Detail from Black Lines, Vera Boele-Keimer
Exhibition
24th August - 7th September
Exhibition opening with performance: Friday 23rd August 6-8pm
Performance: /and back by Eeva-Maria Mutka and Vera Boele-Keimer
Bristol-based artist Vera Boele-Keimer is presenting a new body of work, exploring the rich relationship between textiles and painting. Merging structural ideas with intuition, materiality, imagination and movement, Vera produces work that draws attention to the processes and imperfections of making. Her grid-based compositions ask questions about the relationship between surface and ground, pattern and movement, drawing and painting.
Movement artist Eeva-Maria Mutka and Vera will present /and back, a performative response to the exhibition which they developed as a collaborative project over several months, addressing physical movement both in making and responding to the works. Using simple props in semi-structured and improvised ways they focus on the role of playful exploration, simple acts of transformation and new ways of working.
The starting point for Vera’s current work is the parallels she sees in the crossing of lines to create visual surfaces and the crossing of threads to create woven surfaces. Anni Albers’ description of fabric as “pliable plane” resonates with the artist who uses the material qualities and characteristics of painting to create works that cross the line – between object, drawing, textile and painting.
Folding has become a way of emphasising sculptural aspects of a painting ground whilst lending itself to a repetitive process that allows a semi-systematic way of working across a surface. In her mind, this methodical aspect of her work is linked to ideas about weaving where a fabric is slowly constructed one line at a time. In a similar way, masking tape is used repetitively to define narrow lines in which paint is applied as line.
However, the folded, scraped, painted or printed lines are less rigid, less reliable than their underlying principles – ends don’t meet, boundaries blur, paper becomes fragile. On closer inspection there is fallibility in the simplest gestures, as if despite best efforts things move on.
Opening Times:
Thursday - Saturday 10am-3pm
Performances: Friday 23rd August 6.30pm, Saturday 24th August 11.30 am, Thursday 5th September 6.30pm
Exhibition opening with performance: Friday 23rd August 6-8pm
Eeva-Maria Mutka
Eeva-Maria Mutka is a Finnish movement artist and maker based in Bristol. Initially trained at London Academy of Movement and Dramatic Art, she's been performer and co-creator in works by significant artists in the UK & US: including Scotty Hardwig & Andrea Olsen Matkalla (2021) - 6 Best Short Dance Film awards, Miranda Tufnell/Sylvia Hallett/David Ward Pneuma Project (2013-2021), Gaby Agis Close Streams (at Turner Margate in 2016) & Explicit Faith (2004), Jo Fong Witness - Portraits of Women Who Dance (2012).
She's artist-maker in ACW funded Shimmer (2020), a NDCW/Literature Wales commission Plethu (2021) and Transience of Forms, a performance installation at Body & Earth International workshop in Northampton, MA, USA, (June (2024). Currently Eeva is creating Mrs Perfume performs... with theatre company kissküss and preparing for the tour of Y Llyn/The Lake Storytelling show with Michael Harvey & Stacey Blythe.
Over 2 decades, Eeva and her husband Andy Paget ran a rural creative retreat Penpynfarch in SW Wales, producing artists’ residencies & developing sustained, somatic teaching practices in the community, including with differently abled children and adults, stroke victims and elders – with Rosetta Life, Age Cymru, Stroke Association, Arts Care, Touch Trust, Alive. www.eevamariamutka.com
Vera Boele-Keimer
Vera Boele-Keimer studied Fine Art at the Academy of Art in Munster, Germany, after completing a degree in History and English. After relocating from Berlin to Bristol in 2004 she became a member of Jamaica Street Studios and started teaching at Bristol School of Art. Vera holds an MA Fine Art from Bath Spa University and is currently working on a PhD project at University of Gloucestershire.
Vera was elected as Academician at the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in 2012. She has been invited to artist residencies in Finland at the Nelimarkka Museum in Alajaervi, at Kunstnerverkstede Trondheim in Norway and “Thread” in rural Senegal. Earlier this year she spent two months as artist in residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Connecticut, USA, where most of the work in this exhibition was begun.