Installation view, But this material…, 2021, The MAC, Belfast
Material Distance
Anne Tallentire at John Hansard Gallery
8 October 2022 – 14 January 2023
Tallentire’s works emphasise all that is fragmentary, partial, and overlooked, not to trivialise it, but to create sharply drawn and acute observations of life.
— Rachel Thomas
Material Distance brings together recent works by Anne Tallentire alongside new commissions that reference the architectural history and spatial arrangement of the city of Southampton.
Installation view, As happens, 2019, Hollybush Gardens, London
Using everyday materials such as masking tape, builders line, insulation boards and tarpaulin, Tallentire scrutinises architectural structures through methodical gestures such as mapping, translation or deconstruction, their analytic assembly revealing intimate patterns which inform social experience. These treatments require such systems or settings to become fluid and at times provisional, open to alternative registers of interpretation. Tallentire’s interest in ordinary material, civic space and the architectural organisation of social life has informed recent work such as Area (2020), an installation of several rectangular MDF panels. Replicating dimensions and colours from items of furniture found in the common area of a social housing complex in Graz, Tallentire examines how communal space is arranged, distinguishing the tension between conventional, systematised spatiality and makeshift personalisation.
Material Condition: Part I responds to contemporary emergency architecture. In the construction of this work, materials such as tarpaulin and wood — typically used in the construction of temporary dwellings built frequently at speed on sites of humanitarian need — are layered, folded, wrapped and placed. The work can be read both as a sculpture and three-dimensional drawing, each surface revealing a unique pattern relating to the process of making. The title provokes questions regarding legality and the responsibility of governments to provide permanent shelter for all.
The subjective negotiation of designated space and lived environments often invoke the diagrammatic as a foundation or structuring device with Tallentire’s practice. A series of collages created in 2020 employ floor plans of Tallentire’s own home with other public housing dwellings; each plan is partially obscured by rectangles of card corresponding on a 1:1 scale with paragraphs from chosen books. Emptied of textual content, these compositions juxtapose the activity of building with that of reading, two different kinds of spatial systems illuminated by a propensity of reciprocal influence. In such arrangements, Tallentire suggests textual structure and the act of reading are imbricated by a matrix of other spatial, cultural and social determinants.
Textual arrangement, floor plans, scaffolding, and construction materials become alternative indexing apparatus enabling methodologies for a different kind of knowledge-production. Found material and existing templates become suffused with new meaning or purpose. Enfolding her organising principles and observances through processes of installing, overlaying, translating and obscuring, Tallentire disarticulates ‘neutral’ systems to render visible otherwise undetected patterns which influence everyday life.
To coincide with Tallentire's solo exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, JOAN has published Look Over. The booklet documents the artist's performance that took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 2022.
Material Distance is a John Hansard Gallery exhibition presented in partnership with The MAC and Hollybush Gardens, with support from Henry Moore Foundation.
A publication will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition, including new texts and extensive photography throughout. To be published in January 2023.
Anne Tallentire (b. County Armagh, Northern Ireland) lives and works in London, UK. Her practice encompasses moving image, sculpture, installation, performance, and photography. Through visual and textual interrogation of everyday materials and structures, Tallentire’s work seeks to reveal systems that shape the built environment and the economics of labour. Her recent work has examined geographical dislocation and demarcation in relation to infrastructure. From 1993, Tallentire has also made work as part of the artist duo work-seth/tallentire with artist John Seth. She is also the co-organiser, with Chris Fite-Wassilak, of the peripatetic event series hmn.
Tallentire will present a solo exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton in October 2022. Recent solo exhibitions include But this material..., The MAC, Belfast, Ireland (2021); As happens, Hollybush Gardens, London (2020); Plan (...), Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria (2019); Shelter, commissioned by 14-18 Now, touring at Nerve Centre, Derry; Ulster Museum, Belfast; FabLab, Limerick (all 2016); This and Other Things, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); and Irish Pavilion, 48th Venice Biennale (1999), among others. Group exhibitions include An Insular Rococo, Hollybush Gardens, London (2022); IMMA 30 Setting Out, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2021); REFUGE, Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2021); Extrospection, Pi Artworks, London (2020); Truth: 24 Frames Per Second, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA (2017); Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980’s Britain, Tate Liverpool, UK (2014); Publish and be Damned, ICA, London (2013); and Anthology - for Lucy Reynolds, Film in Space, Camden Art Centre, London (2012), among others.
Her work is held in significant public collections, including Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Government Art Collection, UK; British Council Collection; and Arts Council Ireland Collection. In 2018 Tallentire was the recipient of a Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. She is Professor Emerita at Central Saint Martins, where she taught from the early 1990s to 2014.
