout her career as an artist, Price has continued to work in academia, and is presently Professor of Film and Photography in the School of Art, Kingston University.

Nwando Ebizie

An unclassifiable polymath, British-Nigerian multidisciplinary artist Nwando creates Afrofuturist speculative fictions and alternate realities at the intersection of live art, experimental music and multi-sensory installations. She proposes new myths, rituals and provocations for radical change and radical transformation of the self and community, drawing from science fiction, Black Atlantic ritual cultures, biophilia, neuroscience, electronic music, and her own neurodiversity and Nigerian heritage. Nwando’s critically-acclaimed works include the multimedia installation Distorted Constellations, left-field pop persona Lady Vendredi (a blaxploitation heroine from another dimension) and ecstatic operatic experience Hildegard: Visions. She has been commissioned by and has had her works shown across the UK and internationally, including the Barbican, Brighton Festival, Science Gallery Melbourne, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Southbank Centre, BALTIC, Site Gallery, Humber Street Gallery, Rio de Janeiro’s Tempo Festival, London Sinfonietta, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Zurich’s Blok.

Olivia Louvel

Olivia Louvel is a French-born British composer and artist whose work draws on voice, computer music and digital narrative. Her work is presented in the form of sound recordings, live performance, sound art installations and video art. She often operates at the intersection of creation and documentation with works such as: The Sculptor Speaks (2020), a resounding of a Barbara Hepworth archival tape; The Whole Inside (2019), a generative sound mural exploring the violent misogyny of the Incels; Data Regina (2017), a multimedia suite based on Mary Queen of Scots’ writings; and Afraid of Women (2016), an audio-visual piece raising awareness for Rojava, the autonomous zone in Northern Syria. Her practice is built upon a long-standing exploration of the voice, sung or spoken, and its manipulation through digital technology, as a compositional method. She is a PhD candidate (2021-) at the University of Brighton, investigating the interplay of voice and sculpture. The Sculptor Speaks was nominated for an Ivor Novello Award in the Sound Art category at the Ivors Composer Awards 2020. She was interviewed by Stuart Maconie for his BBC Radio 6 programme about her ‘compelling sculpture-inspired work’ on Barbara Hepworth. The Whole Inside was selected for the Longlist at the Aesthetica Art Prize 2021, and is published in Aesthetica Art Prize Anthology: Future Now. Additionally, her article ‘A Generative Sound Mural, The Whole Inside: Sounding the body’ (2020) is published by Leonardo Music Journal, MIT Press.