Kate McDonnell & Nicola Turner WE ARE FOR THE DARK 8 - 10 September 2023

 

Kate McDonnell & Nicola Turner WE ARE FOR THE DARK 8 - 10 September 2023 Private View: Friday 8 September, 6-8pm 195 Mare Street | London E8 3QE   RSVP We Are For The Dark is a site responsive intervention by contemporary artists Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner. Their assemblages, sculptures and installations retrace invisible memories left by generations of former inhabitants at one of Hackney's oldest buildings. Both artists explore the darker sides of the human condition through an uncanny palette of ephemeral materials and ambiguous forms. With Turner’s works speaking to the fragility of the body and McDonnell’s to the fragility of the mind, their collaboration contemplates the notion of death as a life-affirming force. Monumental yet incomprehensible creations ooze down walls and staircases, bulging shapes engulf furniture and spill out of crevices - where children once may have played hide and seek in their Georgian family home, or where former prisoners were given shelter during the building's time as a women's refuge. Tendrils creep into the building's gloomy basement where Clare Whistler and Jim Blackburn add movement and sound to one of Nicola Turner's immersive installations.  The exhibition will be open for three days only from 8-10 September, 11am to 6pm, with performances during Friday's Private View and from 11am-1pm and 3-5pm on Saturday and Sunday. 195 Mare Street welcomes visitors as part of Open House Festival 2023, an annual event that celebrates our curiosity for what happens inside the buildings that we walk past every day. Built in 1697 as a grand country house, 195 Mare Street is one of Hackney's oldest buildings. Home to the Elizabeth Fry Refuge from 1860-1913, the property housed thousands of young women recently released from prison. In the twentieth century, it became the New Lansdowne Working Men's Club before falling into disrepair. The house will soon be restored as a family home and community arts venue.

With a practice firmly rooted in process art, Kate McDonnell creates three-dimensional objects and environments.  This summer, McDonnell presented her first major solo show at The Art House, Wakefield, following her installations at Chichester and Wells Cathedrals in 2022. In 2021, she received the Gilbert Bayes Award, was named an ArtConnect Artist to Watch, shortlisted for the New Emergence Art Prize, and earned a West of England Combined Authority residency. Nicola Turner combines found objects and materials into microcosmos of human and non-human agents.  This year Turner has created site responsive installations for the Od Arts Festival, Somerset and for the Norwich Art Path, a collaboration between the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich Castle Museum and the Norwich Arts Festival. In 2021 she won the Ashburner Sculpture Prize at Stone Lane Gardens, Dartmoor, and she has recently been awarded a DYCP grant by Arts Council England.