CAS OPEN OPEN ( June 2025) and ASSOCIATES SUMMER SHOW (August, September, 2025) at Chapel Arts Studios

 

My entry to OPEN OPEN, Chapel Arts Studios

'Remember Tomorrow', May 2025

             


My practice is increasingly concerned with unmaking—not as an act of destruction, but as a methodology that resists the dominant narratives of capitalism, which equate progress with accumulation, productivity, and overconsumption. Unmaking as a concept investigated by a group of environmental scientists based at Utrecht University (Netherland), led by Giuseppe Feola, inspired my proposal. For Feola it is about rethinking ‘alternative ways of living, working and interacting with our environment (2019). 

Drawing from my PhD research study and a turn toward performance-based work, I find myself returning to making with my hands—not just thinking. I am craving a tactile engagement with materials—a return to land, territories, traces, and animal matter that inspired my previous installation works.

Nonetheless, I feel that the world contains enough things. This has prompted a shift in my artistic focus: away from the art object and towards art as process, gesture, and social connectedness. My work is increasingly informed by post-humanist thought, particularly the writings of Deleuze and Guattari (2019), and more recently Elizabeth Grosz in Becoming Undone (2011), which invites us to consider life as a fluid assemblage of organic and inorganic matter, always becoming,  in constant flux. I explore unmaking as a generative act: a practice of making and re-making that traces the folds of materials and moments, and reimagine what might emerge if we allow ourselves to come undone, together; a search for connection for new ecologies of assembling and relating.

Remember Tomorrow

My Entry for CAS Open show, 'Wish you were here', named 'Remember Tomorrow' is an invitation to notice and remember every little action and its impact on our environment as an act of caring. A little ball of wool becomes an entanglement of matter: wool, sweat, spider web, dust, and thoughts, a hand-held ball. Caring as a gift, caring as remembering, caring as reimagining our little world. The image printed on bamboo paper is placed on a T-ruler, a reference to the act of designing and shaping the world. The fragile equilibrium is readjusted with letterpress lead letters and spacers—a reminder that losing balance is part of the balance, a continuous rebalancing act between all elements.

I view unmaking as an act of reorientation: a way to revisit the familiar, dismantle assumptions, and uncover new potentials for connection and becoming. 

'Remember Tomorrow' invites the visitor to observe, listen, and document moments of vulnerability and transformation in both ourselves, our materials, and the environment. 

CAS summer show: TRACES 

This exhibition marks my post-PhD return to CAS as an active associate member. I joined CAS in its early stages in 2008, and since then, I have taken part in numerous collective projects both within and outside the Chapel.

In the gallery, I make visible a trace of my last art piece recently entered in the open show( see image 1: Remember Tomorrow): marking the absence of work, a trace as 'residue of meanings'* from past artworks,  engagement, collaboration and frienship that pays tribute to the works of the many associates who have engaged in, and contributed to the group's amorphous fluid structure. My return to the group is marked by both a nostalgia for the freshness and spontaneity that CAS showed in its emergence and by the promise of new artistic adventures and co-creations.

The absence of work, the trace remaining on the wall, echoes a sense of hope for the future: a search for connection through becoming other for new ecologies of assembling and relating.

* to echo Kate Myeczkowska's introductory essay, and the writing of Jacques Derrida

Keywords: Absence, Assemblages, More-than-human, Post-materialism, Post-human, Presence, Togetherness, Traces, Unmaking.

laurencerushbyart.co.uk

Laurencerushby-events.blogspot.com 

My entry for TRACES:

Title: Ley de los Cambios ( 'Law of Change', title inspired by  Jorge Oteiza's concept of aesthetic space)