Anne Tallentire

Hollybush Gardens is pleased to present As Happens, a solo exhibition of new work by Anne Tallentire. The exhibition builds on the artist’s ongoing engagement with precariousness and contingency in relation to social spaces, concerns that have been articulated in works that dismantle, re-order, and re-situate everyday materials and systems tied to specific locations or social situations. Valuing flux, mobility, observation, and chance, Tallentire’s practice animates the invisible structures of the systems under interrogation, revealing the conditions that regulate and shape patterns of everyday life.

Area (2020) comprises numerous rectangular MDF panels scattered across the gallery walls, and builds on an installation of the same title staged at Grazer Kunstverein in 2018. The dimensions and colours of the panels are taken directly from items of furniture found in the common area of a social housing complex in Graz, brought there by the residents for communal use. Animating the dynamic between the specific and the generic, the work considers, according to Tallentire, ‘how the performance of such collective placement, especially around everyday objects, can be determined by economic, practical, aesthetic and cultural factors.’ Similarly probing the politics and spatial logic of architecture, Setting Out 2 (2020) employs neon builders line, nylon string that is designed to mark long straight lines and used in construction to transfer architectural drawings onto the ground. Transporting what is conventionally on a horizontal plane to the vertical plane of the wall, the strings form a line drawing whose composition is determined by the floor plan of Tallentire’s home. Paper markers on the string demarcate lengths that correspond to the circumference of different rooms in the home, such as the kitchen and bedrooms, indexing the spatial logic of the house.

Also on view is a new series of collages (2020) that employ floor plans of buildings that hold personal resonance for Tallentire, among them the social housing development in Graz and her own home. The plans are partially obscured by blank rectangles of card paper, shapes that correspond on a one-to- one scale to paragraphs from books that Tallentire selected from her shelf while working from home during lockdown. Although the titles of the collages derive from the first words of the chosen paragraphs, they are otherwise emptied of textual content, retaining only the physical structure. Thus juxtaposing diagrammatic representations of building spaces with the physical shapes embedded in the act of reading, this series plays with the perception of two very different kinds of spatial systems that suffuse ordinary life. Through such a maneuver, the series illuminate the ubiquitous – and often seemingly natural – physical norms of the everyday that are in fact dictated and constrained by cultural and social determinants.

The exhibition is accompanied by Hollybush Issue 8, a new publication of correspondence between Anne Tallentire, Lisa Panting, and Malin Stahl.

Anne Tallentire (b. County Armagh, Northern Ireland) lives and works in London, UK. Her practice encompasses moving image, sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Through visual and textual interrogation of everyday materials and structures, Tallentire’s work seeks to reveal systems that shape the built environment and the economics of labour. From 1993, Tallentire has also made work as part of the artist duo work-seth/tallentire with artist John Seth. Tallentire is Professor Emerita at Central Saint Martins, where she taught from the early 1990s to 2014. In 2018 she was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. A solo exhibition by the artist is forthcoming at The MAC, Belfast, Ireland, in 2021. She has presented solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including Plan (...), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2019); Shelter, Nerve Centre and Eighty81, both Londonderry, Northern Ireland, Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and FabLab Limerick, Ireland (all 2016); This and Other Things, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); and Irish Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale (1999), among others. Selected group exhibitions include Extrospection, Pi Artworks, London (forthcoming October 2020); Truth: 24 Frames Per Second, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (2017); Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980’s Britain, Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); Publish and be Damned, ICA, London (2013); Anthology, a collective film work, Camden Arts Centre (2012); and Le Monde Physique, La Galerie, Noisy-Le-Sec, Paris (2011). Her work is held in significant public collections, including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Government Art Collection, UK; British Council Collection; and Arts Council Ireland Collection.