mudlarking Kingsgate Project Space is the gallery-cum-testing ground for projects supported by Kingsgate Workshops.  Kingsgate Workshops is principally interesting in supporting artists at key stages in their career, most often recent graduates.  We think, however, that supporting emerging artists is only interesting and valuable if it is done in conversation and exchange with established practice.  Young artists do not leave the cosseted and protective studios of art schools to emerge blinking into a bright and silent nothing.  No, they join a boisterous and polyglot swell of thinking, making, testing, showing, talking, erasing and re-making.  mudhoney In this soup we swim is a small sample – a soupçon - of the rich and strange chorus of art making in London, Kent, Sussex and Devon.  Works by Phyllida Barlow, Jeffery Camp, Gerard Hemsworth and others represent what is achieved by a long career in the studio.  Varda Caivano, Jack Lavender, Paul Housley and others are the mid-career artists whose influence and inspiration is strongly felt in this year’s graduate shows.  mud bath And into this throng are artists currently studying MAs at Camberwell and RCA as well as recent graduates from Slade, Goldsmiths, Leeds and Royal Drawing School.
 
All of the works in this exhibition excavate interstitial gaps between figure and ground, between states of bloom and decay, and in the collision of different systems of language.  mud doctor  The sense within each work that something (meaning, form, coalescence) is both arriving and retreating is echoed in the show as a whole; a chorus of many voices check, compliment and contradict one another.  In this soup we swim exults in the non-definitive, the fluid, the unstable and the vitality of lively exchange over reductive consensus.
 
On Saturday 18th June, 4-6pm, the exhibition becomes the context and container for Jim Hobbs’ One Hundred Foot.  mud slide slim  As an industry standard, 100 feet of film (approximately 3 minutes) is the given length for a small spool of 16mm film. This standard has been used by artists in the past and remains a pertinent form/format for creating films. Utilizing this number, a film can be conjured up within the parameters of two distant but specific points – 0 and 100. In understanding that film, as opposed to digital, is measured in this tactile and physical form of length, the filmmaker/artist must address the issue of time through the measurement of a material length. For some, this constraint is seen as a time limit; for others it can be seen as a finite amount of physical material in which to construct a work, similar to a sculptor’s material; and again, for others, their considerations may combine or reach beyond these deceptively simple approaches.  OHFIII explores the messy space of collaboration mud in your eye

+++ One Hundred Foot III (Collaborations) Saturday 18th June 4 - 6pm +++