Lacuna.
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Marko was recently up in Nottingham at the Bonington Gallery which is part of Nottingham Trent University.
He was commissioned to photograph the PHD exhibition of Joy Buttress's work. The exhibition is titled "Lacuna".
Joy Buttress is currently undertaking doctoral study at the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. Her work investigates the current interpretation of lace in contemporary visual culture. The university is caretaker of the one of the largest collections of lace archives, donated by the lace manufacturers and designers as factories were shut down and lace became thing of the past. Joy's research is the first to be funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council based on the lace archive. The exhibition demonstrates how something once considered defunct and only fit for a museum can be resurrected and has a place in contemporary visual culture.
The Glove series are displayed inside several wood ply boxes which are stacked high in threes. In order to see the displays you have to peer through pin holes. Here the gloves appear like dismembered limbs of ghostly corpses, beckoning you to size up and examine their fragile beauty. It's hard to focus for long, as there are distractions, created by the contrasting elements of bright illuminations. Inside each display box hangs a single white crystallite light from 'bakelite' bulb holders. These are attached to brown flexes leading out of the top of the box and up to the ceiling. The boxes have cracks where the corners are slightly coming apart so viewing through these gives yet another interesting point of exploration. The lace embroidery on the white/cream gloves is always only just discernable.
Joy has stated that she wished to examine " the interface between skin and pattern which is created by lace fabric when worn on the body" The Latex wall hangings do just that. Pinned to the wall with large iron nails, each piece hangs like a skinned animal - a reminder of pink caucasian skin or the colour of stockings worn by my grandmother and revealing the undulations and pulls of the machine, the artist working it to create patterns of sublime and delicately embroidered stitches.
It was a pleasure to photograph such amazing pieces of art and a selection of these is shown below...
More information about Joy's work can be found on http://joybuttress.com/
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