MAKING INTRODUCTIONS

The 4X20 Choreography Platform promotes the work of up-and-coming choreographers as they start their careers. We commission and support two choreographers each year to produce new work and bring it to a new audience. This year, the 4X20 Choreography Platform winners premiered their work at Festival of Dance 2023 , which will be followed by a performance at Pavilion Dance South West (PDSW) in Bournemouth, 29 September 2023. To catch their performances book your tickets here: https://www.pdsw.org.uk/whats-on/messums-4x20-choreography-platform-presents-chandenie-gobardhan-john-william-watson/ Filmed and edited by Joe Priest, Monkeyflip Media. Thank you to all platform supporters and affiliated partners.

Meet artist Tyga Helme in her studio on the Wiltshire Downs. Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed. She couples minute observation of the teeming forest floor – where the emerald green of a bramble leaf sits in stark juxtaposition to an array of cold blue silver leaves – with the flux and movement of unceasing growth. A rising star in the new British Landscape movement her works embodies an awakening to the importance of the ground beneath our feet. Although Tyga lives and works in the UK she won an Erasmus scholarship to study at the L’Ecole Nationale Superieue des Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg and for more than a year taught at the International Institute for Arts, Modinagar in India. Her work is held in held in a number of important collections including the Royal Collection.

Kennedy Junior Muntanga is a movement artist born in Ndola, Zambia where he resided until he was 7. The importance of dance was already embedded in him through his African heritage, which he began to study from the age of 12. Kennedy furthered his training and graduated in Ballet and Contemporary Dance at the Rambert School in July 2019. Kennedy is the Artistic Director of Kennedy Muntanga Dance Theatre, a new company based in London whose mission is to create work that represents many cultures, life experiences and stories. Kennedy presented his piece 'Greater than Lion' at Messums Wiltshire's Festival of Dance in September 2021.

Antony Williams works almost exclusively in egg tempera – a painstaking, exacting medium in which egg is used instead of linseed oil as the binding medium. While oil allows for a degree of flexibility and manipulation of the painted surface before it dries, many days after initial application, this technique does not easily allow for alteration. All his work is based on intense observation, particularly of human flesh, creating as a result a heightened sense of realism. Antony trained at Farnham College of Art and Portsmouth University and is a member of the New English Art Club, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters and the Pastel Society.

Tuesday Riddell was one of the very first on our emerging talents programme. Tuesday studied at the Painter-Stainers Decorative Surface Fellowship at City & Guilds of London Art School – the only Fellowship in the UK that provides specialist training in the craft of decorative surface techniques to ensure that endangered skills are kept alive and vibrant in contemporary practice. ‘Making Introductions’ is a series of five films produced in partnership with our artists and focuses on the techniques that stand at the core of their respective studio processes. All of these short classes can be followed at home and will be released throughout the Christmas holidays. In one fifteen-minute video we hope you will learn a little about one of our artists and a lot about their process. Every masterpiece starts with a sketch, every journey with a step. It is often forgotten that art is as much a language as speaking. “Making Introductions” is about learning these different ways of communicating and being able to take part in the conversation.

'Making Introductions' is produced in partnership with our artists and focuses on the techniques that stand at the core of their respective studio processes. All of these short classes can be followed at home and will be released throughout the Christmas holidays. In one fifteen-minute video we hope you will learn a little about one of our artists and a lot about their process. Every masterpiece starts with a sketch, every journey with a step. It is often forgotten that art is as much a language as speaking. “Making Introductions” is about learning these different ways of communicating and being able to take part in the conversation.

'Making Introductions' is produced in partnership with our artists and focuses on the techniques that stand at the core of their respective studio processes. All of these short classes can be followed at home and will be released throughout the Christmas holidays. In one fifteen-minute video we hope you will learn a little about one of our artists and a lot about their process. Every masterpiece starts with a sketch, every journey with a step. It is often forgotten that art is as much a language as speaking. “Making Introductions” is about learning these different ways of communicating and being able to take part in the conversation. We began working with Francesco Poiana in 2019 with his debut show following a residency at Messums Wiltshire as part of our emerging talents programme. Francesco trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome before studying fine art printing at the Albicocca workshop in Udine and then taking his masters degree at St Martin’s College of Art in London. He now attends the Royal Drawing School. We are currently working towards an online exhibition of his recent work.

In February 2023, ceramic artist Thiébaut Chagué began an artist’s residency at Messums Wiltshire. The project was to build a 10ft high sculpture in clay that would be fired in a 5 metre high woodfired kiln as a live spectacle. The project was completed in March 2023 despite high winds and heavy rain. In this interview Thiébaut discusses the project ahead of the firing.

Tom Waugh makes sculptures from stone and marble that depict discarded, mass-produced objects. Plastic bags, cardboard boxes, and tin cans are squashed, crushed, and wrinkled, documenting the casual imprints of human use. Using the processes and techniques of classical marble carving, and paying close attention to form and surface detail, he achieves a high level of realism in his work. Some of the sculptures are life-size, others are larger than life, and some appear, like fossils, emerging from the pristine rock. Materials are carefully chosen to achieve realism: white marble takes on the appearance of plastic or polystyrene, ironstone becomes rusty metal and Portland Stone is transformed into crumpled cardboard, rendering solid, immutable marble and limestone into the light malleable forms of discarded objects. Despite the use of traditional materials and techniques, his work has tensions and contradictions: between classical and contemporary art; between temporality and permanence; and between humour and serious environmental and social issues.