Celebrating new artistic talent from across the South East, Platform Graduate Award 2019 is a series of three solo exhibitions by selected BFA graduates from Oxford Brookes University, University of Reading and The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. The initiative supports emerging artistic talent to further their practice, and awards one outstanding artist a £2,500 bursary and mentoring from a professional artist.
Grace Robertson
Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford (5 – 15 September)
Grace responds to the gallery space at Modern Art Oxford and foregrounds a commitment to drawing as a contemporary practice. Self-generating the conditions of its own composition, the work will become activated throughout the exhibition to organise and re-articulate drawings though a system of interactive fragments, recycled material, writing and sound. This act unfolds Grace’s interests in mapping, translation, perception and scale whilst calling into question the frameworks of art production and viewing, material agency and ecological thought. Like the blank page of paper, the space becomes a site of transformation.
Amy Richardson
University of Reading (19 – 29 September)
Amy’s work explores the intricacy and dedicated labour associated with textile embroidery. It emphasises the value of marginalised individuals within society and the socio-political issues that they represent. There’s nothin’ soft about hard times centres around a series of nine free-embroidered cushions which retell Amy’s Uncle’s story of homelessness, reflecting upon the effects of a harmful childhood, struggles with learning difficulties, mental health and addiction.
Kulsuma Monica Khatoon
Oxford Brookes University (3 – 13 October)
Kulsuma is a profoundly deaf Muslim artist who wears two cochlear implants which give her access to sounds she could not otherwise ‘naturally’ hear. Due to the limitations of this sonic range, her understanding of language can appear delayed and her speech can be unclear to others. To communicate, she lip-reads and uses a fingerspell sign language alphabet. Can You Say That Again? looks at the relationship between sound and sight, between speech and text, between hearing and reading, foregrounding her disability and daily struggle to understand and be understood.
Platform is led by the Contemporary Visual Arts Network South East (CVAN South East) and is a partnership between four galleries: Aspex in Portsmouth, MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, Modern Art Oxford and Turner Contemporary in Margate.