Lauren Godfrey, Entrée, Stage Left

 

6th June - 19th July 2015

PV Friday 5th June 2015, 6-9pm

 

“A menu is a script, a recipe a scene”[1]

 

 

Lauren Godfrey’s first London solo exhibition Entrée, Stage Left features new work created in response to her time as the inaugural recipient of the Kingsgate Artists Residency programme.

 

Her residency has been focused around creating works that contemplate the space between theatre and restaurant culture. Influenced by a quote from British writer and food critic AA Gill, Godfrey’s exhibition incorporates objects, text and performance that look to address the slippage between the visual and the verbal.

 

On the preview evening of 5th June, 6 -9pm Lauren Godfrey will present an installation of shifting objects within Kingsgate Project Space, serving an audience a light and fluid starter, a lyrical and buttery heavy main and a sweet palette cleanser.  Over the length of the exhibition, viewers will be able to request or ‘order’ iterations of the space directly from the gallery invigilators.

 

The artist’s work frequently returns to autobiography in the experience of the aspirational space of high end restaurants and exclusive art world events.  The records of past experiences are documented via ephemera picked up, and furniture recalled, warped with memories from media or popular culture; Audrey Hepburn dancing on tables in Funny Face, or the sculptural furniture in a little remembered scene from White Christmas.  Godfrey’s is an inquiry into the meeting of materials shared between the worlds of restaurant culture, art and theatre production.

 

Entitled 'Entrée, stage left’, Godfrey has approached the structure as a three-act play or a three-course meal.  The exhibition is designed to be altered and performed as though a theatrical scene-change, or a table cleared between courses. Treating her sculptures as performers in a scene, Godfrey approaches the process of art making as collaging, much like mixing together of constituent parts in the cooking of a dish.  The elements are united as a series of quotations of existing ingredients, and the processes they are put through as a cooking or curing. 

 

Lauren Godfrey (b.1989, UK) Lives and works in London. She graduated from BA at Slade School of Fine Art in 2012 and has exhibited across the UK, Italy, Australia and USA in exhibitions including Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2012, Stovies, Scallops and Scabby Man’s Heads at An Tobar Gallery on the Isle of Mull.  She co-publishes the periodical, ‘Her Eyes and My Voice’.

 

To celebrate the launch of our new public programme Lauren Godfrey has created a series of 50 signed limited edition risograph prints on paper. Working with artist framers, Lord and Duplooy, Lauren has selected a frame specifically for this art work. For more information on availability and prices please contact mail@kingsgateworkshops.org.uk. 

 

[1] AA Gill, Sunday Times, Table Talk, published 10th Nov 2013. Review of restaurant Merchant’s Tavern, London.

 

On Thursday 9th July 2015, 7:30pm Kingsgate Project Space hosted a conversation between Lauren Godfrey and artist Anthea Hamilton, with an introductory reading from Susannah Worth

 

Listen to the talk below