London, October 2008

Curator Pascale Lacroix reopoened her home as an exhibition space in October 2008 and invited artists Valerie Jolly and Tamarin Norwood to create new work for the occasion. Number Five Princelet Street is a carefully preserved early Georgian house built in 1725, just off Brick Lane. The original timber panels in the rooms and hallway of the house create an ambience of domestic warmth and intimacy. Its owner Pascale Lacroix, a young French woman with a Doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris, studied with Christie's Modern Arts and worked for the Purdy-Hicks Gallery at Bankside before opening a gallery in her home in 1999. Citations Lifted Loose is the first show held there since 2003.

The artists approach the project as a residency, building on affinities between their practices to respond to the space as a lived-in environment. They create quiet interventions into the fabric of the ground floor living room, which continues to be lived in for the duration of the exhibition. Without explicit labeling to distinguish between the artists’ interventions and the everyday objects in the room, the works imbue the room with a tone of comfortable, articulate strangeness.

Tamarin’s small objects appear to be functional but have no clear purpose within the domestic space. Amended pieces of furniture, prosthetic table legs, quietly rotating constructions that cast light around the room, humming or clicking as two objects momentarily touch… the works conceal themselves within the homely vocabulary of the setting, revealing themselves slowly as one explores the space. Tamarin's objects might be imagined as citations, and the ground around her citations as the room itself, with its furniture still in place: the raw material backdrop of the world.

Valerie’s colourless and weightless constructions are paper casts of everyday objects. They echo the forms of the original things yet consciously depart from their real-world substance. Pale and sometimes incomplete or opened up, her sculptures are like silent citation marks that reiterate the objects in the room. They become the inverted commas that hold the artwork separate from the ground around it, watching the strangeness of the world from above, ‘lifting our citations loose’…

Tamarin Norwood's works in Citations Lifted Loose:
Each to Each
Table with Chairs
Nightjar
Cup Handle Holder
Book Holder Opener
Book Holder Opener Weight Holder
Raft
The Sound of Envelopes Coming from the Cupboard
Trying to Remember How the Shelf Went in the Cupboard
Plant Pots
Conversation Piece

With thanks to Matt Dyas for photographing the exhibition.

Citations Lifted Loose is part of the Shoreditch Concrete and Glass Festival.
www.citationsliftedloose.wordpress.com

5 Princelet Street, London E1 6QH
2-9 October 2008 12-6pm
(or by appointment 0207 247 06 01)

Private View Thursday 2 October 6-9pm