Pulp Fictions in Rochester
Ordnance Survey England, Michelle Holden, 2006 (listings image Blue Origami Ball neklace, Leila Batten, 2007)
Rochester Art Gallery relaunches its crafts gallery with Pulp Fictions, an exhibition looking at how makers use paper in their work (20 June – 30 August)
Pulp Fictions is the first in a new series of exhibitions exploring the boundaries between art, craft and design scheduled for the re-vamped gallery space. Each exhibition will look at the ways artists and makers use different materials. The five makers featured here all use paper as a key ingredient in their work although they all do very different things with it – be it cutting, folding, sticking, compressing, wrapping. Majid Asif, who won the Younger Designer of the Year Award 2009, uses it as both a structural material and form of surface decoration in his Cut and Paste Waste Chair, which is the ultimate form of environmentally friendly seating, being made from re-cycled card covered in old newspaper. Other exhibitors include Maggie Hollingsworth, Ellen Bell, Tracey Bush and Tracey Falcon
Alongside the main exhibition there will be a Craft Case featuring regularly changing smaller displays. First up here is Michelle Holden who uses embroidery and text to create a new, pared-down take on familiar objects like her spidery embroidered map of the network of Devon roads in her Ordnance Survey England, Kingsbridge and District. Her work will be showing alongside Leila Batten’s delicate origami jewellery made out of gold, silver and folded paper.
www.medway.gov.uk/arts
