PLAN FOR A RUIN
26 September  – 4 November 2013

Featuring:
Melanie Counsell
Heather & Ivan Morison
James Parkinson
Marie Toseland
David Wojtowycz

Plan for a Ruin has been curated by Simon Morrissey, Director of WORKS|PROJECTS, as a direct response to the atmospheric, semi-derelict fifth floor and attic at Islington Mill, Salford, Manchester.

The exhibition features leading British artists Melanie Counsell and Heather & Ivan Morison together with emerging artists from the UK and USA James Parkinson, Marie Toseland and David Wojtowycz.

The exhibition uses carefully selected artworks to activate the space as an agent in a broken narrative about a state of perpetual entropy. Each image and object within the deteriorating industrial architecture of Islington Mill’s top floor is disconnected, fragmented, yet conjures the idea of the ruin to life.

The ruin is the landscape. It is the building. It’s occupants. Each component is a ruin in itself. James Parkinson’s paintings are like excised sculptural fragments of architectural surfaces that have never existed. David Wojtowycz’s film The Lake presents a portal into an uneasy landscape that haunts the derelict spaces of the mill with its song.  Heather & Ivan Morison invite us to rest at a cold fire of blackened bones to view this unreachable lake. In the attic Melanie Counsell’s model for a space obliterated by an unusable staircase projects a future architecture that consumes itself whilst Marie Toseland’s work infuses the virtually empty space with a glacially slow decay which is almost sexual in its intensity.

An impossible divided sea. Torpid collapsing forms. A disemboweled cat. A solitary voice. A framework of decay…

The ruin is a place without time. It is a moment without space. And it is complete.

Follow this link for documentation of the exhibition.