With Show One: Art open and in full swing, we talk to exhibiting art students about their work and the inspirations behind it.
In Show One, BA Fine Art duo Lucie McLaughlin and Eleanor Strong can be found performing tracks from their debut album Sad Party. They have assembled a space, a re-presentation of their bedroom-studio, informal but complete with keyboards and microphones all set up for the two to play and work throughout the show’s duration. The duo connect a low-fi, actively non-professional, performance with honest and expressive voices.
Eleanor Strong and Lucie McLaughlin performing at the Private View (photo: John Sturrock)
We asked McLaughlin and Strong to share five inspirational female performers and though it begins with an (excellent) caveat, they offer a formidable collection.
“It feels reductive to select artists based on their gender in a moment when gender and identity is being accepted as an increasingly fluid force to be reckoned with. Having said this, of course we have been influenced, inspired and motivated by a plethora of fierce women, living and dead, real and imagined. Here is a small selection:
1. Penny Goring
Penny Goring is a London-based artist and poet. Reading her book The Zoom Zoom provided us with an emotionally charged and darkly beautiful moral compass as we navigated our way. Goring works across many disciplines including video installation, sculpture, drawing and online and performs her poetry to audiences who sit or stand in rapturous pleasure.
Damaged Gods, Penny Goring, Arcadia Missa, London, 2016
2. New Noveta
Performance art duo, Keira Fox and Ellen Freed. Two gals, fighting and stuff. Sometimes performing with music, lots of sound, their own voices, crashing waves, objects, things being built or broken, clothes being ripped off and high heels clacking across gallery floors. Very cool, confident and feels like a survival or a struggle. They’re definitely winning.
3. Jutta Koether and Kim Gordon
We’ve watched and listened to Koether and Gordon (of Sonic Youth) enact vivid experiments between or towards art and music. For Her Noise, a 2005 South London Gallery exhibition, they collaborated creating a very exciting place for sound art and music. There is an online archive for this project provided by Electra.
We loved Lantz’s sound and sculptural installation on show at Rodeo Gallery in London this year as part of Condo. Lantz has used sound and music, in a dirty techno, to give us gunk, grunge and matter, which is striking within the commercial gallery context that tends to always feel a little dead.
5. Ligia Lewis
We saw Lewis’ mesmerising Minor Matter in the Tate Modern’s tanks. Lewis and her co-performers transform the black box, bathing it in red light – energising the space with both rage and love. Lewis subject of blackness becomes both urgent and unfixed. The poetics of her performative gestures push beyond the boundaries of identity politics. All shape a truly affective and electrifying experience.”
Minor Matter, photo: Martha Glenn
Degree Show One: Art is on show to the public at Central Saint Martins, 24-28 May with Degree Show Two: Design following 20-24 June.
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