'Prime', 2017, 7' 30'', digital video projected onto primed stretched linen canvas
~
Supporting Material is an exhibition that explores the correspondences, synergies and fractures between two artists, filmmaker Amanda Loomes and painter Ian Parker, installed at the Herbert Read Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.
Journeys were made to Belgium where flax is grown for linen canvas, leading to the morphing and shaping of ideas, in particular their inflection with a sense of the quickening of history. The linen industry is located in Flanders, a landscape marked by the period 1914 – 1945, with memorials to what some historians have termed the ‘European Civil War’.
Taking the idea of supporting material literally, Amanda Loomes has filmed with the linen industry and Claessens Artists’ Canvas to consider the labour that haunts the canvas. Working with ideas of production, mechanisation and repetition, Loomes attempts to imbue the supporting material with some of the humanity that is integral to its making. Both projection and screen are deployed to play with ideas around the frame as both container and edge.
~
Watch Prime~
Download press release
