The International 3

Preview

Friday 17th April 6pm - 8pm

Exhibition Continues

18th April - 29th May

Exhibition Opening Times

Weds - Fri 12pm - 5pm / other times by appointment

The Whole Wide World

Noel Clueit / Joana Escoval / Hondartza Fraga/Emma Hart/ Ludwig Karl Koch/ Philip Newcombe / Joe Fletcher Orr / Laura Pawela /

The Whole Wide World, is a group exhibition that celebrates the power of the modest gesture to communicate complex narratives about our relationships to ourselves, to one another and to the natural world. The title of the exhibition alludes to a line in Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence, where the diminutive scale of a grain of sand acts as a cypher for the entire planet. Drawn together by their use of unassuming materials, disarmingly simple processes or their small-scale, the works in The Whole Wide World combine to create an exhibition which is visually quiet yet notionally loud.

Noel Clueit (born 1984, Manchester) explores the relationships and disparate threads between objects, language, history and representation. For The Whole Wide World, Clueit has produced a new work from his work/lamp series. Re-purposing items from the studio; spent tape rolls, electrical tape, paint rollers and plastic lids are composed to create new objects of beauty and function that quietly declare a wider process. Commissioned by The International 3, Clueit’s newest work/lamp will source and re-use materials from this exhibition’s installation process to a produce a piece that acts as both emblem and residue of the space and time of its making.

Joana Escoval (born 1982, Lisbon, Portugal), produces delicate works that convey her emphatic and joyful relationship to the natural world. Beings That Accept and Embrace The Growth of Other Beings (2013), is the artists 7” flexi-disc containing the ambient sound from Lisbon’s Botanical Garden. Here in 2007, the artist transported two olive trees from southern Portugal and replanted them. The 7”work was made in devotion to the vegetation and ecosystem which allowed two olive trees to grow and flourish in their new habitat. In the series, Useless Education, stones, which the artist has been collecting since childhood, are cast in bronze and displayed side by side. Whilst each stone is unique, coming to be via an extremely slow process of transformation, the bronze cast reduces it to a copy, which as Escoval states, “like most educational systems today there is a tendency to level everyone, to flatten all possibilities”.

Every day for a year starting on January 1^st 2015, Hondartza Fraga (born 1982, Cabanas, A Coruña, Spain) has committed herself to producing a pencil drawing on A5 paper of a globe. Taking their starting point from found images, these globes however are rendered without any defining land or sea mass. This open-ended gesture allows for a multiplicity of readings, from the end game of post apocalypse to the starting point of history yet to be written. For The Whole Wide World Fraga will exhibit her drawing produced on 12^th April which is International World Cosmonautics Day. **

Dice (2009) by Emma Hart (born 1974, London) comprises of a looped single screen video that depicts the artist engaging in a game of dice with the sea at the water’s edge. On the one hand a surreal and playful act yet on the other, a gesture that can also speak of our ongoing give and take battle with the natural elements.

Our understanding of nature is frequently filtered through the research of both professional and amateur Naturalists. In 1889 an eight-year old boy used his father’s wax cylinder recorder to record the song of a Common Shama, the first documented recording of a bird. This boy, Ludwig Karl Koch (born 1881 Frankfurt am Main, Germany, died 1974, Harrow London), having opened up a whole new world of study, would go on to become one of the great natural history broadcasters of the early 20th century. In this exhibition we present an unpublished recording from 1936 made for his seminal Sound-book ‘Songs of Wild Birds’. With thanks to The British Library.

Laura Pawela (born 1977, Rybnik, Poland) presents the looped video, Ocean / Lemonade (2011). A locked off camera shot presents the surface of a tumultuous sea gradually changing from blue to yellow. Ocean / Lemonade  was made in response to the artist’s time in the American town of Utopia, Ohio which was founded in the Mid-19^th Century on the principles of French philosopher Charles Fourier. Believing that world harmony could be attained through living an exemplary life, Ocean takes inspiration from one of Fourier’s pronouncements which suggested that when the time of peace was upon us the seas would lose their salinity and turn to lemonade.

Philip Newcombe (born 1970, Germany) often uses familiar and democratic objects creating subtle, frequently humorous and well-aimed interventions. For The Whole Wide World we are showing two of Newcombe’s works. The first, Untitled (2014), comprises of a single dart, with ‘the flight, the colour of a fly trapped in a bedroom’ which every morning must be thrown randomly by one of the gallery’s directors into the gallery wall. The second, The Most Beautiful Place in the World is a folded piece of paper on which information relating to the most beautiful place in the world according to Google can be found. Carried by the artist in his back pocket since 2010, the work is presented folded and pinned to the wall giving the viewer no access to the secret it holds.

Joe Fletcher-Orr (born 1991, Birkenhead) chooses objects from the high street, the market, the internet or the skip often for their banality. He then subjects these objects to a seemingly deadpan system of rearrangement; playfully choreographing their own formality. For The Whole Wide World, Orr has selected and site-specifically presented within the space, a ready-made commercially produced SAD (seasonal affective disorder) lamp. In doing Orr brings into play a consideration of the human need for nature’s most basic life giving energy, the sun, whilst also drawing attention to the object’s inherent simplicity.

*On May 3^rd as part of Sounds From The Other City,  The Whole Wide World exhibition will be animated by a programme of live sound performances. This is a ticketed event as part of Sounds from The Other City. More information to follow.

**A limited edition print by Hondartza Fraga produced exclusively for The Whole Wide World will be available for sale from the gallery from April 17^th.

For more information contact Paulette Terry Brien : ptb@international3.com / Tel: 00 44 (0) 7981 389 591

Thanks for Maria Stenfors, IMT Gallery, Vera Cortês Art Agency, The British Library and CFCCA

Thank you to our Founder Patrons and Project Patrons +

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England