Hand-stitched embroidery on digital print - Johan Conradie

Johan Conradie, “Echo chamber”.

Hand-stitched silk & metallic threat with Swarovski crystals on digital print on archival paper

104 x 70cm, 2015

Working in various media ranging from oil painting, digital photography to embroidery, Johan Conradie’s highly complex visual surfaces of mostly Gothic architectural elements and Neo-Baroque sensibilities, merge the three dimensional-space of digital photography with that of hand-stitched embroidery. His digital-generated prints on paper meet direct traces of the artist’s hand through his meticulously hand-stitched embroidery. In the age of digital revolution his digitally engendered worlds questions the concept of ‘reality’ and what is it worth on its own.

“Echo chamber” engages masculinity and femininity, the ornamental and the conceptual, tradition and technology, mimicry and invention, and abstraction and representation. The image is of a photograph of the spire of Notre Dame Cathedral, superimposed with a detail in Mont Martre graveyard, taken during the artists’ two month residency at the Cité in Paris. Ultimately, the work fuses two conceptually gendered worlds, exploiting the tensions between the digital print on paper and that of actual stitching through the photographic print. “Echo chamber” gleams with a Neo-Baroque intensity that occupies a liminal zone, somewhere between digital space and that of material surface splendour.

Claire Morgan: haunting the periphery

"Here is the end of all things"
Thistle, seeds, bluebottles, a taxidermy barn owl, nylon, lead, acrylic
2011

London-based artist Claire Morgan's delicate sculptural installations presents a disturbing liminal point in time where the natural flow of life has been arrested in some way. Theorist Manuel Aguirre employs an understanding of the liminal as a defining feature in the Gothic novel. In his understanding, the effects of terror in the Gothic novel are due to the textual constitution of a threshold between the domain of rationality and the world of the 'Other', the 'Numinous'. This threshold, or 'limen', expands and become an unhomely space of its own in which the protagonists are caught up and subsequently attempt to escape.

In Morgan's work the suspended matter (from a taxidermy barn owl, thistle, seeds and other artificial materials) presents an ambitious appeal for an urgent renegotiation of our relationship to the earth. Petrified animals populate this liminal threshold, haunting the periphery of our familiar world with a measurable physical presence and stillness. Darren Ambrose (October, 2008) observed that in Morgan's works "the avatars from the closed realm of nature are brought into the visibility of our world and are coaxed into speaking our language". The viewer's engagement with nature is staged through a careful consideration of natural rhythms and cycles. The poetic installation has a strange balance between chaos, control, constraint, balance and geometric form.

Yasuaki Onishi: the ethereal Gothic.

Yasuaki Onishi is known for using 'humble materials' like plastic sheeting, dead branches, hot glue, cardboard boxes and urea, to create monumental installations that appears to float in space. The process, that the artist refers to as "casting the invisible", involves draping the plastic sheeting over stacked cardboard boxes, which are then later on removed to leave only their impressions. The process of 'reversing' the sculpture is the artist's meditation on the nature of the negative space, or void, left behind. In "White landscape" (illustrated above), the suspended branches and ropes are covered with dripping hot glue. This effect creates new shapes imbued with a faint luminosity. The dripping glue creates a vertical line using gravity and it's shape is maintained as the glue temperature cools down with urea. 'Urea' is an organic chemical compound, and is essentially the waste produced by the body after metabolizing protein. In the second image the artist used black hot glue to create intricate 'spatial drawings'.

Ikeda Manabu: the 'Gothic' excess of imagination

Though 'Gothic' is a borrowed term in contemporary art, applied mostly to artworks centering on death, deviance, the erotic macabre, psychologically charged sites and fragmented bodies, it is also the product of an excess of imagination, or a surplus of fantasy. In this view, Japanese artist Ikeda Manabu's meticulously drawn gigantic acrylic ink drawings, explore apocalypse and takes pleasure in the fragment, inconsistent narratives, the disjointed and the morphological. These works create feelings of gloom, mystery, terror, suspense and fear. Traditional Japanese architecture clashes with giant mangled tree roots, while swarms of birds and fish dart through the water or atmosphere. Each work takes up to two years of eight-hour days to complete. The most unbelievable aspect being that Manabu has no idea what the final artwork will look like, but instead explores each work originally from day to day as he progresses inch by inch. In 2008, Manabu created "Foretaken", a 6 by 11 foot intricately drawn merciless tsunami swallowing trains, boats, buildings and all things human that explode in a syncopated dance of destruction. The artist prefers working with 'Tachikawa Comic Nib Foutain' pens.

Nicola Samorì painting

Nicola Samorì
"La Vertigine" (Cardinale)
Oil on linen, 200 x 100cm (2012)

Gothic's shadowy relationship with the past is conveyed in the solidified ghosts of Italian artist, Nicola Samorì. Known for his smoldering intensity of his figurative work, Samorì skillfully creates moody and atmospheric pieces that weigh heavily, both physically and metaphorically. In a recent interview with Mia Benenate  (The Huffington Post) the artist states that his work "stems from fear: fear of the body, of death, of men. I think my nature as an artist is something like feeling helpless. Works are just temporary shelters and painting is a leisure place where one can conceal yourself". His influences range from a Baroque use of 'tenebrism' (darkened or deepened shadows), to a dark and eerie Gothic world. The artist lives and works near Ravenna, in Italy. When asked about the "darkness" in his work he replied that "it is an unconscious mirror perhaps, sort of an exorcism to take away something from you or give form to whatever you do not want to live. What is shown in my work is what I have escaped".