HERE TO BECOME
In summer 2023 alongside my fellow creatives Angelo Madonna, John Elcock and Silvia Battista we formed a co-operative art collective called Material Matters. This exciting project led to our first exhibition which took place in summer 2023 at Liverpool’s Bridewell Studios.
The exhibition together titled ‘Here to Become ‘featured as part of Liverpool International Biennial.
Visitors were invited to embrace the alchemical qualities of the material and the symbolic, weaved together into mythopoetics that are paradoxically both stable and mutable, human and more-than- human.
Angelo Madonna further explores his work on body-duality, his created forms presenting a kind of living alter-ego of the self: fragile works, that play with elemental forces of fire, water and air.
Also literally taking inspiration (‘re-spirare’ It.– departing, going, to breathe the last breath) from these forces, Silvia Battista invokes ritual practice to imagine a mythological, speculative fiction: centred on a series of works which powerfully and beautifully present an alternative semiotics.
Patric Rogers presents a startling geological examination of human identity, deconstructing the figure in 3D to argue for a re-appreciation of the contribution that landscape itself has on both our physical and spiritual manifestation.
John Elcock connects with and unifies our collective’s work with a kinetic sculpture whose enigmatic form, at giant scale, seeks to weigh human souls in a chilling metaphor for nuclear annihilation.
This show stemed from our shared connection to processes, questions and uncertainty, rather than a didactic of end-results and answers. Our artists look at change as a condition of life – as an infinite process of becoming, and we challenge the imposed addiction towards the new that neoliberal ontologies have impressed on our consciousness.
‘Here to Become’ was an Independents Biennial event responding to the theme of the 2023 Liverpool Biennial ‘uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things’ whose theme addresses the history and temperament of our city and its call for ancestral forms of knowledge, wisdom and healing.
Host
By Patric Rogers (2023) PLA Filament 3D Drawing
HOST presents a startling geological examination of human identity, deconstructing the figure in 3D to argue for a re-appreciation of the contribution that landscape itself has on both our physical and spiritual manifestation.
Queering the Cross
Silvia Battista (2023)
Taking inspiration (‘re-spirare’ It.– departing, going, to breathe the last breath) from these forces, Silvia Battista invokes ritual practice to imagine a mythological, speculative fiction: centred on a series of works which powerfully and beautifully present an alternative semiotics.
Falling diamonds are dancing on hot plates
Angelo Madonna (2023)
Angelo Madonna further explores his work on body-duality, his created forms presenting a kind of living alter-ego of the self: fragile works, that play with elemental forces of fire, water and air.
Trinity
John Elcock (2023)
Trinity is a large kinetic sculpture made of steel and feathers illustrating the existential potential of Pu-239 and its eschatological relation to the Trinity atomic weapon test.
This large kinetic work originated from the chance find of a round bolt of metal. The artwork connects the steel’s sheer heft and materiality to the extreme potential of an equivalent mass of Plutonium 239. This artwork is a meditation on these metaphysical implications.
Puddles
Angelo Madonna (2023)
This new work came to exist after few water’s experiments that the artist realized in his studio at Bridewell. His fascination on exposing opposite elements together, in this case water and heat or water and air, create an emergency dancing or invisible performance through the medium itself. A dance that will sadly end when the water will be reduced to steam or when water will vaporize in the air. In this specific work, the artist wants the audience to think of us as human beings and our live existence depending on the climate mutation, an opportunity to understand at last where we – inhabitants of the earth – live, what is our function here and how to orient ourselves and exist in this world in the years to come.
Cherenkov
John Elcock (2023)
Cherenkov is an installation created for the exhibition Here to Become at the Bridewell Studios, Liverpool for the 2023 Independents Biennial exploring the prophetic quality of Plutonium-239.
When light passes through water its speed is reduced by around a quarter. A charged particle emitted by a radioactive substance may have a speed greater than that of light in water. The resulting ‘sonic boom’ causes the emission of a characteristic blue light – Cherenkov radiation – named after the Soviet physicist and Nobel Laureate Pavel Cherenkov who first discovered it.
