GASS Collective

We are delighted to welcome GASS Collective as our artists in residence for October 2021.

The Graduate Artist Start-up Scheme is an award given by Cultivator Cornwall to support recent BA and MA graduates in developing their creative careers. GASS is a group of thirteen artists that have connected through this scheme to form a collective. This month they are undertaking a residency across three venues in Redruth: CMR, Auction House and Back Lane West. This will culminate in a showcase featuring all thirteen artists; the first time they exhibit as a collective. The purpose of the residency is to offer them the opportunity to create new work or to realise existing projects, whilst developing their relationships with the other artists involved.

The artists taking up residence at Back Lane West are: Elle Brown, Cat Horton, Helena Clarke, Amberley Long and Antonia Glücksman.

The showcase will take place over the last two weekends of October, from the 22nd-24th and the 28th-30th. A private view will be held on Saturday October 23rd from 7pm. The events and workshops taking place during the residency will be announced through either their instagram or website.

To accompany the exhibition, Cultivator has commissioned an in-depth essay on each of the thirteen artists from writers Cat Bagg and Rosie Thomson-Glover of Field Notes, Vanessa Murrell of Dateagle Art, Will Rees, Sara Bowler and Phil Newcombe. The texts will be available at the showcase in the form of an illustrated publication, they can also be read on the GASS website.

Biography

The first four artists showing at Back Lane West also makeup Quarry House Collective, so named as their studio is located in a working quarry. They initiated the collective to open up conversations around the poetics of material and material connection to the environment.

 

Cat Horton

Cat Horton is a sculptural artist who graduated from Falmouth University in 2020. She was awarded two residencies at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives during 2020 and 2019, as both an individual artist and as part of Quarry House Collective. Horton makes a sculptural enquiry into landscapes, often those that have been quarried or mined, and the forms they hold within their voids. Working with stone, drawing, painting, film and printmaking, her practice explores the materiality of intangible mass and ‘substance’ within these excavated spaces.

 

Elle Brown

Elle Brown is a Nottingham-born artist whose work attempts to dismantle cultural and social discourses through distorting and manipulating form. Throughout her studies Elle has continually returned to the subject of how bodies are represented within visual art and social history. Through a fluid approach to materials, she works across stone, clay, paint, wood, cyanotype and 35mm film.

 

Helena Clarke

Helena is a visual artist with a practice based in woven drawing. She uses an exquisite language of marks to create strange unsettling forms reminiscent of flora in this world yet clearly not of it. Applied in layers through processes of accretion and erasure, they are manifestations of her meditative stance, drawings of time, or a question, rather than a physical object. Through this she explores the bodily impact of anxiety and the healing affect her practice brings.

 

Amberley Long

Amberley Long is a Cornwall based artist/sculptor, born in London in 1996. Enthused by rocks, stone and the unyielding landscape, Long’s curiosity lies in architecture contrasted with the natural environment. This has her mainly working with cement, found materials, clay and stone, focusing purely on a performative environment with the sense of touch and the concept of energy within space.

 

Antonia Glücksman

Antonia Glücksman is a German-Canadian designer, writer and illustrator based in Cornwall, England. She has designed and illustrated several books, including for the National Trust and Guillemot Press, and has exhibited her work in shows and galleries across the UK. Her work is research-led, often drawing on archival sources and collective memory to reveal the hidden poetry in mundane objects and everyday surroundings.