Thursday 1 November 2012

A Word From Graham...


Graham Parker

Two years ago, Swansea artists Graham Parker and Sylvie Evans co-founded 15 Hundred Lives – a Swansea based, contemporary arts group bringing accessible, contemporary visual art right into the heart of the City and County of Swansea and its diverse communities. It was logical, therefore, for Sylvie and Graham to work together in Swansea assisting artist Catrin Webster and historian and archaeologist Elena Isayev on the initial community-based Future Memory in Place project.
Both Sylvie and Graham were deeply committed to and actively involved with the Future Memory in Place project from start to finish. They worked alongside Catrin and Elena and relished the opportunity to engage with Swansea’s diverse communities in a project which enabled art and archaeology to collide. They were delighted to be successful in their joint application as artist interns for phase-two of the project, where they have again been working alongside Catrin and Elena, Ceri and Andrew, the projects archaeologists interns, and Steph Mastoris, Head of the National Waterfront Museum.
Sylvie brings a wealth of educational and creative talent to the project. Much of her artwork incorporates views of Swansea. Using her own photographs and experiences of familiar places, both picturesque and social, she deconstructs and reconstructs the traditional representation of a place; photomontage techniques allow her to play with scale and perspective, to remove and add alternative structures into the landscape to create new spaces. Confronted with the seemingly familiar where everything is not always as it first appears, the viewer thus begins to question reality. As a former head-teacher, Sylvie is well placed to ensure that educational activities, arising from both the artistic and archaeological parts of the project, link into the National Curriculum documentation so that schools will use the activities in the long-term.
Abstract in style, Graham’s current body of work is derived from, and conceived as a result of, stimuli from the real urban, coastal and rural environment, and the inner landscape of his imagination and life experience.
He uses the exceptional physical qualities of paint, his chosen medium, to full effect, allowing his creativity to run unrestrained, producing fluid, organic forms, full of movement and bursting with colour. The results have an immediacy and authenticity that incorporate ethereal, harmonious, wholeness, and stark, grounded, imagery.
Abandonment and control work in a glorious juxtaposition of visual lyricism and emotional tension in these vibrant paintings.
Graham will be staging site-specific art events, enabling opportunities for learning and engagement with the National Waterfront Museum’s recently installed Tessera Hospitalis sculpture and the project Future Memory in Place, which created it. These events, which are planned for late 2012 / early 2013, will include a series of memory-maps and audio/video interventions capturing people’s sense and memory of Swansea.
These exciting and interactive public engagement activities around the themes of memory, place and identity will culminate in a permanent interactive, audio component to the Museum’s Tessera Hospitalis sculpture and plaque.