QUAD/FORMAT Virtual Residencies

QUAD and FORMAT is pleased to announce that we are working with 6 recent graduates from the University of Derby – 3 from BA Photography and 3 from BA Fine Art – and hosting them through July and into August 2020 as part of our Virtual Residency scheme.  
 
QUAD and FORMAT has for many years now provided residencies, awards, exhibitions, work experience and mentoring support to University of Derby students and graduates. In these difficult times of global pandemic, and how that has affected our lives so much, we want to continue our work to give critical portfolio reviews, advice, support, mentoring, presentation opportunities and exposure to graduates embarking on the next stage of their careers.  
 
The Virtual Residencies will see each artist work in their home space, but with two-weeks of access and support from QUAD/ FORMAT Curatorial and Programme Team – with on-going mentoring. The Residencies will take place on the following dates: 
 
13 – 24 July: BA Fine Art Graduates: Jas Lucas, Julie Clive, Nisa Khan 

3 – 14 August: BA Photography Graduates: Elin Davies, Jenna Eady, Rosie Lawrence 
 
About the Artists: 
 
BA Fine Art Graduates: 
 
Jas Lucas 
Jas creates live performances in response to the ‘everyday’. Questioning the daily activities and routines in which we often partake passively, her work highlights the absurdities and contradictions involved, often through the use of subtle humour.  At present, Jas is observing the ever-changing social behaviours inherent in our reliance on smartphones, social media and the internet. By exploring the boundaries and familiarities between the online/offline and the public/private, she aims to deconstruct and critique our relationship with technology through face to face ‘real’ experiences.  Due to the constrictions of Covid-19 and lockdown, Jas is reconsidering the “liveness” of her practice. She is interested in the possibility of producing and exhibiting live work online, with the aim of continuing to question our online behaviours.  
 

To view Jas’ performance ‘Alone Together’ and more work please visit: https://www.jaslucas.co.uk 

Jas Lucas Biography  
Jas Lucas is a Nottingham based artist who received her BA in Fine Art from the University of Derby in 2019. She recently completed a 6-month residency at BACKLIT Gallery, Nottingham with 5 other recent graduates. This culminated in the group show ‘YOUR CHANGES COULD NOT BE SAVED’ where Jas performed one of her most recent works ‘Rearranging the Deckchairs’ in March 2020.  

Jas is a member of the independent choreography school ‘Only Losers Left Alive’ hosted by artist duo Channing Tatum at Dance4 Nottingham. This opportunity to learn through movement alongside 14 other selected artists and performers will result in a weekend of public events, performances and discussion. In response to her experience of working as a part-steward part-researcher for the British Pavilion at the 2018 Architecture Biennale in Venice, Jas created a performance titled ‘#Island’ which was exhibited at RIBA North gallery in Liverpool.  Alongside her studies, Jas volunteered with Air Arts, an organisation which aims to help patients at Derby Hospitals recover through creativity.  

She has worked as a member of Front of House at Nottingham Contemporary gallery, Derby Museums and Lakeside Arts Centre Nottingham 
 
Julie Clive 
Julie Clive, an abstract painter from the East Midlands, born in Derby, centre of the industrial Midlands, but her practice focuses predominantly on the hills and caves of the Derbyshire Peak District. Working on a variety of surfaces and using a range of mediums. The artist’s work, at times moves, from the 2D of a traditional painting into the 3D, developing interesting ‘Assemblages’, that are painted collaged works, semi-permanently created hybrid forms that begin to take on a more sculptural quality. These vary in size and scale, coming away from the surface/frame or wall and move through space, creating an ‘installation Artspace’. Using a digital microscope and an illuminated magnifying glass, Clive photographs images of Geology and Strata, from her County of Birth, or places of significant importance to the artist. From these natural resources, Clive creates her own unique blend of visual art and language.  

Clive’s paintings have many facets, which coalesce to form a whole. Use of colour and ‘motifs’, are repeated within a painting, imbuing the painted works with a sumptuous as well as subtle array of mark making. Bringing the ‘unseen’ into view. When painting the micro/macro abstracted works, Clive uses ‘Intuition and automatic action’ as starting points, with a more considered, informed intuitive approach to refine the work. Curiosity in the molecular structure of nature, blended with artistic mark making and scientific research, leads her practice towards a sense of ‘indeterminate indeterminacy’.  

Methods, such as, extrapolation and distillation, inform the work to become more abstract in appearance. Combining just three or four marks, that are refined and repeated in scale and opacity form curious ambiguous landscapes, informed by nature, refined by an automatic and intuitive response to the microscopic land, geology beneath our feet. The ‘hand of the artist’ is prevalent in Clive’s practice, enjoying the freedom of movement that a trained hand gives, allows Clive to paint freely with scale and chosen medium, creating a sense of ‘flow’ and being within the ‘stream of consciousness’, brings forth a connection of both the subject matter, material and the artistic unconscious action that creates it. This being the essence of what Clive feels her practice is about. “Abstract landscapes intuitively formed of the very ‘particles’ of life and matter”. 
 
Julie Clive Biography 
Julie Clive BA (Hons), based in Derby, is an Abstract Painter and Installation Artist, specializing in oils, inks, and gouache. Forming small ‘intimate’ works and a practice of ‘painting in the expanded field’ with her ‘Assemblages’, which vary in size and scale comprising of many painted works collaged together with a sense of immediacy and expressiveness organically achieved via her intuitive process. Her inspiration comes from the ‘unseen’ and microscopic in the natural world along with the desire to build an environmentally friendly and sustainable practice. Focusing on the ‘microscopic’ elements of Geology, local and not so, Clive creates curious, colourful, and ambiguous ‘Microgeoscapes’, which give a neither/nor recognisable experience.  
 
With a foundation of experimentation, Clive’s paintings are full of ‘motifs’ and ‘mark-making’, which evolve from an informed intuitive beginning, culminating with an ambiguous yet familiar abstract endpoint. Being able to be ‘free’ and allow for playfulness to surface is key in her work.  

Clive has had several exhibitions ‘The Bath Fringe Festival’, being her most successful exhibition to date, which was moved online last month, with her ‘Assemblages’ installation work. Clive is looking to merge her practice with science for her Masters study. 
 
Nisa Khan 
Nisa Khan’s practice unpicks multiculturalism by paying close attention to hidden elements within British, Pakistani, and British-Pakistani popular culture. She achieves this by focussing on personal life experiences, which have activated her sense of  “in-betweenness”; of being caught between British and Pakistani cultural extremes. In particular, she draws from early conversations with her mother, whose colourful language contrasted with the strict social codes she attempted to enforce.  

Nisa’s practice exposes unpleasant, crude, familiar, and unfamiliar elements of her Pakistani heritage through humour and juxtaposing subtle and explicit symbolism in the artwork. By focussing on moments when she encountered one culture through the lens of the other, she aims to bring attention to the space between cultures, languages, traditions and experiences. As a consequence of Covid-19 she is expanding her practice to investigate the connections between live and digital spaces. She is interested in how the domestic has become a public space and, how lockdown has blurred these boundaries.  

Nisa Khan Biography 
Nisa Khan is a practicing artist from Derby, she has recently graduated from the University of Derby’s BA Fine Art programme, where she received the Cavendish Arts Society Award. Khan’s recent work ‘Nauchy Nauchy uff Thu Faaney’ is currently being exhibited at the Leeds Summer Group Show, where Khan is a shortlisted artist. Summer 2019, Khan was an artist in residence at the Artcore Gallery, where she explored cultural identity and hybridity through material processes. These works culminated in a two-person show called ‘No Matter How Strong’. Since then, Khan has created an extensive body of work. Some of these works have been shown at New Art Exchanges, ‘NAE OPEN 2019’. More recently, these works have been exhibited at Sunny Bank Mills annual show, ‘Ones to Watch 2020’, where Khan has been awarded a month-long residency and studio space. Previously, Khan has participated in site-specific projects which have been presented as live performances. In 2019, Khan performed restriction | persistence at the National Justice Museum which responded the prisons historic culture of hard labour. These explorations led to a 3-day live performance intervention ‘Bouncing off Walls’, in which Khan performed acts of hard labour, doing and undoing thousands of metres of twine in silence. The video documentation of this work is currently part of National Justice Museums, Constraint Restraint exhibition.  

https://nisakhanart.wixsite.com/website 

Instagram: @nisakhanart  

From BA Photography: 
 
Elin Davies 
‘I Need a Tutorial’ 

When words fail us, we use non-verbal methods to get our point across. Body language is a big part of a conversation, and a method we use to express and support what we are saying.  

Speech sometimes become disrupted, halted or delayed when conversation can be suddenly lost mid-sentence. 

This performance explores a conversation that can take place during a tutorial, showing the strong interconnection that is present between a lecturer and student, even when verbal communication has been removed from the conversation.   

Link to ‘I Need a Tutorial’: 
https://vimeo.com/418002292  

 
Elin Davies Biography 
Elin Davies is a Welsh photographer, who works with moving, as well as still images.  Davies’ time at the University of Derby has allowed her to explore more as an image maker. Being bi-lingual, her passion for languages and culture has driven her to create work around the themes of language, (non-verbal communication) and body language.  Humour is often included in her work conveying her opinions, visions and ideas in a new and refreshing light.   

Davies’s work has been exhibited at the FORMAT Fringe Festival 2019, ‘CONTRAST 2019’, and the ‘FLARE’ Exhibition, as a part of her second-year, end of year show at University of Derby. 
 
Jenna Eady 
Jenna’s most recent project ‘A James House’, is an avenue which to explore and question the concept of innate gender. As a feminist Jenna is passionate to show an audience how easy it should be to change, construct, deconstruct, make ambiguous or obvious somebodies gender identity. And at the same time should not be ashamed or oppressed for doing so.  

So far, she has worked within the parameters of the family dynamic, the constructs taught to us by our parental figures and how society perpetuates these dynamics over time. Using her own family and friends she has created various family dynamics who all in turn participate as ‘James’. James has been performed as the idealised image of masculinity. This representation of patriarchy is important, as the family members nonchalantly experience their family dynamics each family impacted by patriarchy and masculinity even if is so done subliminally.  

Unfortunately, the Corona Virus has stunted the projects progress but it will be continued to include as many different family types in various ages, races, genders and abilities once possible.  
 
Jenna Eady Biography  
Jenna Eady is a young, white, heterosexual female from Nottingham, UK. Or so the patriarchy would have you believe. Jenna is a contemporary artist and recent graduate from the University of Derby. Having worked within several themes, more recently her focus has been deconstructing the line between gender and its binary code. Her work specialises in experimental photography and moving image, whilst playfully negotiating our gender specific conditioning through performance. Jenna was instrumental in creating and exhibiting in FORMAT 2019’s fringe exhibition CONTRAST, and 2019’s student summer exhibition ‘Flare’ in Derby’s own Tramshed. 
 
Links to Jenna’s works can be found here: 
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRJldIOQlfw&t=1s 
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GX6yF9zfM8&t=1s 
3:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0eEAcNxZOw&t=4s 
4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa5a8iROhtA&t=4s 
5: https://vimeo.com/436854396  

To find out more about Jenna’s work, visit : https://www.jennaeadyphotography.co.uk/ 

Rosie Lawrence 
Rosie Lawrence’s body of work has come about from finding a hidden archive of photographs at a property that belongs to her parents.  

This archive of photographs is like reimagining the history from someone else’s life and this piques the curiosity of the viewer to want to learn more. 

Why would someone not cherish these photographs if they are personal, why would they leave them behind buried instead of burnt? 

Rosie Lawrence Biography 
Rosie Lawrence recently graduated from the BA Hons Photography course at the University of Derby specialising in experimental approaches in photographic media and installation pieces. At the end of her year at Derby in 2020, she received several awards including Format International Photography Festival Awards, Award for Progression and Development from the University of Derby, and the Deborah Evans-Stickland Art Prize from Saint Felix School, Southwold.  

Rosie is based in Essex but is currently living in London for work. Her degree show work has recently been chosen by ShutterHub in Yearbook 2020 Visual Exhibition. 

To find out more about Rosie’s work visit: www.rosielawrencephotography.co.uk  

Header Image by Jas Lucas