It’s that time of year again, when young arts graduates find themselves having
to reveal to the outside world just what it is they’ve been doing all this
time. Graduate shows are popping up at colleges all over the country and the
art world is beginning to buzz with curiosity – who will the big collectors
be buying? Who will spend the next 30 years struggling to make it, and who
will be the Next Big Thing?
As well as the college exhibitions, more and more shows are cropping up where
the leg-work is done for you, with hand-picked selections of young artists
representing the brightest talent from around the country. Anticipation is
the newest of these shows and promises to showcase 25 of London’s finest MA
and BA students from 2005-06. It will certainly spark interest, with pieces
ranging from an 8ft chandelier made from vacuum cleaner fluff by Jodie Carey
to Michael Lisle-Taylor’s military uniforms transformed into straitjackets.
The daddy of these shows, though, is Free Range, at the Old Truman
Brewery in East London, which has sifted through thousands of entries every
year for the past seven years to choose the very shiniest of shiny bright
young things in design, photography, art and mixed media from across the UK.
This year, a rolling programme of more than 60 shows features more than
3,000 hopeful students. We’ve chosen five current or recent Free Rangers we
think have what it takes to make it big.
Nadine Jarvis, product designer
There are two ways in which people usually react to Jarvis’s work. They are
either touched by its poetry and humanity or they recoil in horror. “People
think I’m really morbid and strange, but I’m not, I’m quite normal,”
protests the sunny 24-year-old.
The easiest way to describe her pieces is “death objects”. Rest
in Pieces and Bird Feeder are like the urns used to store the
ashes of the dead, but eliminate the responsibility for when and how they
are to be scattered. Rest in Pieces is a ceramic urn suspended
outside on a perishable thread. When the thread disintegrates the urn falls
to the ground. The ashes escape on the wind, leaving behind the memorial of
the broken pot. It’s like the final breaking free of the soul. Bird
Feeder is a hollow casing of bird food that releases the ash bit by bit
as holes are pecked in it. “Part of my aim was to help the griever,” says
Jarvis, “to prolong the death ceremony so you’ve got more time to grieve.”
Jarvis’s most polarising but, arguably, most poetic work is a beautiful wooden
box containing 240 pencils. “I worked out that when you heat up ash to a
high temperature it turns to graphite,” she explains. “You can make 240
pencils from someone of my body weight.” The product isn’t available because
it’s an industrial process requiring a (brave) manufacturer, but the
response has been astonishing. “People send me e-mails. An artist told me he
would draw a picture of the person. One guy said he’d write a book about his
life – I thought that was quite lovely.”
Aowen Jin, artist
She is a product of China’s one-child policy, married to a Scot and living in
a Yorkshire village, so it’s not surprising that Jin’s work is concerned
with identity. She came from China to study law at Durham University in
1997, feeling the full weight of parental expectation, she says. It was only
after a near-death encounter with six bottles of red wine one New Year’s Eve
that she realised she wanted to be an artist. “I was alone, I was really low
and I thought, if I die here, nobody is going to know. This life sucks!” So
she gave up law to study art.
It was the right decision. Last year Jin was commissioned by the UK China
Cultural Association to present a piece of work to the Queen for her 80th
birthday. The painting, called Two Left Feet, is an oddly erotic
image of two legs emerging from a red fabric drape. It is stitched like a
tapestry in an ancient Chinese style called Wan Zhen Xiu using thread ten
times as thin as hair.
Jin’s heritage continues to inform her art. She is currently working on a film
about young Asian girls – Chinese, Thai, Korean, Japanese – employed as
prostitutes in London brothels. “They have loads of pressure from home, from
family. Some of them are really lost, some just want to rebel. It’s
fascinating.” She has some hair-raising tales, of posing as a madam with a
hidden camera and of being robbed at gunpoint. “Everyone was shaking and I
was like, yes! This is exactly what I need! Just don’t shoot me in the
face!”
Carl Brorson, furniture designer
The moment a design student is cut adrift from college is usually one of blind
panic at the prospect of finding a job in a near-saturated industry. In
Brorson’s case, however, he was plunged in at the deep end in a different
way, landing a job at the office of the architect David Adjaye as a
furniture designer. Not bad for a kid two weeks out of college.
The work that secured Brorson’s design future also won him an important Vitra
Award. Essentially, it’s a table with three wide legs in a flexible but
tough material that can be upturned and used as a seat for three people.
It’s really simple. Which is what Brorson likes.
“I work with a lot of boxes,” he says in his soft, Swedish accent, “a lot of
modular systems, to create these generic, changeable environments,
changeable pieces of furniture. It’s to do with putting some thought behind
it and being a bit clever. But not too clever.” It doesn’t sound thrilling,
I’ll grant you, and it doesn’t have the flash factor of something by Karim
Rashid or Ron Arad, but it has massive commercial appeal and designers love
it.
Steve Schofield, photographer
After spending three years in the company of students 20-odd years younger
than himself, the 37-year-old Schofield became fascinated in the
Americanisation of British popular culture, as he saw it, which he explores
through photographing fans and hobbyists – cheerleaders in Stoke-on-Trent
and Klingons in
Luton. “I was interested in how it was interpreted by people. A lot of my work
is done in people’s homes, it’s the juxtaposition, the very British,
strange, appropriation.” In one image, a man stands before a window in full Starship
Enterprise regalia, his phaser ready to fire. Except the setting is that
of an unmistakably English front room, slightly tatty with brownish decor.
The work doesn’t make fun of the subjects, however – they choose their own
stance and there is a certain pride in every one.
The time at college has begun to pay off – Schofield has just received a large
commission to look into customs from other cultures that have been embraced
in Britain, and those from Britain that have been taken on by immigrants who
have settled here. If you belong to an all-Muslim ladies’ brass band,
perhaps, he’d love to hear from you.
Edith Maybin, photographer
Maybin’s images – rich, dreamily lit, almost vintage in their feel – are
deceptive. A beautiful girl stands in a room wearing old-fashioned
underwear. Look a little longer and you realise that the girl’s body is that
of a slender woman, but her face is that of a six-year-old. It’s very
unsettling.
This chimera is created by Maybin using her own body and her daughter’s face,
to explore the subject of mother-daughter relationships. “We set up a little
play act – she would mimic me and I would mimic her so that I could
digitally put it together.”
The subject is one that Maybin feared at first might be clichéd, but her own
experience of motherhood made her realise that there was still more to be
said. “There’s so much rubbish talked about that just isn’t what mothers go
through,” she says. “There are very strong structures still of
what’s expected of her, how she is to perform. I think there’s still a
strong Victorianism about how we approach family and work.” She deals with
the taboos of motherhood, the fears involved for the child and for one’s
self; of the daughter growing up, of losing her and the difficulty of
carving out an identity in the space between one’s own mother and daughter.
It’s cerebral stuff, but Maybin plays a subtle game and the viewer isn’t
bludgeoned into complicity. The images are undeniably and deliberately
beautiful and you can choose to leave it at that. “But you might care to
look further,” says Maybin, “and those are the people I want to have a
conversation with.”
Free Range, the Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1 (www.free-range.org.uk
020-7770 6003), Thur-July 23; Anticipation, One One One, 111 Great
Titchfield Street, London W1 (020-7637 0868), until June 9
