Mivart Street Studios opened its doors and invited visitors to see artists’ work where it is created. With over 35 artists and designer makers taking part, this annual event allowed visitors the rare opportunity to see inside artists’ studios, purchase existing or commission new work, and to talk to the artists in person.

HIDE & SEEK was an exhibition of site specific works sited within Mivart Street Studios, an Old Victorian red brick building situated in Easton, Bristol. Twenty-two dynamic artists were selected from an open submission as part of a curated exhibition during the annual Mivart Street Open Studios.

Between 13-15 October the building became alive with an explosion of activity. Artists produced work that either responded to the very structure of the building itself or to the local area. These works were be sited in cracks in the walls, within window frames, in the public toilets and in the stairwells, as well as in the main exhibition areas. Exhibits included: site-specific sculptures, installations, paintings, sound pieces, wall text, walking tours, a live painting performance, a museum collection and a research project on the proposed destruction of the local Greenbank Chocolate Factory site. Although the pieces differed in materials and media, they made references to collections, language and representation of scale and subject matter.

Exhibition: Shelly Abrahams, Victoria Appleton, Lucy Austin, Jon Bentley & Rachel Toon, Neil Bonnett, Max Cahn, Nicky Cornwell, Milly Frances, Colin Higginson, Angela Groombridge, Rebecca Lines, Joel Marshall, Marilyn Marshall, Andrew Munoz, Jem Noble, Hilary Ramsden, Sally Simpson, Elin Thomas, Kay Tily & Scott Bryce, Bernni Vinton.

Curator: Sarah Williams is a freelance curator, an artist and Gallery Coordinator at Jerwood Space, London.

The Exhibitors -

Shelly Abrahams works in various materials including; photography, flowers, recycled materials and throwaway items. The work relates to the manmade and the natural environment. A union jack flag made of waste materials was shown as part of the exhibition.

Victoria Appleton is a glass artist and painter whose work explores individuality, interdependence, separateness and connection. She uses layering and light techniques to create texture, shape and volume. Her sculptural work consisted of delicate layered glass panels.

Lucy Austin’s installations and films are site specific and often temporary. Made from familiar materials such as paper straws, plastic cable ties, cotton thread, used envelopes and masking tape the work explores issues of being human and what it feels like to experience a space. Each piece explores different aspects of this theme; such as vulnerability, loss, memory and identity.

Jon Bentley & Rachel Tool collaborated to produce a sculptural piece for HIDE & SEEK. Using religious iconography and symbolism the work explored notions of cultural diversity and unity. Ethereal images appeared on bread emerging like signs or miracles.

Neil Bonnett is a sculptor who works in various materials including: marble, wood, stone and plaster. His sculptures explored scale from gigantic to microscopic forms and were informed by art and science with particular reference to DNA structures and cell formations.

Max Cahn creates ambiguous narratives within his paintings. Using images of animals, figures and natural landscape his paintings are often mysterious and macabre. Large-scale paintings of trees occupied the main entrance. Each painting included symbols that refer to people drawing on imagined mythology.

Nicky Cornwell, through sculpture, enabled a dormant plant-like form, a previously hidden presence, to unexpectedly, but insistently, reveal itself - emerging from the vulnerable framework of the ageing building; perhaps dislodging a brick, wrapping around a pipe or breaking though a hole in the wall.

Milly Frances is a fine artist whose work is a response to the proposed demolition of the local Greenbank Chocolate Factory in Easton. The research project attempted to link personal worlds within the larger political landscape, highlighting the role language plays in the battle for control.

Colin Higginson’s artistic practice is rooted in object making and sculpture. Using a wide range of materials and approaches he creates small intimate works as well as larger scale specific installations. His new work arrives from his interest in archaeology and the museum institution with particular reference to the language of the museum object, display and the shifting relationship between object and viewer. Embodying sounds, films and museum displays his installations focused on how birds are represented as inanimate objects exploring language and meaning.

Angela Groombridge produces work that is a direct response to the text messaging revolution. Her work highlights the changes and development in everyday communication and language. She attempts to makes the deletable text message permanent by engraving it onto a plaque.

Rebecca Lines is passionate about colour and will produce a series of painting performances live in the exhibition space. Mops and sticks will be used to scrape, splatter and ooze buckets of paint around the canvas. This is set to be a visual delight.

Joel Marshall often uses repetition and pattern, drawing the viewer into a state of absorbed attention. Black Sun is a modified version of the Sun Microsystems corporate logo. Placed within a blacked out window frame the piece suggests parallels between corporate and occult symbolism.

Marilyn Marshall’s figurative paintings draw on the carefully composed sentimentality of old family photographs. Her grandmother, for instance, sits buttoned up in her coat in a garden café: a painting from the photograph stirs uneasy, intimate memories. Her more abstract paintings are based on odd corners of the studio or glimpses from its windows, but again raise the question of whether what you see is what you get.

Andrew Munoz is inspired by relationships of dependence, vulnerability and affection. His paintings, drawings and prints are a response to fairytales and mythology. Part human, part animal characters interact on the canvas creating a sense of strangeness and uncertainty.

Jem Noble creates installation and performance work using sound and video. Dance For Microphone (Displace 8) is a quadrophonic sound installation that will be performed by a dancer and recorded within the space in which it will be exhibited. The sonic artefact brings to life the dynamics of the past space in a displacement of the ‘now’ to provoke questions of memory, projection and the structure of the human present. Asylum is a video work addressing domestic order as a unique means through which each individual and family negotiates, organises, reproduces and subverts the objects and ideas from/in wider society. Through fracturing the mundane and reassembling it into baroque obscurity, the work uses the TV screen’s trusted point of engagement to strip away the familiar, exposing the strange and vivid peculiarities that underpin the everyday.

Hilary Ramsden is a performer, co-artistic director of Walk and Squawk Performance Project and a member of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. Her work is a blend of live and relational art, rebel clown, movement and artivism. She will present the Mivart Talkie-Walkie guided walk around the building which is a slightly edgier and askance take on a traditional guided walk or audio companion to an exhibition.

Sally Simpson is a jewellery designer, maker and retailer. She is currently working on a new body of work which aims into explore the theme of transformation. Focussing on the form of a butterfly to express ideas of regeneration and transformation, she will create an installation of paper butterflies that will flow down the stairs from the first floor stairwell and into her studio space where examples of her jewellery practice can be viewed.

Elin Thomas’s works are highly crafted and playful. For HIDE & SEEK she will produce text based works inspired by the book ‘A Lover’s Discourse/Fragments’ by Roland Barthes, 1977. Fragments of text will appear throughout the Mivart building. Some text pieces will be more visible than others creating a sense of background presence, of how one attempts to articulate desire.

Kay Tilly and Scott Bryce will collaborate to produce casts of delicate lace material taken from items that have been passed down through generations of their families. The sculptural pieces will be placed on a wall in the building temporarily re-facing the brickwork. This piece refers to issues of permanence, ephemera and a desire to hold onto memories of the past.

By placing adverts in local papers Berni Vinton will invite people from the local community to send passport photographs of themselves and a mystery object. These photographs and objects will be shown as a collection examining the choices made by the subjects involved. Her work often uses humour and mystery as a tool for communication.