Materiality was a four-woman exhibition at Walcot Chapel Gallery, Bath. Fiona Campbell, Kelly M O’Brien, Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner exhibited together for the first time in this exhibition celebrating the importance of materials in sculpture and installation art. The exhibition showcased large-scale objects and interventions into the architecture of the gallery space. Programming included performative response by Clare Whistler, private view, artists talks, workshop, and a Materiality Salon Dinner.
Each artist is engaged with sustainability in their practices and they are driven by their materials in the first instance. Curator McDonnell says: “Materials – the stuff that artists work with – have become a way of loading artworks with meaning, and each artist in this exhibition holds the stuff they work with at the heart of their critically-engaged practice.” In Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality, Petra Lange-Berndt says that ‘To follow the material means to enter a true maze of meanings’. Leaning on the political, social, and psychological interpretations of materials, the artists allow their chosen materials to talk to wider issues. In these works form becomes the servant of the materials.
