Paper #53: (Un)Staged: Creque Alley & Fallen Monument

Taking the print process and studio as inspiration, the gallery acts as a kind of stage, a place through which narrative unfolds and characters appear on the scene, interacting and leaving traces. (Un)Staged is a collaboration with Leicester Print Workshop, a conversation between Simon Woolham and Yasmin Canvin. The exhibition features work by six PAPER artists alongside two Leicester Print Workshop members. Sumiko Eadon has created a new series of etchings around memories of her childhood home in Kamakura, Japan. The images are drawn from memory and without looking at the paper, alluding to a place long lost in time. Emma Gardner questions ideas of space, concealment and transition through printmaking and evokes a sense of stillness and silence within ambiguous spaces. Rui Matsunaga draws inspiration from mythology, folklore, and popular culture to reflect an increasingly technologised world, questioning our relationships with nature and other, unseen worlds. Ilona Kiss’ work is strongly influenced by dreams and nightmares, collective memory, and the question of place and belonging. The poetic qualities of uncertain situations influence her work as such and connect with traditional genres like Romanticism. Her work is drawn to ambiguity and she is interested in the tension between the familiar and the weird, and the real and the imaginary. George Shaw paints places that were familiar to him in his youth, places in which he “found [him]self alone and thoughtful... along with “the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe”. Ruby Tingle uses a variety of media to create forms that are rooted in natural history and presents an alternate folklore where boundaries between human and animal are obscured. Simon Woolham's work is concerned with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold in them. His drawings of a tree stump or a broken fence are filled with the meanings of the events that go on around and about them. Hannah Wooll explores the domestic space and interior life, using unnatural lighting to create dreamlike and static qualities within melodramatic moments of still and uneasy tension. Curated by Simon Woolham & Yasmin Canvin with Leicester Print Workshop.