Detext... Sumtext

Two sculptures made from paper, maple veneer and elastic have been sited in St John's Street (Detext) and Angel Lane (Sumtext). 

How interesting to work on this year’s groving project with Urve, who is an art historian, psychotherapist and poet. Urve comes at the theme of encroach from a different angle and yet there was so much synchronicity in our discussions and visual ideas.
 
Our first thoughts about encroachment were of a negative force; moving in, taking over, using up resources. The decision to use redacted text meant that although some words were blanked out, a system which would be frustrating and agonising if used in an official capacity, a new text emerged, which could be engineered to make the combination of leftover words make sense and could be seen as a positive. The blanking out of words could also be visually interesting. Something new, both verbally and visually, growing out of a deliberate act of sabotage.

Julia Manheim 

Julia Manheim makes very short videos, often with a performative subject matter. Her most recent work Ken Taking Photos was put together from hundreds of her photographs of her husband taking photos. Taken over many years, at first surreptitiously and later with Ken’s knowledge, they give a sense of his ways of seeing and doing. When Ken died last year, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do something with a selection of the photos as a lasting memory of him.
 
During lockdown, Julia initiated a photographic collaboration with Caroline Broadhead which is still ongoing. She continues to run the m2 gallery in Peckham, a 24 hour gallery, which can be viewed from the street and has a rolling programme of about six exhibitions a year. In 2022, m2 gallery curated and held two exhibitions at Artists’ Studio Company (ASC) gallery, showing work from seventy artists who had exhibited in m2 in the twenty years since the gallery’s inception.
https://m2gallery.com/julia-manheim

Urve Opik is of Estonian heritage, grew up in Northern Ireland and lives in London.  She studied art history at Manchester University and the Courtauld and worked for many years as an Arts Administrator.  She became increasingly interested in the life psychotherapeutic in the late 1990s, retrained, and now practices as a psychotherapist.  She retains a deep interest in the visual arts and weaves a writing practise through it all.