The Gendered Archive, Juliet Middleton-Batts

The Gendered Archive, Juliet Middleton-Batts

Graduate Show 

  5 – 14 July 2019, Mills Bakery Upper Floor, Royal William Yard

Featured artists 

Jack Carberry-Todd
My paintings deal with ambiguity, both in perception of visual content and in the perception of the painted surface. They explore the dichotomy between nature and technology, presenting humanity somewhere in the middle, attempting to work out interactions or intersections with each force. The paintings establish a tension between these two entities, to offer a space where nature and technology mesmerizingly fold into one another. Throughout there are references to contemporary society, which rupture the oceanic quality of the work, interrupting the seductive colours and whirling compositions. A different level of attention is encouraged, one that considers the painting beyond its appearance.

Danny Everton
My sculptural forms bring a sense of humour through a visual presentation bringing together soft and hard along with animations that bulge and squirm. Constructed jersey sections are stuffed and stacked, then compressed with concrete breeze blocks. The bricks are visually heavy as we see them pressing down and squashing the cushioned forms. The soft pastel fabric shows stress and weight from the pressure.. These contrasting forms and materials explores a social pressure to conform to a particular version of masculine or feminine and what it is to be a ‘man’.

Adam Garratt
I have focused on is collecting materials from the urban environment in order to print onto and create rhythmic suspensions in the gallery. By securing the printed materials with bungee cords and ratchet straps a tension between stretching, folding, compressing and hanging is created, this allows the previously used materials to be shown in a new way. Another set of materials I have been working with is Sand Bags and Rubble Bags. They are presented on mass, with one set being filled and stacked and the other strapped and compressed together. 

Debra Harris
There is collaboration between artist and material; the metal was homogenous and silent before it received phoenix-like rebirth through flame to give it a voice. Inert metal is reactivated and given agency, and the interaction expands to include the final collaborator, the viewer, to form a complex matrix of conversations.

Katy Richardson

Here is a story, inside a box. It is not my story. Diving into its shuffling layers, I trace pathways – narratives embedded in my click trails. For you, the box remains closed: stapled cardboard like a tatty book cover around contents that I see and you do not. You are imagining what it might contain, aren’t you? Come closer, it’s your turn to be detective now.

Download the 2019 graduate show brochure

Take a look at our archive of previous graduate shows.

Contemporary Art Practice Grad Show 2019
Image courtesy of Helge Mruck

Graduate show 2018 - featured artists

Tim Bailey
'Lingering emotion not apparent in the diction, a mood not visible in the Configuration of the verse.' (Kano no Chomei)

A deep emotional feeling embodies yugen, not quite sublime and definitely free from ego. There is a middle way in which no explanation is needed just intuitively sensed. Mumyo Hisho reminds us, that not everything has a literal explanation: ‘It is just as when we look at the sky of an autumn dusk. It has no sound or colour, and yet, though we do not understand why, we somehow find ourselves moved to tears.’

Jude Bryson-Meehan, 'Domestic Studies'
Jude’s work delves into the domestic space and the relationship between the observer and the observed. She investigates a loop, found in relation to repeated tasks performed in the home, and in the displacement of a domestic image in a gallery space.

Alain Pezard, 'The Things Downstairs'
Alain’s work seeks to explore memories and reinterpret ordinary and banal objects aiming to reveal the hidden beauty of the everyday and the ordinary. Objects are all memories of time, places and people.

Tonie-Carol Patchett, 'A38 Tourist Information Centre'
The A38 tourist information centre comprises records of journeys, flights of fancy inspired by site, narratives, images and artefacts made or found in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, the West Midlands, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The focus is on the odd, the usually overlooked and the downright ridiculous.

Download the 2018 graduate show brochure

Graduate show 2017 - featured artists

Numina, Philip Bath
Philip's work takes diverse forms, often employing technology, to draw attention to aspects of perception and knowledge. ‘Numina’ are things which invoke a religious or spiritual feeling. What if we successively remove material specificity: specific subject matter, materials, narratives? For some people, a spiritual or religious feeling emerges from the emptiness.

Death is a Place, Monica Shanta Brown
Monica's practice encompasses digital film, installation, drawing and performance. It is the impulse of an artist embodying a cultural space of ‘occult instability’‚ cast into conscious consideration of being ‘oneself’. Monica engages with universal human experiences; Eating, Breathing, ‘Death’…as portals to ontological and metaphysical questions.

Lost Words of the West Country, Caitlin Hennessy
Caitlin is studying old (often obsolete) West Country words relating to nature. This is a deeply rural region with a rich dialect, both evocative and earthy. Her belief is that we should celebrate these lost words, and hold on to them, to better understand and reconnect with our natural surroundings.

Ore, Laura Hopes
Laura's work explores distance in a contemporary reading of the sublime. The anthropocene epoch and sublime both date from the beginnings of the industrial revolution when man’s distance from landscape – land sculpted for minerals or deemed barren in capitalist terms – led to a heightened awareness of the ecoaesthetics of environment.

The Gendered Archive, Juliet Middleton-Batts
This examines personal historical artefacts and transferences, and the female narratives they embody. Central to the work lies an exploration of women as keepers of history and custodians of the past, with an emphasis on gender and the domestic archive.

The Invisible City, Karen Pearson
The cartographer records the anonymous journeys of urban walkers that catch her attention as they traverse city centre pedestrian spaces in Plymouth. She maps their fleeting footsteps before they disappear, fixing them in space and time.