The Suffolk Group: Cut Connections

Date: October 2013
Exhibition/Show Type: Group
Media: Other

Exhibition Description

The Suffolk Group's second exhibition at The Cut.

The Suffolk Group was formed in 1990 by a small group of art school lecturers and other artists. Its aims – still relevant today – were to “put on exhibitions of a high standard and provide opportunities for mutual support”.

For more about The Suffolk Group follow this link.

Following the Suffolk Group’s 2007 exhibition, “New Cuts” (in which sixteen members set out to exploit The Cut’s unique space in making and exhibiting work which took us in new directions), nine of us wished to repeat the process.

With the title “Cut Connections”, we aimed to use The Cut itself specifically as a starting point for new work.

In my case, for example, everything I exhibited (and continued to produce for some time afterwards) was based on the construction of the grain hopper.

In other examples:

Moss Fuller focussed on rye, including a “carpet” of seeds which germinated during the course of the exhibition

Mark Fuller made steel figures which reclined on the angled beams (and spent a day installed on one himself!)

Elaine Nason produced paintings and prints of visitors within the building

Esmond Bingham made wall-hung constructions which echoed elements of the building’s interior, etc.

Contributing Artists and their statements at “Cut Connections” exhibition, November 2013

Esmond Bingham: I have always enjoyed the intruding diagonal beams that dance and slice across the Malt Room gallery space, so these were my starting point. I have interpreted “Cut Connections” very literally in physical and material terms.

Judith Foster: Dislocated and reassembled drawings, based on images of The Cut.

Mark Fuller: I have been inspired to make figures that connect with the building, the brain of the figures touching the steel girders up in the corner – sensing the atomic structure of the building.

Moss Fuller: I love the feeling that the maltings was specially built for processing barley. In my exhibition I have tried to visualize this process from the fields to the gallery floor. I feel the presence of the people from the past moving around the building.

Lindsay Harris: I’ve always liked the industrial utilitarianism – and clumsy elegance – of the two large, red-oxide grain hoppers (one of which can still be seen in a room off the Malt Room). I began by exporing the zip-like joints of the steel sheets through paper-engineering … and one thing led to another. All this work has a direct relationship to that source.

Judith Lockie: My connection is to poetry and singing at The Cut. The Poetry Trust is based here, and many great performances take place in The Cut. I have taken this connection, with images from poems, coloured the singers, and placed them on woodblocks, imagined paper bricks, and actual rooftiles as a celebration of place and music and poetry.

Malcolm Moseley: These paintings are explorations of the colours and structures to be found in this building.

Elaine Nason: Recently I worked as a volunteer in The Cut Cafe, and between serving coffee and cakes liked to watch the interaction between groups of people. This work is the result.

Marisa Sharp: I chose in making this work to respond to the creative environment of The Cut which allows artists and the community to share a space. I like to recollect times, for example, where I might have been looking at a piece of art work whilst a dance class thumps above me and the door to the theatre is enticingly open, with people entering and leaving whilst the smell of capuccino and quiche is all around me.