Initially trained as an artist, Mark Devereux founded and Directed Blank Media Collective in 2006 and was later pivotal in the launch of Manchester’s BLANKSPACE Gallery, before stepping-down from his role as Director & Head of Exhibitions last July. Now concentrating on a focused and dedicated support structure for early-career artists, Devereux comments: “I have spoken to hundreds of artists over the years and one of the key areas that continued to arise was the need for more one-to-one guidance and support. Already since making my idea public in January, artists from not just the North-West but from around the UK have contacted me and we’ve met to talk about their work.”
As part of Means of Feedback, Manchester-based Nicola Dale created The Weight Between Words – a new work consisting of thousands of paper rectangles, each hand-cut with a bookbinding awl to the same size, shape and cumulative weight of a printer’s lead type. In conversation with Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Curator, Helen Pheby [included in the accompanying publication], Nicola Dale reflects on how this work first started: “The first piece I picked up wasn’t a letter, but a space – being made of lead, this small rectangle was heavy despite its size and it made me think how once upon a time even a gap, a pause, a breath had some actual weight in the production of knowledge… but now even words themselves are weightless when they pass into digital form.”
On the back of his recent solo exhibition for this year’s Sculpture Shock and Catlin Art Prize awards in London, David Ogle developed a new site-specific work especially for Mark Devereux Projects exhibition, Means of Feedback. Exploring materials and notions of how objects are perceived in space, Ogle’s work uses light to create innately ephemeral experiences. Beginning as a strict mathematical procedure, the rules and formulas are then ‘played-out’ within an environment, allowing the physical space to shape and manipulate the work. Ogle states; “Through negating material properties my work seeks a kind of fragility; resting on the edge between a sculptural form and an environmental effect of light that manifests itself within a space, a context from which the work is inseparable.”
Nicola Ellis exhibited a new work responding to her recent piece, Paregro part of the FOUR exhibition at Cornerhouse, Manchester. In a conversation about the process behind the making of her works, Ellis comments: “It’s about finding something out about the material and process, which then explodes into the final work. The origins of the piece are in that discovery process. The spectrum starts broad and is then narrowed down with specific focus on the creation of the work, but once the final piece has been made this process then opens up again.”
