Art X-UK Acquisitions
Over the past year, the Government Art Collection has collaborated with contemporary art networks to collect new works by 45 visual artists from across the UK, celebrating and supporting the diversity of creativity across the Union.
In this difficult and unusual year, the Collection invited the networks for nine regions in England, and the networks in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, to nominate artists as part of a special project, Art X-UK. Our collection curators went on a virtual tour of artists’ studios from Penwith to Ballygally, to select works for the Collection to display in government buildings worldwide. Art X-UK, supported by the Advisory Committee on the Government Art Collection, was a unique way of responding to the impact of COVID-19 on the visual arts sector.
This project has enabled the Collection to support 45 artists, acquiring over 90 works, and spending £230,000 across the UK. As part of the nomination process, we asked each network to form a group and put forward the artists’ names, providing a statement on their selection process for transparency, including a list of the selectors. Asked to consider diverse representation of artists within each region, 24 of the artists are women, 2 identify as non-binary, 20 as minority ethnic, 6 as LGBTQ+, and 4 with disclosed disability.
YVAN was on of the networks that collaborated with the Government Art Collection. We were so honoured to put forward and showcase a range of amazing artists who are working in the region.
The artists selected form Yorkshire & Humber are:
Donna Coleman
Everything is different now 2 - Graphite and ballpoint pen on paper 2020
Donna is a Leeds based artist, who has been making work about her own experiences with mental health for many years.
She has exhibited her work in the Arts and Minds Leeds and Love Arts Leeds art festival exhibitions, and is now forging a career as a contemporary artist.
Donna's art practice is focussed on expressionist drawing. She creates visually intensive portraits, depicting the fragile human psyche. Her work examines how raw emotions such as fear, paranoia and anxiety, can distort our perceptions, make us become disconnected and in turn effect our behaviour.
Her latest body of work explores the effect of social media, Covid-19 and Lockdowns are having on the publics mental health. She wants the viewer of her work to recognise the shared vulnerability we are all experiencing, during these unprecedented times.
Lisa Fielding-Smith
Social Distance | Quarantine Collage Extended Edition #46 Portrait of a Woman (Invisible Virus) | Tier 3 | Britain 2020 - handmade collage on paper 2020
Lisa is a Mixed Media Artist & Educator working in film and video, drawing, sculpture and collage. Her work is informed by a body of ongoing research covering such areas as Feminist theory, Hysteria, witchcraft, fairy tales, gender performativity and performance. Her current work explores dissonant dualities between both the objectification and visibility of women in the media through meticulous collage interventions of found fashion magazine images.
The Quarantine Collage Series is an ongoing body of work reconfiguring fashion model images of women from popular lifestyle magazines. Once completed, it will take the form of 100 handmade paper collages produced within the lockdown and quarantine periods in Britain during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021. The selected fashion model is rendered as a faceless mannequin, erasing their former identity. Entire planes of their body are replaced with a variety of images of photographic textures and surfaces such as hair, chocolate, plants, clothing, interior house plans, window blinds, toilet paper, stone, bubble wrap, household waste and laminate flooring. These surfaces infiltrate the body of the model (like a virus) once protective domestic surfaces now threaten actual survival.
Jade Montserrat
She had discovered the meaning of true abandon - ink, crayon, watercolour, pencil, pencil crayon, felt-tip, pen and gouache on paper 2015-2017
Dancing her way through history and her story. Marking the archive and letting it mark her. Finding a voice within a chorus of opinions and reflecting projections of now and then. Montserrat’s work is a fracture in the linear narrative of consumption and a rigorous critique of the way cultural production scars bodies and constructs histories.
Her work exposes the perceptions of the Other as weighted responsibility in need of retort. Skirting social activism by gesturally and texturally ascertaining new ground for politicised territories manifest through performance, film, installation, sculpture, print & text. This process is focused on the interrogation of materials, rearticulating them to expose gaps in both visual and linguistic habits.
Jade Montserrat is the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation Scholarship which supports her PhD (via MPhil) at IBAR, UCLan, and the development of her work from her black diasporic perspective in the North of England.
Manish Harijan
Shaman “Untouchable unseen” - C-print on aluminum 2019
Manish Harijan is a contemporary Nepali artist who lives in Sheffield, UK. The son of a shoemaker from the Dalit or untouchable caste, through art, Manish questions the injustices inflicted upon minorities and the lived experiences of vulnerable populations in all societies around the world. His work traverses the east and the west, casting iconic images from religion to pop culture, smoothly embedding them in one canvas to create bold, beautiful and thought-provoking paintings.
His main medium of expression is painting using oil, acrylic and mixed media with techniques tending toward Superflat. Inspired by Nepali art traditions of Thangka and Paubha, Manish also borrows styles from graphic novels, especially manga and popular superhero comics. He calls it the ‘Thang-Su-flat’ technique.
Manish’s compositions reference a variety of subjects from social issues of caste discrimination to art history, merging local stories with the global, fairy tales with current news pieces, mythology with facts — questioning both the portrayal and the portrayed.
