PATRICIA FLEMING - Key Persons
Newby incorporates techniques from industrial textile production into a drawing practice that aims to subvert the assumptions pertaining to value and skill within fine and applied arts practice, as well as challenge the design principles and craft rhetoric commonly associated with carpet tufting.
The works we are presenting at SWAB, titled ‘Raspberry-Jail' and ‘Maersksealand', are made using a handheld industrial carpet-tufting gun and created through a process of improvised drawing. Newby is currently looking at the carpet-tufting gun as a case study in how the roles of artist, artisan and fabricator are determined by terminal belief systems in productivity and commodification. His unique technique of ‘drawing with carpet' redirects the manufacturing function of the gun and instead explores its capacities as a mark-making tool, while observing it as a fundamental equivalent to the pencil, spray can, paintbrush and tattoo needle. His works carry an awareness of the anonymity of globalized commercial production and mass labour, in direct contrast with the skillful mastery equated with artisanal handicraft.
Christian Newby, Maersksealand (detail), 2019, Tufted wool on cloth, 285 x 135cm
Christian Newby was born in Virginia Beach, VA, USA and now lives and works in London, UK. He graduated with an MFA from Glasgow School of Art (2009), following his BA (Hons) in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the Contemporary Art Research Centre, Kingston University, London.
Selected exhibitions include: Boredom> Mischief> Fantasy> Radicalism> Fantasy, Collective, Edinburgh (2021); The drum, the chime, the scrape, the splash, the jerk, Patricia Fleming, Glasgow (2021); Brick-Wall-Spider-Web-Post-It-Note, Beers London (2019); Yo Compro Calidad, Matadero, Madrid (2017); Tetracontameron, Space Between, London (2016) and Le Club des Sous l'Eau, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016). He has been an artist in residence at Academy of Visual Arts, HKBU, Hong Kong (2019); Matadero Madrid El Ranchito exchange with Arthouse Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria (2017); URRA/Gasworks Residency, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2015) and Triangle France Artist in Residence Programme, Marseille (2010). He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2016) as well as the Converse/Dazed & Confused Emerging Artist Award shortlist in association with Whitechapel Gallery (2013).
Jacqueline Donachie was born in Scotland and lives and works in Glasgow. She completed an MFA at Hunter College, New York in 1996 after graduating from Glasgow School of Art's Environmental Art department in 1991.