20×20 magazine

Issue One | Contributors

Michela Bettuzzi was born in Ravenna, Italy, in 1974, and currently lives and works in London. She has published her works, mainly photographic reportages, on local magazines such as Coolissimo and Quindi. She participated in ‘Al di là dello specchio’, an international photography exhibition, Ravenna, December 2005. She works both with analogical material and with digital technology.

Kiril Bozhinov worked as music journalist for a number of Eastern European music publications. Wrote and codirected a homage-play to Russian satirical short stories under the title of Chichikov and the Big-Nosed Devil that was performed in London. His first collection of short stories, Eclipses – stories of disappearances and reappearances will be published later this year.

Jennifer Camilleri began working as an illustrator but found it quite restricting so moved into fine art where she was able to freely express her thoughts. She has been exhibiting in various galleries and shows around London and abroad. She has also undertaken various commissions within public buildings and workshops. (website)

“My work documents the relationships, encounters and absurdities of life in general, essentially acting as a diary. Drawing upon memories recalled, the paintings and writings are rendered as honestly as possible, sometimes brutally so. Uninhibited expression of thought and spontaneous sensations of life inform my work”.

Sebastian Craig is an artist and the Director of i-cabin, which is a project space, publisher and author. His practice includes coordinating the architecture think-tank i-h.u.t. which is concerned with the transferral of information into architecture and the generation of an ongoing dialogue on artistic intention. (website)

Alexandria Clark was born in Brighton, UK in 1985. She graduated from Nottingham Trent in 2007 and is currently a freelance writer and an artist working in the Midlands. Her work is directly involved in live performance and text art. (website)

The essence that drives me to write and perform is “the possibility of our existence being lost. (pause) Our pains, our happiness, moments of extremity that affect our lives so much and mean such a lot, just vanishing into the forgotten past. There is a need, that it must be recorded. A yearning so strong that runs through our bodies.  That runs through us and our double, that thrills us to record the truth.  Whilst we make up the fantasy, that we dream up around it.”

Stephen Conning graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2000. His studies involved working with kinetic sculpture and video and during this time he developed a specific interest in habitat and the internal environment. Over the past eight years, Stephen has exhibited in various spaces, both group and solo shows. He was awarded a work/live residency at the Acme Fire Station, received an Artsadmin bursary and has hosted a retrospective of his work. Exploring ideas around domestic space, he works primarily with video to look at the sculptural quality of various objects and mechanisms in and around the space in which he lives and works and is intrigued by the many perspectives that can be captured and considered. He often uses CCD Micro cameras for the microscopic quality of the image produced.

“My practice has specifically focused on the examination of how we interpret the space(s) in which we inhabit. By doing this I attempt to give the subject matter an almost epic like status by reassessing perspective, viewpoint and its relationship with its environment. This often raises questions about how we identify with the world around us. ‘Corners’, a series of stills and originally exhibited in conjunction with a monitor piece, is an exploration of boundaries and corners which are placed under close scrutiny revealing the microcosms that occupy us. My approach for this work critically draws upon the writing of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, and his study of domestic space in ‘The Poetics of Space’, which has provided additional insights and explorative ideas around the home. He explores the importance of corners to the domestic interior and the multiple ways in which we experience the architecture where we dwell.”

Graham Day was born in 1946 in Central London. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, at the Bath Academy of Art, and at The Slade School of Fine Art. His artistic practice has been influenced and inspired by other cultures, arts and craft, especially from the Middle and Far East; his work often refers to other spheres of human knowledge, from literature to mathematics and philosophy. Graham’s work can be found in several public collections amongst which The British Library, Modern Art in New York. (website)

Rahel Nicole Eisenring was born in 1975 in Winterthur, Switzerland. She trained in textile design and later studied illustration at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She works as a freelance illustrator in Lucerne since 2004.

Giles Goodland’s last book was Capital from Salt (2006). Before that, A Spy in the House of Years was published by Leviathan Books in 2001, and Littoral was published by Oversteps Books in 1996. He lives in London and works in Oxford as an editor of a large dictionary.

“The poem ‘A Raft of Measures’ is based on the idea of travelling through the body in time. Over life we use our body as a vehicle. But which part of us is container, and which contained? Perhaps I should say: over life, our body uses us as a vehicle. It travels over our whole identity in the course of a life.”

Ulrich Hakel was born in 1973 in Munich, where he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the class of sculptor Olaf Metzel. Expanding upon classical drawings, Ulrich Hakel’s oeuvre encompasses painting, sculpture and installation. One subject central to his work is the moment of human failure as it relates to fixed power structures and the media. His work was shown in various solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad. He had a solo show at Rote Zelle project space, Munich and had a collaborational project with Klaus Auderer at Kunstraum Innsbruck, Austria. Furthermore he participated in group exhibitions at Galerie Christian Nagel, Berlin and the Urban Art and Media Festival Munich. (website)

“Francesco Ioele (1893 – 1928), better known as Frankie Uale or the alias of Yale, was a Brooklyn gangster and original employer of Al Capone. He was one of New York’s leading Organized Crime Figures in the 1920s. This portrait is from a series of seven drawings which include Frank Nitti, Al Capone, Paul Castellano, Sam Giancana, Pretty Amberg and Meyer Lansky, all representatives of the powerful mafia system. It somehow functions as a ancestral portrait gallery. All portait images where found on the internet, the point of departure and source for many of my works. I’m generally interested in structures, distinctivly in those representing specific forms of power and their interconnections. Frankie Yale was shot to death in his car as he was driving through Brooklyn by Al Capone’s men from Chicago. If this series is not received literally it could become a metaphor for something else”.

Carole Hamilton was born in Motherwell and works as a writer and drama teacher. Her stories feature in various anthologies and journals. In 2005 she graduated from Glasgow University’s Master’s in Creative Writing, and was awarded a New Writers Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council to write a series of stories about marginalised women. Budding, shortlisted for the Scotsman Orange Short Story Award, appeared in the collection entitled Work (Polygon, 2006). This story and her novella, The Hardest Winter, are set on a Scottish cattle farm. Dissy, No Excuse, and Let Me Take You Down are published in the anthologies Stramash (University of Glasgow, 2004) and Snacks After Swimming (Freight, 2006).

“In ‘Ripples’, a girl struggles to cope with the confinements her disabilities bring. She observes the people around her and those who care for her. The values of society are examined alongside her need to take action in the face of isolation. She attempts to take control of her life till a lifebelt in the form of her friend catches hold of her”.

George Hardy was born 1985 in Surrey. In 1994 his family moved to Lincolnshire. Drawing since he could pick up a pencil, he decided to try and get himself an art education. Earning a degree in Fine Art at the University of Lincoln, he decided to take it further and stay on for an MA in Fine Art. Making his living from artwork and supporting himself since the age of 19, he has been involved in many projects outside University study. With a compulsive need to doodle, he manages to feed his habit with some of these projects such as being the student paper cartoonist and illustrating comics.

“In order to escape the sometimes heavy aspects of the art studio, study and theory, I often need to lose my head. This is when I pick up a pen and draw my comics and cartoons. I find it an effective way to take a break from real life“.

Maria Kjartansdóttir is an a M.F.A. graduate from Glasgow School of Art (2007) and a Scottish Student Press Awards nominee. Despite of her young age she has done numerous international exhibitions, as well as being a photographer and art director with various music and dance groups. Maria«s recent exhibitions include: Nordisk moods, Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Snap to grid, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Slideluck potshow, SNAP productions, London. Further More, Tramway, Glasgow. De andere Kunstbeurs, Westergasfabriken, Amsterdam, 2006 and Ganghut International Wave Festival, Melbourne, Australia. (website)

“I am interested in the set of crucial moments in life: puberty, love, life, death and the thought of eternity. On the other hand I love to travel around and experience first hand small groups of people whether it is my own family or surroundings in Iceland, teenagers in Scotland or the inhabitants of Kulusukk, Greenland. I collect material, photographs amongst these isolated societies or social groups and afterwards mix these different places and people into my own narrative”.

Helen Nodding ‘When the disillusion sets in it’s good to have a hobby’.  Armed with a degree in Fine Art in 2001, the subsequent years have been dedicated to a series of unremarkable jobs that have provided Helen with enough quality ‘thinking time’ to indulge her creative imagination. Innocently idealistic (between drink-induced bouts of cynicism) Helen pursues a passion to become involved in the quiet revolution of nature in the City through mixture of drawings, miniature worlds in brick walls, architecture for insects and an effort (possibly futile) to enhance unsightly City structures with ivy. Helen has had work published in several books and magazines and is represented by Alda Caparrelli Fine Art, London. (website)

Al Palmer (b. 1984, Tyne & Wear, UK) is an artist living and working in Manchester, UK. Primarily working in photography but occasionally painting and film he is concerned with the human-made landscape and environment. He works in series to document temporary and disappearing spaces. He has previously exhibited at the Cluny in Newcastle as well as recent shows at the Zion Art Centre in Hulme and Nexus Arts in Manchester. (website)

“My initial thoughts about the phrase “Gone Beyond” was the regeneration of urban areas and the exodus of their previous inhabitants. My work is concerned with the space between stages of development and inhabitation. I photographed areas which are derelict and are being demolished to make way for tower-blocks. The resulting images are of an area in limbo, they’ve gone beyond their function, while the people who worked and lived there have moved on. These in-between spaces exist for a relatively short space of time; I feel it is my duty to document them”.

Giovanna Paternó studied Art History in Florence, graduating and specialising in Museology and Contemporary Art. After moving to London she started writing and translating for British (The Art Newspaper) and Italian art magazines (Giornale dell’Arte), while completing a masters degree in Journalism at Westminster University. She is now a freelance writer and translator, and spends her spare time listening to obscure music and doodling on scrap paper. Giovanna has taken part in various projects such as Chromophilia (interdisciplinary research on colours), Interlude Magazine, and now 20×20 magazine.

Francesca Ricci remembers fondly the Golden Era of her stage design studies at the Academy of Arts in Florence (Italy). She eagerly moved to London in 1998 and firstly worked in several fringe theatre productions. She then started following ‘parallel’ career paths, working as a shop assistant, Italian teacher, translator, gallery assistant, exhibition coordinator, and other odd roles. In the meanwhile she took up writing, wrote on art and cinema for several Italian magazines and published a collection of short stories in Italian in 2003. She is one of the founders and editors of Interlude Magazine, a London-based experimental art publication, and 20×20 magazine. Her fascination for literature, art and cinema is often overlapping at different degrees of intensity, therefore she is still finding out what exactly she will do when she grows up. (blog)

Tony Rickaby studied at Portsmouth College of Art and St.Martin’s School of Art and then worked with the Archigram and Light/Sound Workshop groups. He has shown his conceptual pieces, installations and paintings, usually dealing with such issues as ideological and political power and urban survival, throughout Europe and the US, including solo exhibitions at C Space and Franklin Furnace in New York, at Central Space and the Standpoint Gallery in London and Colette in Paris; group exhibitions include Live in Your Head at the Whitechapel Gallery and East International. He has produced works specifically for the web: for the online magazines Drunken Boat, Locus Novus and (B)EAST and on his own site. Recently he has contributed to Just Desserts at the Novas Gallery, London and to the Subliminal Seduction performance project in Oxford Street. (website)

“These works are from a current project in which I try to recall aspects of my earliest childhood and combine them with glimpses of contemporary political events of which at the time I was unaware but which influenced the rest of my life. RETRACING FACE: Over a faint image of my infant face other images appear: of childhood games and fears, cold war politicians and nuclear tests. These images have been digitally altered in various ways to suggest the distortions of memory and then traced out in overlapping layers to represent the contours, islands and pathways of a mental map looking back into one’s past. BERIA’S HAT: Lavrentiy Beria was Josef Stalin’s secret police chief and as such was one of the communist bogeymen a catholic child was taught to fear during the height of the cold war in the nineteen forties and fifties. Here he is represented by his hat, which appears as a ghostly, menacing presence”.

Oddball writer and performance artist Paul Salamone blends sex, comedy, science fiction, and nostalgia for the American suburbs in a multimedia style all of his own. When not contributing stories and poems to small-scale publications, working on ideas for cartoons, or trading songs across the Atlantic with his brother in the Bronx, Paul can be found at an office in downtown Berlin, where he works as a graphic designer. (website)

“‘_FILTER’
… is an example of my more recent style. This is basically a take-off on some of the electro-influenced experiments of Jeff Noon in Cobralingus, which seems fairly appropriate given the club music mania of my current Stadt of residence. Here, I basically applied a series of “filters” to an original source text, with comedic (I hope) results in the end”.

Maia Sambonet is a visual artist and illustrator. Graduating in Theatre Design at Central Saint Martins, Maia lives between London, Milan and Paris. Her practice ranges among drawing, theoretical studies and theatre. In London Maia has wroked at site specific performances for Area 10, The Foundry and Nolia Gallery; has designed for Punch Drunk and Foolish People, performed with Peter Bond and conceived the sound installation Obus 8 with Psychological Art Circus. In Milan she has collaborated with the revues Abitare, Lotus International and Brava Casa and with the theatres Litta and Parenti. Maia has exposed with Moleskine in New York and at Centre Pompidou, Paris; she has also exhibited in London, Siena and Venice. Her first solo exhibition was curated by Raffaella Guidobono at Spazio Aka, Rome. Maia has recently been honoured with the award Milano Donna 2008. Her future plans involve a theatre workshop with John Pinder in BAC, London and the conception of stories for children and adults within books as well as theatre.

“My works are handwoven maps ranging from miniature to environments. The page is a space where drawing is caught as movement. As I follow this movement, a line claims to evade the page to run through books, series, even to climb walls. Chasing a line a story takes shape in the interplay of words and images. I act as a translator of a discourse in its becoming. Here the activity of witnessing merges with the creative gesture of drawing as a performance. A page is no longer a ‘surface’ but an area to invade and investigate. ‘Minute revolutionaries’: minute as minuscule / minute as an instant: Minuscule units lead to an invisible act of awareness which could crown every minute. Like in fractal mathematics, every minute abandons the past in order to open on the next: therefore potentially subversive. Going beyond is here the ability of leaving behind, or a walk to anonymity. ‘Blind walk’ is the map of a moment which goes into the next as enthusiastic as a child. If we look at time under this light we find that immobility doesn’t exist”.

Born to British parents, Katherine Skeldon, also known as Emma, was brought up in both Hong Kong and Thailand until she moved to England when she was a teenager. She graduated from Camberwell College of Arts , London with a BA Hons in sculpture in 2004. Since then Katherine has done a variety of work with children, teenagers and special needs as well as exhibiting across Britain. Now working primarily with photography, both colour and black and white, Katherine aims to create imaginative and poetic images. Her main passion and inspiration come from the countryside, particularly the Scottish landscape which she moved to be near recently. The majority of her work involves masks of some kind, which she makes herself and then photographs friends, family or herself wearing them in the landscape. Katherine currently lives in Glasgow and also works as a ranger with the Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park.

Martin Slidel (pronounced and mis-spelt Slidle, possibly derivative of the German Seidel) is the eldest of three sons to a motor mechanic and a housewife. He started a short-lived banking career before attending Portsmouth College of Art, going on to study combined arts at Brighton. Having always viewed himself as a maker, Martin recently traced his roots via a generational trade of carpentry. In 2008, he co-taught poetry workshops at Brighton Library; also completing an art and poetry project with Lambeth schoolchildren. Martin has five years’ teaching experience in the infant and special needs sector, and is currently studying Art and Design in Education at London. His verse previously appeared in Quartz and Interlude.

Tristan Stevens was born in Montreal, Canada, but moved to England as a child. He moved around between England and France with his mother before they settled down in Somerset. After a few years from education he discovered the works and writings of Samual Palmer, Jung, Christopher Bucklow and Alchemical drawings to name but a few, and started to draw again. He finally decided to take the plunge and without the qualifications needed he applied for his degree based solely on the work he had made during a few months. He achieved a First class degree with honors at the Norwich School of Art & Design and he exhibited in Suffolk and Somerset, UK, and the Netherlands (2007). He was invited as Artist in residence at Atelier Baztille Netherlands. TristanÕs work was published this year in Ninja Magazine for the Paris fashion week special edition.Tristan lives and works in London and is currently working towards an exhibition with Rob Lehr in the USA and a series of editions for Artlout in Berlin. (website)

“Many shifting changes have naturally occurred in the developing process of making work that explores an attempt at looking at the psyche and experiences as functions for making work. My idea of research often consists of exploring my opinions as a set of various notions moving in and out of each other. These variant concerns have allowed me to produce work I now see to be to do with an individual vision (mine) rather then a universal model for life as previously thought. I am able to act as an individual and thus perhaps explore myself in a state that allows the audience to explore themselves. This creates a social aspect. My practice has shifted to an area outside of my previous intentions and more to do with unclear and imaginative environments that use narrative as their basic element. I allow initial processes of characters to form and from this initial reaction, unprecedented subjects happen. This brings to mind the collective unconscious of stored images that have archetypal qualities to them”.

Ingrid Stigsdotter is a London-based writer and curator. An itinerant spirit, Ingrid grew up in Sweden but also lived in France and Spain before moving to London to study art and film, eventually completing a PhD in Film Studies. She is a co-founder of the film event company Cinoche Media.

“My creative practice is divided into academic and journalistic writing, curatorial work and fiction. As an arts critic and researcher my aim is to write texts that manage to be both personal and inventive within the limitations of their generic parameters. As a film curator, I attempt to open up dialogues between films and create new audio-visual experiences by presenting films in interesting ways to different audiences. As a writer of fiction, I am faced with freedom from constraints but also the struggle to translate images and thoughts into words. The four different languages that I command all fail to obey my orders, and the perfect expression always seems to remain hidden in an imaginary dictionary that I do not possess. ‘Confinement in Crimson and Cinnabar’ is a tentative attempt to defy this linguistic evanescence in order to capture a mood, a place, a character, a space, an atmosphere”.

Julian Throssell was born in The Shrubbery, Buckinghamshire, in 1977, and never fully recovered from the ignominy. His family relocated to Western Australia when he was four and set up home in Perth, The Most Isolated City on the Planet. After studying to become an Occupational Therapist, Julian relocated to London for a two-year stint, and never left. Resigned to his fate, he now works as a postural specialist at Camden Wheelchair Service, biding his time until he wins the lottery, and tours the world as a travel writer and photographer.

“Although a full time therapist, I have always had more of a passion for film and photography. The urban minutiae of the streets fascinates me, and this is what I tend to centre my photography around. When I travel to foreign cities, I tend to point my camera towards the seedy underbelly and unnoticed normalcy of the streets and people rather than the monuments. I don’t get much time to take photos these days, but living in the big rot of London means that opportunities are never far away.  ‘Gone Beyond’ just put in my head the idea of the world we live in decaying slowly around us – paint peeling from walls, posters rotting down from their brickwork, flesh rotting off bones. We spend so much of our lives beyond our best – man and city alike. Three photos submitted for this issue were taken in Mexico during ‘El Dia de los Muertos’ Festival in November 2007, a time and place that illustrate the point beautifully”.

Nick Thurston is author of Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy) (2007). In 2006 he joined the York-based independent publisher information as material as Co-Editor. As an artist-writer, editor, and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, he is interested in the investigation of the creative horizons of reading. He has recently performed as a conceptual poet at the second ÔPrinted Matter, Inc. New York Art Book Fair’ and The Laurence Sterne Museum, and has journal articles in the most recent editions of parallax (Routledge) and The Happy Hypocrite (Bookworks). He will be presenting new work at The Simon Fraser Gallery in Vancouver this November for the exhibition, ‘The Poetics of Erasure’.

Katharine Wojcik was born in London in 1983, she is an artist, writer & curator. Completing a Foundation in Art & Design in 2005 & a BA in Fine Art in 2008, she currently lives and works in Nottingham. Current projects include a sitespecific installation for ‘Art on the Edge’ Norwich 8 – 24 Aug 2008, & an internship at Fabrica Gallery, Brighton, with the exhibitions & curating department. Also pursuing freelance writing work, previously published articles include interviews with Hew Locke & David Toop. She curated & exhibited work for ‘At Play’Surface Gallery, Nottingham, earlier this year, & in 2007 exhibited as part of ‘Double Take’ at Surface Gallery, Nottingham, ‘Tingle Tangle’ at The Loggerheads, Nottingham & ‘Tingle Tangle’ at Birmingham BIAD.

Anyone hearing a recording of his or her own voice,
Or seeing a photograph of them-self,
Is presented with a double
(‘A ghost from the past’)
Technologies ability to record and capture moments in time;
Can just as easily be used to record over or erase.
Devices filter the information we receive
A tape recorder – a camera – your television – (or radio)
Something information passes through, before it is experienced by an audience
(Second hand or direct?)
Through experiencing these fragments, new responses & interpretations develop
An echo or sound bite; a thought or memory
(The original information gradually deteriorating)
New facts emerge from old information?
Or elaborate fictions created from the truth of the past?
Examining ideas of time, and the very nature of our physical presence within space.
Are we becoming virtual? Or do we occupy a physical presence within reality?
Events from the past and present exist in the future as memories
Traces that are incomplete & histories that can be revisited
(In part)

For sample pages of Issue One click here