FURTHER WORK | AmyHowdenChapman.com

AMY HOWDEN-CHAPMAN

Biddy Livesey and Amy Howden-Chapman have been collaborating since 2005. Their work together center around performance, writing and the production of publications. Their work primarily considers the design and use of cities.

Active Edges of the Commonwealth contrasts elements of the street scape around the off site building used by David Dale Gallery at the East End of Glasgow, with Mangere, a post-industrial area in Auckland, New Zealand. Though analysis of photographs of two sites the project considers how buildings in these two locations function. The project also catalogues additions, such as seating, that have been made by those people who use these areas so they can function more effectively.

Elysian Park Museum of Art
http://www.epmoa.org/

See
‘Videos in City Gallery Portico’ in Eye Contact, By Mark Amery
http://eyecontactsite.com/2011/01/videos-in-city-gallery-portico

See:
Aesthetic Acts, By Arne De Boever,
In 'Primitive Accumulation,' December,2010
http://www.primitiveaccumulation.com/?p=370

BANNERS

Lovers between Glass 2014
By Julia Waite
For The World Undone, an exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery.

Amy Howden-Chapman’s unhemmed banners, made from strips of coloured cotton and sewn
together into interlocking planes, recall the homemade flags or standards of grass-roots
activism. The artist has described her works as ‘creating a context for abstraction’, as she
investigates art’s connections to systems of power, political decision making, and human
relationships.

The banners are a device to explore colour and its use as a conduit – as a carrier of tone and
information in ceremony and power relations. In a series of performances she calls into question
colour’s role in emotional decision making, and how abstraction operates in regards to the
representation of institutions and their ideologies. The 2010 work I UNDERSTAND THERE IS A
GREAT PASSION AND DISCONTENT AMONGST THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE GATHERED
HERE TODAY comprised a series of banners which signified individuals from different fictional
community organisations and their particular perspectives. In a video work Howden-Chapman
made a year later, On Names and Naming, colour in banner form,highlights the names of US oil
billionaires who pursued – and funded – anti-climate change agendas. These works are not
literal political messages; instead, they question the process through which abstract forms take
on symbolic meanings.

In Lovers between Glass two banners lean beside one another and create a clash of jarring
colours and fractured shapes. First exhibited in artist Martin Basher’s 2014 exhibition Lovers, an
exhibition curated by artist Martin Basher’s 2014 the work represents a shift by Howden-
Chapman from considering the political in the public domain to thinking about shared
experience in the private space of an intimate relationship. Previously, her colourful standards
functioned as props in performances; here, they appear like static artefacts or preserved
semaphores whose frozen code is forever secret. The scale and inaccessibility of Lovers
between Glass seems at odds with traditional declarations of love, and Howden-Chapman asserts
that the colour scheme and form is ‘too complex to be a straight-forward romantic gesture’.
These sealed-away, puzzling symbols might be seen to represent how the beliefs and ideologies
of two individuals function when they come together.