Harold Offeh
Emergent
5th - 29th June
Emergent (Crystal Mouths) is a series of new photographs from Harold Offeh’s ongoing Crystal Mouths project (2021–). The photographs present a series of rocks and crystals emerging from Offeh’s mouth. The mouth or opening becomes a topographic feature from which the object is emergent. There is a juxtaposition of moist and soft flesh with hard crystalline forms. In choosing the rocks and crystals Offeh was interested in their origins and the links of such materials as quartz, pyrite (fool’s gold) and amethyst to the African landscape and the extraction of natural resources. 303 Projects will see the first solo gallery presentation of these works. Emergent (Crystal Mouths) marks a return for Offeh to body based performance works.
Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. He has exhibited and performed widely in the United Kingdom and internationally, including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; South London Gallery; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge; Studio Museum Harlem, New York; MAC VAL, Paris; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; and Art Tower Mito, Japan.
Offeh studied Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton and has an MA in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, London, and a PhD in Contemporary Art and Performance from Leeds Beckett University. He lives in Cambridge and works in London and Oxford. He is a Senior Tutor in Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and a tutor in MA Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London.
Sharon Leahy-Clark
All the strange things
4th - 26th May 2024
"Trying to make sense of a seemingly absurd existence, my work questions and proposes a different view – where the surreal and strange and ‘other’ are honoured and elevated.I cross boundaries into literature, poetry, sound, all of which inform my images. I also plough my own experiences of life - my background, my present, struggles, love, pain, illusions. My experience is also a shared experience. The images I create have a familiarity, something recognised with which the viewer can find a way in. I use repetitions and rhythms, patterns, symbols, syncopation. I work over the images with line and marks and I erase and rebuild to create something that is not still, but is restlessly poised precariously to topple, move, fly away, or explode. The images I create are not going quietly - I obliterate and glorify with colour. The black background I work on acts as a veil into the unknown. It hints at night and space, a beyond, somewhere else, a darkness we all negotiate as nobody really knows what this is, this life. I am reproposing what is accepted as stable and ‘normal’ and I am saying “I’m not that, nobody is” and instead I am saying all we ever have is all the strange things that we try to make sense of and which present a wonderful possibility of difference."
Desmond Brett
Desmond Brett is a Sculptor and Senior Lecturer in BA (Hons) Fine Art (Sculpture) at Norwich University of the Arts.
Desmond graduated from the Slade School of Art, UCL with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art and an MFA in Sculpture, before completing a PhD in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art. He is interested in how the traditions and currency of sculpture can be expanded, interrogated, and re-imagined through material-led enquiry.
Immersion
An exhibition of new work by
BA (Hons) Visual Art students at the University of Suffolk at East Coast College, Lowestoft campus.
303 Projects @ London Art Fair
January 2024
JMC Anderson / Alex Baker / Jo Chapman / John Christie / Alexander Costello / Paul Dash /
Jess Flood-Paddock / Emilia Holt / Sharon Leahy-Clark / Simon Leahy-Clark / Duncan McAfee / Andrew Miller / Jane Morter / Clare Palmier / Kit Poulson / Rebecca Riess / Giles Round / NaoKo TakaHashi / Michelle Williams Gamaker / Alice Wilson / Tom Woolner
Language not only develops in conjunction with society’s historical, economic and political evolution, but also reflects society's attitudes and thinking."
CRAZY COCO - JMC Anderson
7th October - 4th November
'Crazy Coco' Performance Saturday 7th October, 4pm at the gallery.
Exhibition open Saturdays 1pm-4pm and weekdays by appointment.
JMCAnderson presents an insight into racial terminology from her childhood and adulthood, a continuation of a body of work that started in 2021 when taking part in the group show ‘In Transit Our Memory Fragments’ at Chelsea Space, London.
Anderson presents both old and new works, including a performance ‘Crazy Coco’, exploring internalised racism as a direct product of a racial classification system and the effects it has had on both her physical and mental health.
A double consciousness… Jade and Coco
JMCAnderson is an Artist, Community Curator and Facilitator underpinned by her socially engaged practice. Her work is an exploration of identity, place and belonging usually contextualised by co-creating with communities, to raise awareness, educate and encourage conversations. Anderson uses text, audio, paint and performance within her artwork to investigate narratives and stories from the past, present and future. She is influenced by theories on semiotics and visual tautologies, where language is used both visually and linguistically within her work.
JMCAnderson (b.1994) lives in Norfolk. She received her Degree in Fine Art in 2016 and Masters in Curation in 2017 from Norwich University of the Arts. She been an Associate Curator for 'We: You, Me' exhibition (2017) and Programme Assistant (2019-2020) at Firstsite, Creative Associate for ‘Every Step Is A Different Height’ directed by Artists Lone Twin (2021 - 2022), Exhibition Curator for town-wide climate exhibition ‘Manifesto’ with Collusion (2022), a Visiting Lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts and more. She has facilitated an array of activities with co-creation at the forefront winning a Special Recognition Award from the Norfolk Arts Awards (2022) and commissioned works such as ‘I Am…’ as part of Norfolk & Norwich Festival (2021), ‘In transit, our memory fragments’ at Chelsea Space, London (2022) and ‘Culture Connects’ at PRIMEYARC, Great Yarmouth (2022).
Pile Up
Clare Palmier
2nd September - 30th September
"I put things together to try and make a whole; whether it’s installation, painting, performance or objects and video.
The different states of having power, being powerless or disempowered and the latent state in between fascinate me; being an observer or being active and a creator. Since a child I’ve been aware of moving between cultural identities: British and Mediterranean, what connects and what separates.
I’ve been making short videos over 20 years and in rural Suffolk, the weather, seasons and landscape has dominated. Where do you locate yourself in it. I’m interested in boundaries, the edge of things; where one thing might become another; how we move through horizons, coastlines, territories and memory; with humour and our stories."
Pile Up is an installation created for 303 projects which brings together elements to create a place: three walls of landscape, a video Drawing the Line, my great-grandmother’s chair, some detritus, and an older work Hillock ( Hilaire Belloc).
A performance, Salt, Sand and Water, will take place on the beach to open the exhibition. It will be the first performance by Palmier in 20 years.
Palmier trained at Goldsmiths and has shown in Europe and UK, most recently in 'Big Women', First Site, Colchester, curated by Sarah Lucas, and 'Multi in Silent Disco' curated by Graham Crowley. She is also Director of the Art Station, Saxmundham.
It Was A Long Day
Alex Baker & Kit Poulson
Alex Baker and Kit Poulson have worked together for over two and a half decades. Coming together to explore shared interests, they make ‘conversations’ - physical events which combine elements of their individual practice, but also create strange shared narratives, which neither would have authored alone. At the core of their activities is a deconstruction of objects, technology and language into ur-forms. Or, more simply - taking things apart and putting them back together again (and not necessarily pursuing the same direction).
In this iteration of their ongoing interchange they start with a table positioned in the centre of the gallery. No ordinary table, but one constructed from seven segments with a large hole in the centre. A featureless landscape, it becomes the site for demonstrative models and experimental structures, that expand and fill the space. Interweaving narratives draw from faked field recordings, costal bomb sites, test-centres, model railways, the alchemical micro-macro and interlocking puzzles.
Alex Baker and Kit Poulson studied Fine Art at Middlesex University 1996 - 1999. Baker followed with a MFA at The Slade, UCL in 2001 and Kit went on to complete a PhD at Middlesex University in 2009. Their first public collaborative presentation was a performance for the Exhibitionist's Festival at the ICA, London in 1998. They have subsequently shown nationally and internationally, including Sound is Movement, Chisenhale Dance Space, London , 2002; Marriage of a Chair and a Table, SAN EXPO, Manchester, 2006; Black Cube/White Horse, Hartnett Gallery, Rochester, USA, 2008; Dead Fingers Talk, IMT Gallery, London, 2010; Qwaypurlake, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2015 and Other Suns Other Shadows, St Augustine's Tower, London 2019.
They both pursue active individual practices and collaborate with others.
As If A Storm
Jess Flood-Paddock & Giles Round
27th May to 18th June 2023.
Sundays 1.30-4.30pm and weekdays by appointment
PV Saturday 27th May 4-7pm
Having met at the Royal College of Art in the early 00s, Flood-Paddock and Round have been friends ever since, pursuing successful independent careers. The exhibition at 303 Projects marks a welcome opportunity to exhibit their work together for the first time.
JESS FLOOD-PADDOCK is a sculptor of international standing, whose work is regularly exhibited in leading galleries, museums and festivals, including Tate Britain, the V&A and Glasgow International. She is one of the leading British sculptors of her generation, whose work has attracted interest and acclaim around the world.
GILES ROUND is an artist who currently lives and works in London & St Leonards-on-Sea. Round works across disciplines – including art, design and architecture – through a wide range of techniques and approaches. Recent works have increasingly conflated biographical details, imagery and writings of artistic antecedents with Round’s own. The resulting objects, populated with citation and ‘misappropriation’, are semi-autobiographical, somewhat-fictitious and all, in their own way, attempts to communicate with the dead. Exhibitions include Brighton CCA, Brighton; The Hepworth, Wakefield; Spike Island, Bristol.
When putting this show together we heard the sad news that Phyllida Barlow had died. Barlow was a close friend of Flood-Paddock, as well as an inspirational artist and tutor to both Flood-Paddock and 303 Projects director Alexander Costello during their respective times at The Slade. Had life not moved so quickly, there was even the plan to invite Barlow to show at 303 Projects in the near future. As If A Storm is a tribute to Barlow; the exhibition title lifted from a quote recalled by journalist Charlotte Higgins from a conversation with the late artist. “She told me she liked to work ‘as if a storm was coming’”.
Dead Rural
Rebecca Riess
1st April to 30th April
Opening reception Saturday 1st April, 3-7pm
Debris falls behind the making and the material. What was once a train journey morphed into a painting and now it’s 3 dimensional/sculptural…
Transient timelines twist on the worst public transport at the fringe of industry. Holes in the road, sewage in my river, agricultural runoff.
Overproduced and underdeveloped - soil too wet, soil too dry.
Dipsticks are infectants, specimens and animal life. The muntjac are becoming a problem.
Dogworld and those plastic bags, dirty dirty dirt, this shits free. Stick forks in meat, yes easy meat.
Poison at the weir, 18 dead swans, that greasy pool.
Overflow, bad lung, residue.
I am stationary, embedded, I am a full stop. Smoke. Live wood, dead wood, burnt wood.
Making lists is part of Riess’s process; you have just read one. Although fictional, this new body of work incorporates Riess’s direct experience and interpretation of how her life relates to location, politics and the environment. Her use of materials has psychological weight which she interprets through her own personal narrative. For this exhibition she has sewn, woven, painted, drawn, pinned, glued, collected and preserved materials which engage with her notion of Dead Rural.
Rebecca Riess was born in London in 1972. She received her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore MD 1994, and her MFA from Columbia University School of The Arts, NYC 1996. She has exhibited widely, both across the US (including LA, Chicago, NYC) and in Europe. In 2010 she moved to Suffolk. Her daily practice involves drawing, painting, sculpture and video. The work usually contains fictional spaces which overlap with reality, non-linear timelines, feminist and socio-political concerns and critiques.
Masquerade - A Diaspora Dialogue
Paul Dash
17th September - 29th October 2022
303 Projects was delighted to present new and recently resolved paintings by Paul Dash, that reflect and celebrate the artist's joy and examination of colour, abstraction, movement, Black identity, history, culture, heritage and community.
Paul Dash (b. 1946, Barbados) lives and works in London. He emigrated to Oxford in 1957 with his family at the age of 11. After a Foundation course at Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, he completed a BA at Chelsea School of Art in 1968 and an MA at the Institute of Education University of London (Distinction) in 1990. In 2009 Dash was awarded a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London, writing a dissertation on African Caribbean pupils in Art Education. Dash was an active member of Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) during 1969-1972 and exhibited with the group at various venues in London and Kent. He has shown in many key venues including the Barbados Museum, the Royal Academy, Mall Galleries, Guildhall Art Gallery, 198 Gallery and Tate Britain. His Self Portrait and Talking Music were purchased for the nation by Tate in 2021.
Ursula
Jefford Horrigan
19th November - 17th December 2022
Jefford Horrigan has said he makes short performances and small films, rooted in sculpture but jealous of painting – especially the still life.
As you wander through any town or cityscape you will see rooms lit by the changing hues and glow of televisions screens illuminating the ceilings and back walls of their interiors. Here at 303 Projects Jefford Horrigan has made a video installation Ursula that features a number of his films where everyday objects and actions occupy that dreamlike state of the early sodium hours of morning. An installation, where the still life is fraught with subtle tensions and furniture, televisions and flower vases are the protagonists.
Jefford Horrigan lives and works in London and has shown widely across the UK and abroad. Solo and group exhibitions, performances and screenings include Ken Artspace, London; Assab One, Milan, Italy; Coronet Theatre, London; Whitechapel Gallery. London; Estorick Collection. London; Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Modern Art Oxford. Oxford; Matts Gallery. London; South London Gallery. London; Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick; Korean Cultural Centre, London; Transmission Gallery. Glasgow; Institute of Contemporary Art. London; and Tate Britain. London.
Head On A Plate Projects
Sarah Kent & Sharon Leahy-Clark
4th March - 19th March 2023
Head On A Plate Projects is a collaborative drawing project devised by Sarah Kent and Sharon Leahy-Clark on Lowestoft South beach in the summer of 2021.
The artists work simultaneously on a large sheet of paper on the floor. And as they work, they talk; this helps to focus on the activity rather than the outcome – on the drawing as process rather than product. Working this way makes it difficult to judge the work aesthetically and since the artists constantly work into and over one another’s contributions, there’s no opportunity to get precious. The results of this dialogue are unpolished, raw, immediate and extremely exciting.
"People often ask about the process of collaboration. What are the rules? The answer is there are no rules. We use our intuition as a guide for mark making. This enables us to work freely – it’s as if the drawings make themselves – and the results are always a surprise. Our joint activity produces results that are completely unlike anything either of us would create individually."
Sarah Kent is an artist/performer, and well-known art critic and curator.
Sharon Leahy-Clark is a drawing tutor and an artist based at the Centre for Recent Drawing (C4rD) and exhibits nationally and internationally.
one hundred and eighty-nine
Alice Wilson
2nd July - 30th July 2022
For her solo exhibition one hundred and eighty-nine at 303 Projects, Wilson presents a work that finds a moment of stasis in its occupation of the gallery space. Unsure of itself before it arrived and unsure of where it will go next.
one hundred and eighty-nine, is a measurement of sorts, an arbitrary one really, a number that fits together well, 1+8, 9-1, does this matter? The exhibition is accompanied by a text-work that is constructed using the first line from the 189th page of each book in Wilson’s studio.
Pushing at abstraction and translation, these works sit in conversation with one another, both presenting potentialities and outcomes that have cemented on the page and in the space, and both inviting the viewer to speculate on their individual journeys.
Wilson’s practice spans various mediums, working in both 2D and 3D. Her ‘go to’ is often construction timber, wood of various kinds but predominantly the wood that we build with, timber that has been processed and sawn ready for use, the stuff that arrives on a flatbed truck
Alice Wilson is a London based artist, represented by domobaal. Recent exhibitions include A Mild Epiphany On My Bike, domobaal, 2021-22, and MASS, Saatchi Gallery, London, 2021. She has received significant recognition through funding from the British Council to work and exhibit in Denmark during 2018 and from Arts Council England to make work on site at Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Barn, for an exhibition with DOLPH projects in 2017. She teaches at University of the Arts London, University of East London and is a mentor on the MASS correspondence course.
BRINK
Emilia Holt
7th May - 4th June 2022
Emilia Holt paints spaces or structures that are never quite what they first appear to be; planes tilt and jostle for position, light sources come from undisclosed locations, surfaces are penetrable, spaces shift from foreground to background. Blurring the line between landscape, figuration, architecture and still life, Holt creates a kind of experimental system that holds its own internal logic. With each painting the eye is lead across its various parts through line, rhythm, repetition, directional motion, tone and texture.
Holt is interested in a slow process of observation that reveals new and different understandings of things which are initially unfamiliar. She believes that only with long slow absorption can the unknown be penetrated and explored, allowing subtler connections to suggest themselves. Inspired by the metaphysical landscape paintings of Arnold Böcklin and Giorgio de Chirico and the late still lives of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, she is fascinated by the borderline where our understanding of something that seems inert can suddenly flip becomes charged and meaningful - what she calls “the brink of revelation”.
The two most recent paintings in the exhibition apply this thinking to re-examine portraits by Chardin (Girl with Racket and Shuttlecock) and Diego Velázquez (The Lady with a Fan). Holt is intrigued by how the sensitive portrayals of these artists are at once imbued with such transient qualities, yet have been contorted into rigorous geometries. Triangles and arcs define a two-dimensional space where almost no angles are the same, but the structure holds perfectly in balance. Taken a step further in these new interpretations, the entire picture plane becomes enmeshed with the subject, losing almost all objectivity. The identities of the sitters in the original paintings are now unknown, for Holt this adds further doubt and fragmentation to the structure - like an inbuilt self-consciousness. These works present a constantly shifting meeting place between the artist now (Holt), the painters who created the original works and the subjects themselves.
Emilia Holt (b. 1978) grew up in Switzerland but has lived and worked in London since 1998. Graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design, London in 2007 (MA Fine Art).
It's Not Over Yet
Duncan McAfee
19th March 16 April 2022
303 Projects, in collaboration with The Art Gallery, are very pleased to present a double first solo exhibition of work by artist Duncan McAfee.
Red wine substitute is spattered across the painted surfaces suggesting transubstantiation, intoxication and cartoon violence. Reflecting the uncertainties of our times, the population of cartoonish characters the artist depicts seem manic from overexposure, dissolving in a double-take cacophony of contradictory styles and techniques. They appear constructed from the rubble of twentieth century painting, with elements of its major art historical movements stolen and deformed, forced together in eye-popping new combinations.
McAfee’s ambitious ‘takeover’ of two contemporary art galleries in Lowestoft, will ask the public to travel between 303 Projects, in Kirkley, South Lowestoft, to The Art Gallery in the Historic Old High Street to the North, to experience a comprehensive review of the artist’s recent return to painting which also coincides with his current placement on the prestigious Turps Banana Off-Site Programme.
McAfee’s images are bloated with contradictions: loud and quiet, irreverent and sincere, humorous and grotesque, accidental and intentional, timid and boisterous, anxious yet joyous and celebratory.
One Minute
Volume Ten
Curated by Kerry Baldry
15th January - 25th February 2022
One Minute Volume Ten is a series of films and videos curated and compiled by artist filmmaker Kerry Baldry, and now part of the BFI archive.
Since 2008, Kerry Baldry has been compiling and organising screenings of One Minute - an eclectic mix of film and video, made within the duration of one minute, by international artists at varying stages of their career. The ‘One Minute’ series continues to expand and Volumes 1 to 10 have screened worldwide, including at De la Warr Pavillion, Bexhill, MiArt, Milan, bloc projects, Sheffield, London Art Fair, Ruhr Contemporary, Berlin, Liverpool Small Cinema, and Furtherfield Gallery, London.
One Minute Volume Ten includes work by Gordon Dawson and Louisa Minkin, Anna Mortimer, Zeljko Vukicevic (Zhel), Eva Rudlinger, Bob Georgeson, Kypros Kyprianou, Katharine Meynell, Kayla Parker and Stuart Moore, Philip Sanderson, Alex Pearl, Gulce Tulcali, Simon Le Ruez, Nick Jordan, Jeremy Gluck and Charlie Kramer, Alessandra Arno, Ruxandra Mitache, Kerry Baldry, Giacomo Infantino and Francesca Ruberto, Yolande Brener & Danielle Imara, Jonathan Onsuwan Johnson, Sam Meech, Sana Ghobbeh, My Name Is Scot, Jacob Cartright, Ellie Kyungram Heo, Paul Tarrago, Martin Pickles, Tony Hill, Michael Szpakowski, Rastko Novakovic, Lynn Loo, Karissa Hahn and Andrew Kim, Stuart Pound, sam renseiw, Caroline Rumley, Sarah Harbridge, Guy Sherwin.
Image:
Milk and The Middle East by Gulce Tulcali
Naming a Cloud
Andrew Miller and Tom Woolner
13th November - 19th December 2021
Naming a Cloud includes a number of ‘Cut-outs’ by Andrew Miller – thin plywood sculptures that he says “...began because I had been making collages and so I was already thinking about how I was using paper and card, holding it, cutting it out, and not just using it as a surface but as kind of super thin object with weight and texture. But the painted Cut-outs have a different kind of autonomy as objects – like a coulisse on a stage set, they have a kind of dumb theatrical presence.”
Tom Woolner presents a series of sculptural, yet stubbornly and resolutely flat, wall-based works. Made through an intuitive and playful process of pouring, piping and squidging, semi-viscous liquids congeal to agree upon a form that sits somewhere between object, painting and fresco, as the image is embedded into, rather than onto, the surface. Loosely bracketed under the title Internal Weather, they open portals into the body to reveal an alternative landscape and corporeal meteorology.
There is a shared focus on surface and edge, and by extension boundaries; prodding and probing at the line between inside and outside, front and back, painting and sculpture. There is humour in their approach, even an absurdity, that hangs in the air and lingers around the corner.
Of water and Womb
Zethu Maseko
18th September - 31st October 2021
Zethu Zizwe Ruby Maseko is a Swati and Cornish artist and musician, based in London. She works across performance, film, sound and sculpture, and often delivers workshops.
Her work explores de-colonial thinking, investingating de-colonial memory practices using ritual, storytelling, sonics and spiritual objects. In her practice she draws on issues of racial and gender politics, post-coloniality and Black experience in the UK.
For her exhibition at 303 Projects, the skill and craft of tapestry and weave are a means to record and archive overlapping histories and mythologies concerning identity, struggle, and the sea.
Zethu exhibitied in the New Contemporaries 2020 and 'Reflect Remember Reclaim Health' at the ICA London.
Thank you and I mean that very very sincerely
17th July - 31st August 2021
The inaugural exhibtion, with work by 43 artists, including Turner Prize winner Tai Shani, Jarman Award winner Michelle Williams Gamaker, alongside a mix of established and early carear artsits such as Laura Ford, Bruce McLean, Serena Korda, Harold Offeh and Zethu Maseko.