Bowes
Moor
As
I referred to earlier, the paper pattern templates that
I used as the basis for developing ideas for sculptures
and also as a material for collage, were located in a part
of a warehouse that I also used as a studio. These pattern
templates had strong associations to do with the figure
and because they were suspended from the ceiling by a series
of hooks, slightly sinister qualities that I wanted to explore
further. A 'troubling duality' as one commentator explains.
"Unassuming perhaps, at first
sight, prolonged contemplation of the works, especially
in series, reveals their grimly pragmatic function. The
pendulum pieces are nothing without their bolt assembly.
Aesthetic contemplation of the harmony and balance of each
composition depends entirely on the literal balance resulting
from hanging-take it down from the wall and it ceases to
signify, its parts lying inert and awry. The bolt also brings
to mind the slaughterhouse. The pieces in the gallery-as
in the studio-are hung like carcasses in a butcher’s
shop, which is not to deny their beauty, but merely to strike
it through with a sense of the brutally real. In their way
these are the inheritors of the intensely realised carcasses
of Rembrandt and Francis Bacon."
Dr. Colin Rhodes
Outcomes of this research were initially
exhibited in a solo show of my work at Hartford University,
Connecticut in October 1998. A great deal of interest was
stimulated by this exhibition and subsequent lecture tour
that took me to arts related institutions in Richmond Virginia,
Kansas City, Missouri and New Orleans, Louisiana.
As a result of this, other solo
exhibitions of this work were organised at the Grayson Gallery,
Vermont, Davis Gallery, Massachusetts, Alpha Gallery, Boston,
Massachusetts and Shillam+Smith 3 in London. Critical acclaim
of this work has stimulated further research opportunities
for 2000 and 2001, including my first solo exhibition in
New York City.
The Real Gallery, New York exhibited
evidence of this research in Febuary 2000 and this followed
by two simultaneous solo exhibitions of my work in high
profile venues in New Orleans in March 2000.
Other venues for this work were:
2002 - Scorched Earth - Drawings
and Sculptures, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia
PA, USA
2001 - The Made and the Unmade, Sherry Leedy Contemporary
Art, Kansas City Missouri, USA
2001 - Pendulum Reliefs, Paesaggio Gallery, Hartford KT,
USA
2000 - The Made and the Unmade, Hemmingway Gallery, Boise,
Idaho
The relationship between this most
recent research and how it has fused my approach to different
modes of expression within the field of Fine Art practice
has been examined in the recent publication that accompanied
my exhibition at Shillam+Smith 3 in London.
"Atkins hangings repeatedly
draw us into a literary context, particularly towards works
such as Mary Wolstencraft Shelley’s Modern Prometheus.
We cannot help but speculate about the artists role as the
potentially obsessive collector of corporeal patterns and
of their potential use without due consideration of Shelley’s
depiction of the creation myth and of its burden upon the
creator. Certainly as we have already mentioned there is
a sense of potential reanimation in the work, a possibility
for further manipulation of elements which seem to have
been deliberately arrested in the course of their surface
development into full blown objects. As though to reinforce
this static yet momentary state of the union between material,
image and location, one soon becomes acutely aware of the
terms sculpture and painting when trying to make a critical
assessment of this work. Atkin’s sublime hangings
dare us to refute the leftovers of the modernist dilemma
of the sculpture/painting dichotomy in favour of a more
diversified field of both reception and critique."
Neil Powell
Cut, The Made and the Unmade, Urban Eye, 1999
As much as I am indebted to Henry
Moore for the generosity he extended to me in 1982, I am
also mindful of the earlier agglomeration of subtle influences
that shaped the core of my creativity. The industrial and
rural landscape of the North East of England and also, the
silent social stalemate that permeated much of my parents
life.
|