This special display presents works by five artists placed in dialogue with the artworks, objects and spaces of the Kettle’s Yard House. The project is part of a multi-institutional exhibition taking place across Europe and the United States in 2021–22, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Ivorypress.
Upstairs in the Bechstein Room, you can find two works by London-based Chilean artist Fernando Casasempere: Salar de Maricunga and Geology 2, both made in 2019.
Casasempere (b. 1958, Santiago de Chile) works with ceramics to evoke ideas of landscape, ecology and geology, as well as the Pre-Columbian art and architecture of Latin America. The works also explore ways in which the landscape, particularly that of Chile, is exploited and degraded, through the use of materials such as waste copper from industrial processes.
The Salares works, which the artist describes as hybrid objects, neither painting nor sculpture, use clay imported from Chile which is layered onto felt panels that evoke topography and the landscape. Although abstract, the works can be read as documents of the landscape from which the materials have been sourced. The title of this work, Salar de Maricunga, refers to the expanse of salt flats located in the Atacama region of Chile.
Salar de Maricunga replaces Roger Hilton’s October 1955 Calm (Black, Grey, Brown and White), which is usually hung at Kettle’s Yard on the wall next to the Bechstein piano. Like Casasempere, Hilton’s work sits on the boundary between abstraction and figuration, often suggesting the hills, rocks and sea of the Cornish landscape where he lived and worked.
Geology 2, displayed on the bookshelf in the corner, continues Casasempere’s exploration of minerals and geological processes. The artist describes his work as ‘an acceleration of natural geological transformations, such as mineral sedimentation’, seen here in the compressed layers of clay and minerals.
Rocks, fossils and other geological items are present throughout the spaces of the Kettle’s Yard House. Jim Ede, creator of Kettle’s Yard, was particularly fascinated by pebbles, writing that ‘stones are expressions of strange miracles’, and adding, ‘we find a perfect pebble once in a generation and once in a continent’.
Ivorypress was founded in 1996 by Elena Ochoa Foster as a publishing house specialising in artists’ books. The project currently encompasses a wide range of areas and activities within the framework of contemporary art, including its own exhibition space and bookshop, art consultancy and art exhibitions curatorship, editorial services, audio-visual productions and education.