Toscin Bang - Stephen Felmingham - Tonight @ Union 105 , Chapeltown

Tocsin Bang: An exhibition by Stephen Felmingham
Union 105
105 Chapeltown Road, Leeds, LS7 3HY
Private View:
7th April 2011
6- 8pm
Opening times:
11th- 28th April
12-6pm (except Fridays, weekends and Bank Holidays)

‘Tocsin Bang’ is the codeword used by the Royal Observer Corps after a nuclear strike on the United Kingdom during the Cold War

Union 105 will present objects, drawings and a video work made during the last twelve to fourteen months in response to the Cold War observation posts that have formed part of Stephen Felmingham’s field research and studio drawing practice. This exhibition aims to allow Stephen the opportunity to develop artwork relating to his practice-led Phd ‘Drawing, Place and the Contemporary Sublime’, University of Leeds.

“Recent work has centred on the bunkers and installations that were a part of my childhood in the militarized landscapes of East Anglia. Part of the ‘everyday’ of this childhood landscape were the hilltop observation posts of the Observer Corps. These installations were the underground concrete rooms for the Corps, occupied in split shifts for twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year between the late 1950’s and 1992 and covering the UK in a consistent network. The bunkers provide me with objects and material for drawing and are ‘charged’ places in my practice. They act as conceptual and physical ‘laboratories’ from where the drawing experiments into the subtle field of perceptions that form the work can emerge. They represent the centre of a sphere of observation, a place in which the world is reduced to the narrowest of perceptual apertures with which to regard the blinding flash on the edge of the horizon: a moment of the apocalyptic sublime. Each post had a total view of a landscape overlapping with that of the next post in its sector - within sight like the ancient systems of beacons (often sited on the same hilltops) to warn of invasion or disaster.”

The posts now have the air of abandonment with a sense of kicked chairs and hurried departure. Often they have become utterly ruined or become a refuge for persons unknown, containing cooking stoves, enigmatic objects and empty cans. It is important to me that the posts contain a series of objects that are common to each one- objects such as warning siren crates, standard issue beds, intercom units, brushes/pans etc. The bathos of these objects is telling- they connect the occupants countrywide. Often what remains are the materials of cleaning, of washing of the body, reflecting the futility of these actions in the circumstances of mutually assured destruction. They represent a dissolution – or as Julia Kristevea puts it – “the abject, edged with the sublime” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1982, p.20.)

Stephen Felmingham studied MA Drawing at Wimbledon School of Art where he won the Postgraduate Drawing Prize. He was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2009, was a finalist in the Celeste Art Prize 2010 in New York and has recently exhibited at the Kulturhuset, Stockholm.

For more information about Stephen’s work visit: www.axisweb.org/artist/stephenfelmingham


For further information relating to both exhibition, please contact Karl D’Silva karl@esamail.org.uk