HAMISH & ROSE
ADRIAN CLEMENT AND HAYLEY ROSE HILL
’WHITE’
14 JANUARY –30 JANUARY, 2016
Almost, 2016, Inkjet prints on archival cotton rag paper, 29.7 x 21 cm. Edition of three plus two artist proofs. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is three light brown wooden frames hung spaced across a white wall. In each frame there is a white piece of paper.
ARTIST STATEMENT
White is a project by Hamish & Rose, a collaboration between Adrian Clement and Hayley Rose Hill. The exhibition is influenced by graphic designer Kenya Hara’s 2010 publication White. Exploring white, not as a colour, but as a sensory experience that is linked, in traditional Japanese culture, to emptiness and silence. The concept is liminality is central to many of the works which comprise the exhibition, bringing the viewer to the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible. From near-invisible translucence to overwhelming opacity, the boundaries of white are challenged and become impossible to define in intellectual or dualistic terms. Through the mediums of photography, printmaking, sculpture and installation, the artists seek to express and present both the materiality and the sensory experiences of white itself.
Hamish & Rose, White, 2016, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: This is a wide shot inside Verge Gallery. On the left hand side of the page there is a white wall with a light brown wooden table in front of it and two light brown frames with black and white landscape images in it. In the middle background there is a large window and a white suspended wall. To the right side of the image, there is an angled suspended white wall with a white candle on a brown shelf on one wall, and three light brown frames on the other. the flooring is a grey concrete floor.
WHITE EXCERPT…
Whilst white, and emptiness, is often interpreted in Western culture as an absence or space to be skipped over (or filled in), and devoid of meaning, it is, by contrast, a deliberate aesthetic employed in various traditional Eastern cultures designed to symbolise the Buddhist notion of emptiness and to invoke a spaciousness and simplicity of mind.
Hamish & Rose, Apparition, 52 page hardcover artist book, 18 x 18cm. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is two white books sat next to each other on a light brown wooden table. Behind both the books are two pairs of white cotton gloves laid on top of another.
WHITE EXCERPT…
The concept of liminality is central to many of the works which comprise the exhibition, bringing the viewer to the threshold between the perceptible and the imperceptible.
From near invisible translucency to overwhelming opacity, the boundaries of white are challenged and become impossible to define in dualistic terms. Hamish’s Almost illustrates, literally, the threshold between colour and colourlessness, through a series of inkjet prints of pastel colours (blue, pink and yellow) at such low opacity as to be barely recognisable.
In Apparition by Hamish, titled after the word’s origins in late Middle English, where the word implied “the action of appearing”, a 52-page artist book gradually fades from black to white at its centre before gradually fading back to black by its end, allowing the viewer the experience the full range of shades that exist between our constructions of ‘white’ and ‘black’ and thus challenge them to question where ‘white’ begins and ‘black’ ends.
Hamish & Rose, White, 2016, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: This is a wide shot of Verge Gallery. From the left there is a large window next to a suspended white wall that is joined at an angle. In front of the wall there is a small brown carpet with a white circular object placed on top. Next to the wall is a large grey concrete pole, that continues into another angled suspended white wall. There is a white candle on a brown shelf on one wall, and three light brown frames on the other. the flooring is a grey concrete floor.
WHITE EXCERPT…
Hara observes that “perhaps we should say that the painstaking execution of the misty atmosphere is the main theme of the painting rather than the trees themselves” and that “the exquisitely dense atmosphere is filled with a subtle movement that leaves viewers’ senses drifting in that space.” Hara concludes that, “despite its vagueness, our senses are drawn into that white space, where they are left to sway back and forth.”
Hamish & Rose, Once, candle and caesar stone, dimensions variable. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a white long stick candle sitting on top of a dark brown shelf. This is sitting flush against a white wall.