ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

• Alice Anderson (born 1976)

  Monolith 2011
  
  A recurrent theme in Alice Anderson’s recent work has been the use of highly symbolic dolls – in effect, silicone effigies of the artist – as part of her practice. As a way of signalling a formal closure, Anderson has chosen the woods at Latitude to exhibit her silicone personages for the last time. To mark this rupture with the figurative, she has created a monolith made of dolls’ hair. The woods become a farewell and a passage to future new perspectives.
  
  Anderson says: “The female and male personages (effigies of the artist) are projecting the idea of a unique idealised identity, feminine and masculine at the same time, a single abstract figure who could see the world through a double gaze.”
  
  Interested in neuroscience, Anderson uses her life as a starting point of her art to explore time and memory. Retaining “Anderson memories”, the material of dolls’ hair harks back to the rituals she used to complete with hair and threads during her childhood. For her, the act of remembering is a creative process, allowing her to recreate situations that often occur within the political cell of the family. Her exposure of power relationships echoes the legacy of feminist art.
  
  For Monolith, Anderson has pushed the medium to its limits by repeating an action of dividing and separating the pieces of this material. The untraditional material of dolls’ hair has become a surface-like skin made of many thicknesses, between the hard and the soft, the sculpture links sight and touch. Earlier this year, Anderson created a gigantic bobbin of dolls’ hair – Bound – at All Visual Arts, London, which was followed by Childhood Rituals, a major solo show at the Freud Museum, London, which included the tying the exterior of the building up in ropes of red hair.
  
  Alice Anderson studied with Christian Boltanski at L’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and took her MA fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2004. Her practice includes films, photography, drawings, sculpture and installation. Her work has been recently shown in London at Tate Modern, Riflemaker, All Visual Arts and the Freud Museum; in Paris, at the Centre Pompidou, Cinémathèque Française, the Fondation agnès b and the Fondation Cartier; Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Riso Art Museum, Sicily; National Taiwan Museum, Taipei; and the Busan Biennale, South Korea;. She is based in London.
   
  www.alice-anderson.org
  
  
  
  Image from Alice Anderson, Bound, 2011

• Delaine Le Bas (born 1965)

  The World Turned Upside Down In The Cathedral Of Erotic Misery (After Kurt Schwitters) 2011
  
  Revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. John Milton, Areopagitica (1644)
   
  “What is this Merzbau?” asks Delaine Le Bas. “This place in the woods? A place to contemplate and think about what's going on in the worlds around us? The real and the unreal? In the 17th century, East Anglia – the place that Latitude is situated – was a place of political upheaval and where the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins made his name. In our high-tech world is our mental understanding of the world that we live in any different to the mindset of people living in the 17th century? Political tensions are at fever pitch across the planet, the ‘Arab Spring’ goes on, racism and recession continue to collide with the usual scapegoats – the contemporary scenario is not so dissimilar to that of the 17th century. It is as if we are suspended in time. The lessons from history and our time teaching us that political upheavals and witch hunts can happen spontaneously and that the human cost can be high.”
   
  Le Bas describes her Latitude Contemporary Art 2011 commission – The World Turned Upside Down In The Cathedral Of Erotic Misery (After Kurt Schwitters) – as a “small cathedral” in the woods with an altar presenting a story. Is it a story that is real or one imagined? Does it belong to the past or the present, with an eye on the future across all the surfaces of the ‘building’ inside and out?
   
  Delaine Le Bas is a widely exhibited artist/performer whose work thrives on such convolutions of time and place, of insidership and its corollary, exclusion. References to her Romany heritage appear in some works – her Rubbish Dolls (2005) were inspired by a tabloid story about Gypsies – as one of the ways that she approaches such themes.
   
  A graduate of St Martin’s School of Art, London, Le Bas is represented by Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin, and Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin. Witch Hunt (2009), her recent solo exhibition commissioned by Aspex, Portsmouth, has toured to Chapter, Cardiff; Context; Londonderry; Campbell Works, London; and Berlin. Chanctonbury Ravens (2010) – is a short film linked to this arc of work can be viewed at this link. Le Bas’ installation works have been included in Refusing Exclusion, Prague Biennale 2007; and Paradise Lost, The First Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2007. She lives and works in various locations within the UK and Europe.
  
  www.nourbakhsch.de
  www.soniarosso.com
  
  
  
  Witch Hunt (detail) 2009. Copyright the artist and Courtesy Galerie Giti
  Nourbakhsch, Berlin, and Galleria Sonia Rosso, Turin; photography Tara Derby

• Graham Dolphin (born 1972)

  Gate 2011
  
  Graham Dolphin writes: “For my Latitude commission I am recreating a pair of entrance gates to St Mary Magdalene Church, Tanworth, in Arden, Warwickshire, the final resting place of English folk singer Nick Drake (1948-74).
   
  “Now a site of pilgrimage for fans of Drake’s music, it is increasing in popularity as his cult continues to grow. The grave is very modest with a constant stream of messages, flowers and handmade tributes being left. These tributes I will transfer and inscribe onto the wooden gates. The messages in pen, pencil, marker pen and scratched into surface will entirely cover the surface with flower and other tributes attached.
   
  “The gates will be located solely in a clearing within the woods, removing their function and heightening their incongruity, which will be further emphasised with spot lighting hung from the surrounding trees. The gates, although functional, are an entrance and exit to nowhere. Although the gates look as if they may belong within the setting, their non-function and surface adornments will draw the viewer to them to discover them as an artwork. This discovery, the transformation of a real object into an artwork, is an important aspect to all my work and the woodland location will further the object’s unsettling affect.”
   
  The woodlands of Henham Park lie adjacent to the main music stages of the Latitude festival. It is music (and closely linked, fashion) that features strongly in Graham Dolphin’s art. His work appropriates objects and icons of the fashion and music industries, reforming them into assemblages that reveal the obsessions and formulas underwriting the temporal world of mass culture.
   
  In remaking suicide notes left by cult musicians and recapitulating the peculiar graffitisation of their memorials and shrines by earnest fans, Dolphin re-authors and re-examines significant incidents of mark-making in a particular niche of the cultural landscape. It is a very deliberate, laborious way of noticing the motivations and tensions surrounding that these intensely personal and also very public items. Gate follows in the wake of Bench, a replica of the Seattle wooden bench found in Viretta Park which overlooks the former home and site of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994; Rock, a recreation of a rock found in Joshua Tree Park, LA, site of the cremation attempt of singer Gram Parsons in 1973; and Tree (all 2010), the site of Marc Bolan’s fatal car crash in 1977. His 2006 series 33 1/3 presented vinyl records where the artist meticulously etched the entire album lyrics into the vinyl itself.
  
   
  Dolphin studied fine art painting at Bath College of Higher Education. His solo shows include BURN AWAY, FADE OUT at SEVENTEEN, London, and REPEATER at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (both 2010). Dolphin is represented by SEVENTEEN, London, and David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen. New work was recently presented in a solo exhibition, The Stars Will Remain Here for Regina Gallery, Moscow.
   
  He lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne.
  
  www.grahamdolphin.co.uk
  
  
  
  Bench, 2010

• Andy Harper (born 1971)

  An Orrery for Other Worlds 2011
  
  Andy Harper says: “Since 2005 I have made a number of works under the same title, An Orrery for Other Worlds. These works are mostly spherical in shape, painted with oil paint and hung in non-art spaces; a disused factory or a deconsecrated church. I have had an idea to display one of these works outside for some time and the woodland setting of Latitude seemed like the ideal opportunity. The most recent paintings in the studio have incorporated historical paintings into the lattice of my own mark-making process. With this in mind I weaved elements and compositional traits from Uccello’s The Hunt and Piero di Cosimo’s Forest Fire.”
   
  Andy Harper’s work, very much of the present, is also one firmly rooted in the history of ideas and of art. His orrery series is part painting, part sculpture: they have an enormous presence. Beyond this, the orreries display an interest in nature and its mechanics. An orrery – an instrument that charts the movement of the planets relative to one another is a device that started in antiquity. Its movement, its changes and above all its predictive power are part of Harper’s work, but so too are the ways that the paint falls on them, the strange, supernatural symmetries the patterns make. These methods and this level of enquiry make Harper one of the UK’s most interesting painters working today.
   
  Harper holds an MA visual culture at Middlesex University, and a BA and MA in fine art painting at Brighton Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, London, respectively. His solo exhibitions include An Orrery for Other Worlds at Aspex, Portsmouth (2010), Truthwall at Morgen Contemporary, Berlin (2011) and the Page Gallery, Seoul, South Korea. Group shows include the John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2010) Timbuktu, Pallas Contemporary Projects, Dublin, Ireland (2008); East End Academy, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009); and the Jerwood Drawing Prize. Jerwood Space, London and touring (2005).
   
  He lives and works in London and Cornwall.
  
  www.andyh.net
  
  
  

• Maslen & Mehra (born 1968, 1970)

  Common Ground 2011
  
  Tim Maslen & Jennifer Mehra continue their work with medium-format photography in their series Common Ground. Figures from different historical periods and cultures are juxtaposed in compositions, which have been painstakingly created using hand-made mirrored sculptures and drawing. Temporary interventions are created with mirrored figures, which are set up in a collection of landscapes and captured on film. Hand-drawn pencil borders are then layered onto the compositions. Ghost-like figures appear like spectres from the past, only visible through the light reflected on their mirrored surfaces.
   
  Maslen & Mehra say: “What do these figures have in common? Perhaps parallels can be found in the peculiar groupings of the figures themselves… a similarity in the attire or stance of the figures. The very act of making figures with a reflective surface and placing them in different settings results in a visual merging of the landscape and the sculptures. The diversity of different cultures throughout the ages is distilled down to one common thread: our relationship with, and reliance upon, our environment.”
   
  For Latitude Contemporary Art 2011, Maslen & Mehra exhibit a large-scale image from this series installed in the woods between two trees. The image records an intervention in another rural location. Nearby the exhibited image the artists introduce mirror sculptures of the figures featured in the photograph creating a new, temporary intervention on the site itself.
   
  Tim Maslen was born in Perth, Western Australia, and took a BA fine art at Perth’s Curtin University and an MA fine art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Jennifer Mehra studied at fine art at the National Art School and the City Art Institute, both in Sydney, Australia. The artist duo’s work has been shown across the globe in both conventional gallery spaces and outdoor locations, including six backlit billboards in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada and a solo exhibition in Toronto both for the 2011 Contact International Photography Festival. Their solo projects include exhibitions in Dubai; Berlin; New York; Milton Keynes; and Dilston Grove, London. Their work has also featured in numerous group shows, including The Altered Landscape Collection exhibition and book at the Nevada Museum of Art, the East Wing Collection No.7 at the Courtauld Institute London; the Lianzhou International Photography Festival, Lianzhou/Beijing, China; and Exit Art, New York. They are based in London.
  
  www.voidgallery.com
  
  

• Graeme Miller (born 1956)

  Moth Theatre 2010
  
  London-based artist, performer and composer Graeme Miller won the inaugural Latitude Contemporary Art prize in 2010 with Moth Theatre, a contemplative masterpiece that now returns to the festival in an expanded state. Moth Theatre is, says Miller, “theatre for moths. By moths”. The theatre is a small, freestanding plywood model, supplied with a screen, a video-feedback mechanism and an intense ultra-violet light. The performance will begin as dusk falls.
   
  “By night the moths are drawn from the woods by the bright lights of a miniature theatre whose stage is saturated with the irresistible pleasure of intense ultra-violet illumination,” Miller writes. “They settle to bask in the limelight of a white screen – drawn to a kind of shared stardom of silhouetted insects. In this world the human observer is a guest – a non-resident of these woods and a non-performer on this stage. What they are drawn to is the intense bluish radiance and in the quiet auditorium.”
   
  Miller emerged from a performance background – he co-founded the highly applauded Impact Theatre in 1978 in Sheffield, Miller's work. His work, in its broadest form, focuses on memory and narration. A Girl Skipping (1990) and A Country Dance (1999) were physical performances for a company that placed play and ritual at the heart of human interaction; subsequent works have been more contemplative. For Overhead Projection (2002), Miller created a cluster of wind chimes – “sonic telescopes” – to link cosmological themes; while Linked (2003-now), is a soundwalk, commissioned by the Museum of London, around an area in east London on which explores how human life and memory are mapped into the genius loci – the spirit of a place. For this work (still on site), Miller interviewed people who had previously lived in the Grove Green Road area, a community destroyed by the building of the M11 link road. Interviews with those affected, along with a composed soundtrack, were recorded and hidden in 20 radio transmitters along a three-mile route. Walkers can access these wisps of sound on small receivers borrowed from various locations (details at www.linkedm11). Beheld (2006-09) – ten shallow bowls reflecting the sky, with soundtrack – has been a poetic memory for the modern-day Icaruses who have fallen from planes as they sought new lives in the west. Track (2010-continuing) is also a way of approaching terrain: participating visitors lie on a tracked dolly cart, which then moves them through a landscape.
   
  Miller’s works have been staged internationally in venues that have included underground car parks in Vienna and London, rural landscapes and traditional galleries and theatres.
   
  www.artsadmin.co.uk/graeme-miller