Patrick Heide Contemporary Art is pleased to present “Paper Trail”, an exhibition that brings together two prolific artists, Susan Stockwell from London and Sharon Louden from New York.
Susan Stockwell and Sharon Louden reunite for a creative dialogue following their first museum exhibition together in the United States ten years ago. Both artists have been very much aware of each other’s evolution throughout the past ten years and will embark on an artistic conversation in view of mutual inspirations, ideas and developments.
Connected through a passion for drawing and paper, both artists share the challenge of translating this passion into large-scale, sculptural installations often using disposable, industrial and domestic materials manufactured for common use. Together they will create an installation incorporating the gallery’s specific architectural features. The art work will organically grow out of the artist’s creative collaboration and take over major parts of the gallery space.
Susan Stockwell’s art is primarily concerned with transformation. She traces urban developments and socio-geographical structures and converts them into art works and installations charged with sensual beauty as well as political critique. In her cut out street grids or stitched underground plans Stockwell dissects or recreates maps to reveal underlying and changing patterns. Wrapping paper, toilet tissue or tea bags undergo a metamorphosis into completely new objects, which are seemingly fragile, infused with a provocative tone yet defy any standardised categories in art or thinking.
Susan Stockwell studied at Sheffield Hallam University and Royal College of Art. She recently spent two residencies in China and Taiwan, resulting in a series of new works that depicts Chinese and Taiwanese subject matters and comments on the current political situation and its historical roots.
During the show another large-scale installation by Susan Stockwell called “Paper Tiger” will be exhibited at One Canada Square in Canary Wharf.
Sharon Louden’s art can be described as a minimalist exploration of form and space. Her visual vocabulary is drawn from the line as such, observed in gestures, movements and postures. Her drawings display clusters of single brushstrokes that are applied and placed in a manner that each brushstroke becomes an autonomous form, defining its own dynamic and position within space.
Louden’s installations lift the formal and sensual aspects of her drawings to the third dimension. Some are composed of large numbers of line drawings literally floating in space like in her fantastic “Willow” piece, others include enormous numbers of monofilament or fibre glass sticks. Louden’s installations are tactile, gestural formations, frequently in dialogue with nature, often introducing light bearing materials to give her work more physicality.
Sharon Louden studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University School of Art.
Susan Stockwell and Sharon Louden have both exhibited in museums and public art institutions in Europe, the US and Asia. Their works are held in museum collections worldwide such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.