Alex Farrar

Working on cottons typically used for underclothing, with a silicone-based solution which dries with a still-wet-look, the sweat paintings I’ve been making since 2017 capture forms derived from studies of perspiration as it emerges on our clothing. These works explore the fluidity of sweat and the oppositional themes of labour, sex, illness, exercise and nervousness that it can suggest. They highlight a concern that runs throughout my work, of the body as an object at the threshold of our social/exterior and psychological/inner life. I hold a particular interest in sweat as an intimate, involuntary expression of discomfort, triggered by our being in the world, being looked upon, being thought about. We cannot make ourselves sweat, but the thought of others thinking about us can. In this way, sweat represents an intersubjective event, the interchange of thoughts and feelings between individuals. My interest in the subject continues to grow because of the way it challenges our assumptions about self-control and blurs the lines between self, other and society.

Duo exhibition with Czech artist Jiří Pitrmuc in artist run space Galerie SPZ. We produced works in dialogue with each others for a three month period and presented them one after the other in a rhythmic chain that encircled visitors to the space.

Working on cottons typically used for underclothing, with a silicone-based solution which dries with a still-wet-look, the sweat paintings I’ve been making since 2017 capture forms derived from studies of perspiration as it emerges on our clothing. These works explore the fluidity of sweat and the oppositional themes of labour, sex, illness, exercise and nervousness that it can suggest. They highlight a concern that runs throughout my work, of the body as an object at the threshold of our social/exterior and psychological/inner life. I hold a particular interest in sweat as an intimate, involuntary expression of discomfort, triggered by our being in the world, being looked upon, being thought about. We cannot make ourselves sweat, but the thought of others thinking about us can. In this way, sweat represents an intersubjective event, the interchange of thoughts and feelings between individuals. My interest in the subject continues to grow because of the way it challenges our assumptions about self-control and blurs the lines between self, other and society.

Group exhibition at Rembrandt House Museum, Amsterdam curated by Nathalie Maciesza, with work by Melanie Bonajo, Natasja Kensmil, Rineke Dijkstra, and Verena Blok among others. I presented two night sweat paintings from 2019: ‘Darkling’ and ‘Limned’.

Working on cottons typically used for bedding, with a silicone-based solution which dries with a still-wet-look, the night sweat paintings I’ve been making since 2019 capture forms of night sweating that can occur in various sleeping positions. These works explore the fluidity of sweat and the oppositional themes of stress, sex, illness and anxiety that it can suggest. They highlight a concern that runs throughout my work, of the body as an object at the threshold of our social/exterior and psychological/inner life.

During a three month residency as part of 'Fold #03 on Happiness', – the third chapter in SEA Foundation’s research on art and sustainability – I held open conversations with the people around me, exploring how others understand happiness, how they experience it and what role it plays in their lives. This starting point led to an extended text based on my recollections of these conversations. Through writing I began to reflect further on what happiness means to me. The conversations, most of which were made with my closest friends and family, took place at a pivotal time, as my partner and I prepared for the arrival of our first child. I began questioning the ‘everyday happiness’ and the ease at which I enjoy it, against the challenge of creating a foundation for long-term happiness, before critically regarding the impulse to isolate a single emotion in the first place. Made during a COVID lockdown, the written work was presented as part of an instagram takeover, with one conversation being shared per day. The image shared here concerns the first of 11 conversations that were shared at that time.

During a three month residency as part of 'Fold #03 on Happiness', – the third chapter in SEA Foundation’s research on art and sustainability – I held open conversations with the people around me, exploring how others understand happiness, how they experience it and what role it plays in their lives. This starting point led to an extended text based on my recollections of these conversations. Through writing I began to reflect further on what happiness means to me. The conversations, most of which were made with my closest friends and family, took place at a pivotal time, as my partner and I prepared for the arrival of our first child. I began questioning the ‘everyday happiness’ and the ease at which I enjoy it, against the challenge of creating a foundation for long-term happiness, before critically regarding the impulse to isolate a single emotion in the first place. Made during a COVID lockdown, the written work was presented as part of an instagram takeover, with one conversation being shared per day. The image shared here concerns the first of 11 conversations that were shared at that time.

(Part of the exhibition ‘56 risks, 55 risks transferred, and three parts of three risks transferred and embroidered […]’) We continued the workshop for the duration of the festival and the organisers extended its use of their primary gallery space for a further two months. It developed organically and came to include an open exhibition of works of embroidery that people shared with us. I transferred all of the ‘risks’ (a literal translation from the Portuguese which means ‘sketch’) that we made to record our discussions, onto the walls of the gallery themselves, demonstrating the reflective symmetry which was so important to Azorean embroidery. The ‘map’ of the exhibition space was prefixed with the disclaimer ‘–The open form of the workshop and its exhibition produces content and involves contributors that are subject to change. This works list was accurate at the time of writing, on the day that the exhibition opened.–’ and the exhibition was eventually titled: 56 risks, 55 risks transferred, and three parts of three risks transferred and embroidered, surround the common cloth for the open embroidery workshop with matiz on silk, a rustic stitch, a water wheel, a Picasso, some Mexican motifs and a Yugoslavian tapestry.

(Part of the exhibition ‘56 risks, 55 risks transferred, and three parts of three risks transferred and embroidered […]’) A recent development in my work has been to use open invitations to foreground dialogue in an exhibition context, through social actions concerned with the way we interrelate. For an arts festival in the Azores, I shared the way I usually initiate projects –by engaging with a technique or material– in an open collaboration with others. My intention was to unify the praxis-based approach I use to think/feel through making/materials, with the underlying social concerns that often form the basis of the content of my work. I became interested in hand-embroidery, which I encountered for the first time on a visit to Sao Miguel and which was, historically speaking, widely practiced throughout the archipelago. I could see parallels between my own practice and embroidery’s concern with self-representation, our social being in public. It also shares with my own perspective on contemporary art a performative quality in the way it is used to make-special spaces/objects for a specific period of time. I proposed using the time and space of the festival to initiate an open embroidery workshop. The workshop included practitioners with a lifetime of experience, some experience and others like myself who had no experience. Some we specifically invited, most responded to a widely distributed open invitation, and others were passers-by from the neighbourhood. For nine days, the gallery-space was transformed into a meeting point for understanding and exploring embroidery’s relationship to a raft of intersecting concerns such as gender, class, cultural identity, socio-political history, modernity, industrialisation, leisure, ceremony and interpersonal relations. There were no predefined outcomes, no hierarchy and membership of the workshop was fluid, people came and went. I asked simple questions like what is embroidery? and, what does it do? The shared understanding we developed was captured through written notes made on large sheets of embroidery design paper.

(Part of the exhibition ‘56 risks, 55 risks transferred, and three parts of three risks transferred and embroidered […]’) The project was ambitious and expansive, challenging many of the boundaries and preconceptions that were held in the context of the festival. Our approach to interdisciplinary knowledge drew on the ‘knowledge ecology’ of all members. We shared authorship, in contrast to the structural hierarchy in place elsewhere in the festival that placed artists above artisans. In an exhibition context we created a productive space that was continuously in flux. We resisted defining a physical outcome or process, and re-negotiated what we would do in the workshop every day with each new group of participants. The word ‘craft’ was never used and as with ‘tradition’, I came to view it as part of a legacy of modernity, in which communal art practices, often the work of women, were denigrated and condemned as a making process of the ‘past’ from which modern art was defined against.

As part of the arts festival Walk&Talk in the Azores, I worked in collaboration with embroiderer Maria da Conceição Mansinho, artisan Ana Medeiros and artisan and textile researcher Sofia Silva to form an open embroidery workshop. The act of embroidering was highlighted as a relational and social practice, in which the agency and participation of diverse forms of knowledge came together to produce a practical essay on communality. For nine days, the central exhibition space vaga was transformed into a meeting point for understanding and exploring embroidery’s relationship to labour, to the hand-made, to the industrial, to free time, to ceremony, family, men, women, tradition, modernity, cultural identity, symmetry; asking what embroidery is, what it could be, and what common spaces are, or could be. The exhibition presented and continued this process. The title of the presentation, which was extended for a further two months after the festival ended, describes 56 notations on tracing paper, 55 of them carbon transferred on to the gallery walls, 3 parts of them embroidered, a large shared cloth used as a communal space for practicing embroidery and an open exhibition of works of embroidery that were shared with the workshop.

In 2020 I collected all of the preparatory drawings I had made for sweat paintings in an artists’ book, designed and riso-printed with Studio Hendriksen. The studies are a step between researching images of sweat and making the paintings, with their job being to abstract sweat from its context, ahead of displacing it into the space of a painting. Sweat was conceived to expand on this process, share the original sources and linger on the subject. I self-published Sweat under The Kippenberger Challenge imprint ‘7.45 Books’ and secured international distribution for it through Motto Books. It was nominated for De Best Verzorgde Boeken 2020 by a student jury.

From an ongoing series of ‘umble prints, which I use as a space to bring together divergent areas of interest, sources, references and hesitant starting points in improvised ‘blind-tiled’ compositions. ‘Fumble’ was made on a riso-printer across four A3 pages in four different coloured layers. It incorporates a line drawing of curator Freek Lomme’s speaking head (printed in two colours), an iphone photograph of page 169 of ‘Stress: The Nature and History of Engineered Grief’ by Robert Kugelmann, a 3d SketchUp mock-up for a proposal in public space of an ‘Behavioural Residue’ and a list of words/quotations and starting points for new works.

From a series of sculptures made by casting in lead enlarged drawings of pared fingernails that I find on the floor of my studio. The work began as an attempt to make a visual oxymoron in which the material and technique of a piece is contradicted by the form it portrays. It was the end product and not the process that I was interested in, the meta-state of something which is two things at once, in this case a confident portrayal of doubt, made out of a very heavy and poisonous metal orientated to form a smile. In 2019 a number of them had their toxic surface refreshed with a metallic paint finish in colours derived from popular nail polishes.

Working on cottons typically used for underclothing, with a silicone-based solution which dries with a still-wet-look, the sweat paintings I’ve been making since 2017 capture forms derived from studies of perspiration as it emerges on our clothing. These works explore the fluidity of sweat and the oppositional themes of labour, sex, illness, exercise and nervousness that it can suggest. They highlight a concern that runs throughout my work, of the body as an object at the threshold of our social/exterior and psychological/inner life. I hold a particular interest in sweat as an intimate, involuntary expression of discomfort, triggered by our being in the world, being looked upon, being thought about. We cannot make ourselves sweat, but the thought of others thinking about us can. In this way, sweat represents an intersubjective event, the interchange of thoughts and feelings between individuals. My interest in the subject continues to grow because of the way it challenges our assumptions about self-control and blurs the lines between self, other and society.

In 2019, for a solo exhibition at Bloc Projects in Sheffield, I challenged myself to be more direct with the social content of my work, whilst at the same time introducing chance to define the physical characteristics of the exhibition. I found myself photographing sandbags I saw used in public space in the region, which, being a similar size and mass to a human torso, can often take highly emotive anthropomorphic forms. Sandbags are typically used as a quick response to temporary conditions: from simply acting as a weight to stabilise a road sign, or defending a property from flood water. I related this ‘heavy-thing’ to both (historically) sculptural concerns and a physical experience of depression. I started making my own sandbags out of ‘loungewear’ I found stocked in abundance in nearby shops and market stalls. I became fascinated by this material as a new category of clothing that speaks of a contemporary lifestyle spent largely indoors and alone. At the same time I began collecting bedroom furniture that I found illegally dumped on the streets. ‘Fly-tipping’, as it’s called in the UK, is a growing phenomenon that I saw as a reflection of the material reality of insecure housing and the unsustainable economics of mass produced furniture which means that our main problem as consumers is how we can dispose of our current possessions so that we can buy more. Inspired by John Martin’s paintings of apocalyptic floods, I brought these elements together by flooding the gallery with shallow water, creating a narrative in which the sand-filled loungewear climbed on top of the bedroom furniture and became marooned on flat packed islands.

(Part of the exhibition ‘Fall, slump, drop on a bedside cabinet in water […]’) Scene from a solo exhibition of sandbags I made from loungewear then marooned on fly-tipped (illegally dumped) furniture in a room flooded with standing water.

Solo exhibition developed on a residency with Onomatopee, Eindhoven, bringing together groupings of four interrelated series of works: 'Night sweat paintings', 'Semblable wood, 'Rubin’s cornice' and "‘umble prints". It was the first in a series that I made in 2019 that explored domestic scenes through lyrical ‘dream spaces’ between imagination and reality. In the gallery of Dürst Britt & Mayhew the juxtaposition of a diverse arrangement of works was used to explore a shifting perspective of lived experience.

(Part of the exhibition ‘Ecstatic, darkling with […]’) Semblable wood was made using a variation of the lost wax technique, with found tree stumps surrounded by plaster before being incinerated, their voids replaced with bronze which is then broken out of the mould. The resulting casts formed a fossilised assembly of young trees felled upon reaching maturity. Occupying the entire floorspace, the modest monuments with trunks the span of wrists and roots that reached out pointlessly, situated the exhibition in the midst of an unseen act of destruction and, in combination with the night sweat paintings, suggested a common dreamscape.

(Part of the exhibition ‘Ecstatic, darkling with […]’) Individual ‘stump’ from the installation ‘Semblable wood’, made using a variation of the lost wax technique, with found tree stumps surrounded by plaster before being incinerated, their voids replaced with bronze which is then broken out of the mould. The resulting casts formed a fossilised assembly of young trees felled upon reaching maturity. Occupying the entire floorspace, the modest monuments with trunks the span of wrists and roots that reached out pointlessly, situated the exhibition in the midst of an unseen act of destruction and, in combination with the night sweat paintings, suggested a common dreamscape.

81 found eyelashes were scanned directly on to the drum of a risograph printer and printed, one per spread, to irritate the context of an exhibition catalogue published to accompany the exhibition ‘Faltering, light under two screw holes…’ at SE8 Gallery, London. The book was designed with Chantal Hendriksen, I riso-printed the main book block in her studio, with additional offset printing of the cover and inserts taken care of by Lenoirschuring. Published under SE8’s imprint Mulberry Tree Press, it was nominated by the student jury for Best Verzorgde Boeken 2019.