Summer 2023
Features one of Fay’s circle drawings plus work by many artists who have shown at this Gallery including: Tim Allen, David Batchelor, Richard Deacon, Mark Fairnington, Graham Gussin, Lucy Heyward, Bob and Roberta Smith, Richard Wentworth, Alison Wilding and Gerard Williams.
Book your visit by emailing info@handelstreetprojects.com
Richard Deacon, One in the Bush, 2004 (detail)
3 June to 23 July 2023
Lines of Empathy book by Giuila Ricci
Open by appointment: Thurs-Fri 10 am to 3 pm, Sat 10 am to 1 pm. Tickets vis Eventbrite. Book on the Close Gallery website.
Opening PV Saturday 3 June, 2 to 5 pm, featuring artists in conversation and a performance by Carali McCall.
Read about the exhibition on Artnet:
https://news.artnet.com/buyers-guide/spotlight-close-ltd-simon-hitchens-2328451
Until 29 May 2023
This exhibition, curated by The Prince's Foundation, to mark the start of the Foundation's celebrations in honour of the Coronation of HM King Charles III has opened at the Garrison Chapel in London. A selection of about 20 of the Highgrove Florilegium watercolours including two by Fay Ballard are on display, together with both volumes of the Highgrove Florilegium books until the 29th May.
The exhibition shows how the garden at Highgrove has developed over the years and includes interesting early photographs and some of His Majesty’s sketch books and paintings of the garden.
Little Gem, 2006, watercolour on paper 40x30cm
Gunnera tinctoria, 2006, watercolour on paper 40x30cm
2 – 25 February 2023
www.patrickheide.com
Curated by artist Giulia Ricci: www.giuliaricci.co.uk
Event: Lines of Empathy Book Launch and Artists’ Conversation on Saturday 25 February at Patrick Heide
The following statement is taken from text written by Giulia Ricci in 2022.
Lines of Empathy began as a collection of interviews with a number of artists who were asked the same set of questions about one of their works on paper. Giulia felt a connection to each of their practices where concerns and approaches related closely to her own.The project originated as an idea for an exhibition before the pandemic struck but during lockdown when real life exhibitions weren’t possible, Giulia revised her thoughts spurred on by conversations with artists and online studio visits.
The idea to use interviews as the format for the project came from Autoritratto, a book published by De Donato (Bari, Italy) in 1969 and written by art critic Carla Lonzi. Giulia discovered this volume while she was studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna the late ‘90s and it made a significant impact on her thinking as an artist.
Autoritratto is a collection of interviews with 14 artists who were working in Italy in the 1960s, including Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. Lonzi recorded numerous conversations with them which she transcribed and edited into a sort of collage interspersing the various voices with one other, including her own as interviewer. She used interview as a method to let artists speak for themselves. A successful art critic throughout the decade, in the late ‘60s she was increasingly scathing about her colleagues in the Italian context; she saw the elite of art critics, primarily men, as being in control of the artists’ voices and was acutely aware of the sense of power struggle.
Unlike Autoritratto, Giulia's project is based on written interviews. Giulia writes: 'I wanted to collect the artists’ reflections through their own words in writing and ensure that they would have time to reflect on their answers, given the level of detail I asked of them. I have really enjoyed reading the variety of writing styles with which everyone has expressed their own thoughts. The second reason is that, like the eloquently titled Autoritratto, my project has a fundamentally autobiographical component which is manifested in the choice of the artworks, each touching on aspects I feel close to in my own practice, and in the nature of the questions, focus on characteristics that are very important in my own work’.
Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill
16 May to 29 July 2022
Peltz Gallery
Birkbeck University of London, 43 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PD
Curated by Carly Robinson (PhD candidate, Birkbeck School of Arts) and Dr Eli Pimentel, Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation presents new and existing works by artists Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill, who collaborated on ‘Breathe’ exhibition at the Freud Museum in 2018. The curators write:
Taking ‘Breathe’ as the departure point, Mending the Psyche explores the notions of ‘overcoming’ and ‘becoming’ in their works, specifically as these notions relate to processes of grief and grieving, and the health implications of these processes.
Mending the Psyche: Art as Reparation challenges the socially constructed narrative of grief and mourning as a time-limited experience, where social norms and the capitalist emphasis on productivity restrict the process of grieving to a definable period of time. In contrast, the exhibition highlights the ongoing mourning of the subject in process, emphasising creativity as a mode of reparative becoming.
There will be a full related events programme.
Funded with a grant from Wellcome Trust and Birkbeck University of London.
Open until 3 December 2021
Artists’ Talk, 23 November at 5pm online.
Reserve a place by clicking the button below:
Curator: Dr Ro Spankie, Principal Lecturer and Course Leader for Interior Architecture at University of Westminster and author of ‘Revisiting Sigmund Freud’s Diagrams of the Mind’ (Freud Museum London).
A second collaboration with Judy Goldhill, exploring personal belongings as travelling companions to the self through life. And the stars as travelling companions of a different sort, helping to navigate journeys and offering an anchor in the wilderness.
A copy of the exhibition catalogue is available to download by clicking the button below:
On-line exhibition including 'Objects of the Week’, film of the seminar ‘What or Who is Your Travelling Companion? and film of the exhibition installation is here: http://arbart.crassh.cam.ac.uk/travelling-companions-online-exhibition/
Artists: Fay Ballard, Adam Dant, Karen Densham, Tim Ellis, Hayley Lock, Ged Quinn, Jason Thompson, Richard Wathen, Rieko Whitfield
22 October 2021 to 2 February 2022
Open weekdays 10am to 5pm
Inaugural exhibition at new Confer Karnac Education Centre, Strype Street, London E1 7LQ.
Confer is an independent organisation established by psychotherapists in 1998 to provide continuing educational events for psychotherapists, psychologists and other mental health workers through seminars and more. The new centre has been designed by Chris Dyson Architects.
Borrowing its title from the book titled Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts by scholar and author Giuliana Bruno (2007), the exhibition focuses The exhibition is curated by Hayley Lock who writes:
As one moves through space, a constant double movement connects interior and exterior topographies. The exterior landscape is transformed into an interior map – the landscape within us – as conversely, we project outward, onto the space we traverse, the motion of our own emotions. Space is, totally, a matter of feeling. It is a practice that engages psychic change in relation to movement.
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, 2007
It is important to consider in the first instance, this place. Recently reconfigured from a bicycle repair shop and next to an old sequin factory, the new Confer Karnac centre in Spitalfields offers a newly designed space by Chris Dyson Architects, dedicated to a bookshop and talks programme on psychoanalytic, relational and emotional processes.
Whilst retaining the historic fabric of the building, its philosophy is to connect to the existing sense of community, to innovation and creativity. Located in an area known for its 17th century Huguenot history and extended East End creative quarter, Confer Karnac brings into the neighbourhood a contemporary space for relational, creative thinking. Its inaugural exhibition invites on the sense of place, space, encounter, networks, relations and touch. It explores the surface of things through the Deleuzian philosophy of the fold, where matter is seen as porous, spongy, a fluid multiplicity and a boundaryless continuum connecting the outside to the inside.
Approaching surface as a threshold, a connective tissue or interface between art forms, we see more clearly where subjects, space and place connect. The works develop relations across art, architecture, and psychoanalytical thinking, looking at what passes between a surface, insisting that the object itself extends well beyond the image and bringing internalised sensations and thinking to the forefront in a cryptic, other worldly and seemingly abstract way.
www.confer.uk.com
Fay Ballard
15 October – 17 December 2021
Monday - Thursday 12:00 – 18:00
Friday 10:00 – 13:00
By appointment
Handel Street Projects, 14 Florence Street, London N1
Fedja Klikovac, director of Handel Street Projects and curator of ‘In Circles’ writes:
Handel Street Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on paper by Fay Ballard. In these drawings, Ballard takes the circle, rendering some in graphite’s subtle spectrum of greys, and others in luminous watercolour, exploring tone and colour. The series comprises 40 circles in total; many radiate a sense of measured calm and serenity, while others are more extrovert, their playful colours reminiscent of Ballard’s 1970s childhood.
Ballard’s working process is intuitive and each circle is the result of prolonged periods of concentration. The tone and colour of each circle evolves as the drawing takes shape. Although she sets herself a set of rules – a circle radius of 14, 18 or 56cm, divided into concentric bands of 5 or 10mm, the human touch is evident. Glitches of the hand are incorporated – a stray pencil line, a brush mark overlapping watercolour. No two look the same. As Gilda Williams writes in the catalogue to accompany the exhibition:
‘This is not a mechanical art-making practice, set on repeat. Each drawing gives rise to a unique space of contemplation – ‘a reverie’, as Ballard describes her state when working, echoing the term used by Wilfred Bion to describe moments of psychoanalytical break-through.
Ballard talks about finding an ‘emotional pitch’ and the series reflects a personal journey, perhaps an internal resolution after a decade of rediscovering her mother who died in 1964. Her interest in psychoanalysis underpins these drawings, especially Hanna Segal’s ideas on art as a reparative act. For Ballard, the circles could also be shelters offering containment. Others recall memories of her 1970s childhood growing up in Shepperton:
‘Fairground rides, psychedelia, gobstoppers, Spirograph and those cardboard spinning discs found in cereal packets’. Dr Williams adds ‘grooves of vinyl LPs’ noting that Ballard refers to ‘pitch’ and cites a resonance with Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus’ (1944).
Ballard began the circles after trips to Iran and Morocco, inspired by their art and architecture, especially the brickwork in Iran, and after visiting Peter Zumthor’s Kolumba Museum in Cologne where brickwork is employed to elicit an emotional response.
A book will accompany the exhibition with an essay ‘The Ripple Effect’ by Dr Gilda Williams, designed by William Hall.
info@handelstreetprojects.com
020 7226 2119 / 07815754634
www.handelstreetprojects.com
Buy the exhibition book:
4th August - 26th September 2021
Garrison Chapel, Chelsea Barracks, 8 Garrison Square London, SW1W 8BG
Open 11.00 to 16.00 daily, admission free.
Fay’s watercolours of lettuce, chard and gunnera created for the Highgrove Florilegium form part of an exhibition at the grade II-listed Garrison Chapel on the site of the former Chelsea Barracks. The Prince's Foundation, which is curating the exhibition, has recently established the space to showcase the charity’s creative work.
Rhubarb Chard watercolour on paper 2006, 48 x 35cm
Art In Focus: Fay Ballard. Exhibition 16 May-December 2017. Presented by Imperial College Healthcare Charity, Charing Cross Hospital, Fulham Palace Road, London W6 8RF.
Art in Focus: Fay Ballard
Curated by Caroline Garland, psychoanalyst. BREATHE presents two artists, Fay Ballard and Judy Goldhill, who both explore the central theme of parental loss throughout their practice.
Selected by Time Out magazine as a show of the month. Exhibition at the Freud Museum London, 16 May to 15 July 2017.
Download a review of the exhibition by the Dandelion Postgraduate Journal & Research Network here. Also available on the Dandelion website.
Listen to Fay Ballard and Caroline Garland interviewed about Breathe by Robert Elms.
Christmas Group Show, 15-20 December 2015. French Riviera Gallery, 309 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 6AH.
The French Riviera Gallery
A group show at the Centre for Recent Drawing, London, December 2015.
The Centre for Recent Drawing
Fay's work was shown in the ‘We All Draw: Drawing and Thinking’ exhibition as part of the International Drawing & Cognition Research Network’s 2015 International Symposium, 5 to 9 November 2015, Bargehouse, South Bank, London.
Fay's drawing ‘Playtex Girdle’ won a Recognition Award given by Aimee Good, Director of Education and Community Programs at the Drawing Center, New York.
The Bargehouse, South Bank, London
Exhibition by Phil Goss & Fay Ballard at the Centre for Recent Drawing
2-4 Highbury Station Rd LONDON N1 1SB, 26-27 July 2015.
Alligators in the Hall
Exhibition at & Model Gallery,19 East Parade, Leeds, LS1 2BH, 14-30 May 2015. Artist’s Talk: 14 May at 4pm. Fay Ballard gave a talk about her work in conversation with Derek Horton of & Model.
& Model Gallery, Leeds
Exhibition at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery, London 2014
