The exhibition will run from 28 February to 22 March and is free to attend with no booking required. It is open weekday lunchtimes only from 12pm-2pm.
AA2A (Artists Access to Art Colleges) provides artists and designer-makers with access to workshops, equipment and expertise in host universities and colleges across the UK, offering them the opportunity to develop. It is funded by Arts Council England and the host institutions. At Loughborough, AA2A artists are hosted by the School of Design and Creative Arts.
About the artists
Courtney Askey explores how labour and the body co-exist within and inform the art making process. During her AA2A residency, she has identified an interest in archiving and has begun researching this through meetings, library visits and experimental works.
Emily Driver’s current practice is the outcome of experiments which aim to understand the limits of clay and how far it can be stretched and manipulated before collapsing. These experiments mirror her realities as a working-class artist juggling three jobs, an arts residency and art practice. The work speaks to wider issues around themes of exhaustion and limits.
Grime is using their residency to delve into painting and printmaking. They aim to create a new body of work informed by research at the University’s library on historical working class radical groups and local folklore.
Sheila Ghelani has conducted library-based research, attended talks, met with staff and explored the natural world on campus in order to reflect on her practice, the conditions of artistic making and to extend her local network. She has also been experimenting with techniques to use in three upcoming artworks: performance/event Atmospheric Forces, participatory activity On Rock & Air, and a response to the history of gun-making in Birmingham.
Sophie Goodchild has been reframing her work visually by intuitively responding to similar production methods and material properties that both feltmaking and papermaking require. She is working towards a new body of work that questions how the repeated motif of the spiral can create texture and pattern that emulates chaos, disorder and cyclical movements in the mundane.
During their time at Loughborough, Courtney, Emily, Grime, Sheila and Sophie are working in a variety of settings and interacting with a range of practitioners and researchers. They have collaboratively designed this exhibition, as part of a process of reflection on the work they have produced and where it might lead them.