The #DeadDay Walking Tour of Walsall

Artists’ Studio: Pak-Keung Wan

RESIDENCY ANNOUNCEMENT

The New Art Gallery Walsall is delighted to announce that Birmingham-based artist Pak-Keung Wan has been selected for a 6-week practical studio residency (12 November-22 December 2012), which is being offered in partnership with Turning Point West Midlands.

Wan will use the residency to develop Lune, an ongoing series of painstaking pencil drawings inspired by a NASA publication detailing all 11,898 solar eclipses over a 5000 year period. Time will be given over to animating these drawings through daily projections onto the walls and surfaces of the studio and via static electronic screens within the space.

The selected artist articulated a clear and original vision for the residency, which will see the studio collapsed into a site for production, presentation and discourse around the work and the NASA material at its source.

http://www.tpwestmidlands.org.uk

Damien Hirst, Monument to the Living and the Dead, 2006

Butterflies are a recurring motif in Hirst’s work, as a metaphor for our own fragile existence and as a symbol
of the life cycle. In this diptych the butterflies are seemingly alive, fluttering across the picture. The insects are adhered to the canvas using modern household gloss –a delicate combination of natural beauty and artifi ce. Hirst deliberately painted the edges of the wings to suggest the idea of the butterflies wrestling with the wet surface of the paint before fi nally becoming trapped within it. Butterfl ies are traditional symbols of the soul. Hirst has created a kind of memorial to the living and the dead, so that prayers can be said for their souls. The fleeting lifespan of the butterfl y reminds us of the fragility of life, while the day-time (white canvas) and night-time (black canvas) pairing of the pictures emphasises the inescapable closeness of life to death.

Butterflies and household gloss on canvas

Damien Hirst, Controlled Substances Key Painting, 1994

Household gloss on canvas Hirst created his fi rst spot painting by hand but he soon took up a more methodical approach to painting, making each spot a uniform size and arranging them within a precise grid structure. Here the spots are accompanied by letters and numbers, which seem to dissect the painting into cells. The alphabet ascends vertically, an organising format used in the periodic table where chemical elements with a related atomic structure appear in vertical columns. Hirst’s labelling of the spots also recalls the system used by laboratory scientists to organise specimens. All of the paintings in the ‘spot’ series are titled after the names of drugs. Hirst selected them from a book listing pharmaceuticals, which he read from cover to cover.

Damien Hirst, With Dead Head, 1991

Hirst was just sixteen when this picture was taken –ten years before he enlarged the image and made it into an artwork. He is shown literally face to face with death, posing next to one of the specimens in the anatomy department at Leeds University where he often went to make anatomical drawings as a student. Hirst was already amassing a collection of books on pathology (the scientific study of diseases) and beginning to think about the relationship between life and death –a theme that would become central to his work. With Dead Head is an important precursor to Hirst’s tiger shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991), the work that made the artist a household name. By addressing death, Hirst intended to ‘make art that was more real’.

Photographic print on aluminium

Damien Hirst, Trinity – Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology, 2000

Trinity draws parallels between science and religion as different systems of belief. In Hirst’s trio of cabinets, plastic demonstration objects and teaching aids sourced from medical supply catalogues are neatly arranged on shelves. These focus on the three types of scientific study into the human body: pharmacology (the preparation, uses and eff ects of drugs); physiology (the branch of biology dealing with the functions and activities of living organisms, including all physical and chemical processes); and pathology (the study of the origin, nature and development of diseases). For Hirst, these branches of science have come to govern our everyday lives: science is perceived to off er the same protection from death as eternal life in Christianity and is now a surrogate religion for many. Hirst’s use of the triptych form is akin to religious altar paintings where the largest middle panel is usually fl anked by two smaller works. The name ‘trinity’ itself also
holds signifi cant meaning in Christian doctrine, referencing the union of three persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) in one Godhead; three becoming one.

Glass, faced particleboard, wood, steel and anatomical models