2015/ 
From a Studio
Exchange — Acme Studios

From a Studio Exchange brings together work by six artists – Briony Anderson, George Charman, Bridget O’Gorman, Maria McKinney and We Colonised the Moon (Hagen Betzwieser and Sue Corke) – who participated in an international work/live exchange in 2013 and 2014 between Acme Studios’ Fire Station work/live programme, London and the Fire Station Artists’ Studios, Dublin. The exchange provides a rent-free work/live space for a month, a travel bursary and the support of the host organisation.

For the exhibition each artist presents work that was developed or produced during their residency. In the first year of the exchange, Maria McKinney (Fire Station, Dublin) developed work that explores gestures from the hand. The results can be seen in her coral-like structures with emerging fingernails like armour or scales. In other work she has experimented with the idea of craft through the contemporary fabrication technique of 3D printing.

Hagen Betzwieser (Stuttgart, Germany) and Sue Corke (Fire Station, London), who work collaboratively on graphic art and installation projects as We Colonised the Moon, created 'The Embassy of Summer' during their exchange; a permanent installation on the north face of the Fire Station, Dublin, comprising nine nestboxes for pairs of swifts – representing an invitation into the future to return again and again.

Bridget O’Gorman's (Fire Station, Dublin) ‘The Silver’ (2013), installed as part of her solo exhibition We Are Suddenly Somewhere Else (Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 2013), marks a point of reference for both her studio exchange and her future research that emerged from the residency. O’Gorman has pursued tangents where re-enactments and places (both physical and psychological) are imagined, described or reinterpreted; just as the residency with Acme provided an opportunity and the time to work in another studio space, in another city, this body of research also speculates upon duality, displacement and upon the simultaneous desire to be – or perhaps imposition of being – somewhere else.

George Charman (Fire Station, London) will present a series of drawings developed during his exchange, which consider the use of perspective as a tool to construct and dissect metaphysical space. Informed by historical research into interpretations of varying forms of perspective relating to architectural space, his work often responds to specific locations either in an historical sense or to the actual physical dimensions of place.

During her residency, Briony Anderson (Fire Station, London) developed work which continues to explore how landscape is represented in both imagery and text. Her work for From a Studio Exchange is in keeping with her use of pre-existing imagery, an important feature of her practice, conveying landscape second hand – almost as memory, and as a means to consider the evolving relationships between actual and imaged landscape and its re-presentation.

This work/live exchange programme was established following an initiative, with Acme’s support, by Briony Anderson who is part of Acme's Fire Station Work/Live Programme. 

From a Studio Exchange, Acme Project Space, London, 9 January – 25 January 2015