Curious Quarters brings together a rich variety of media: digital print, drawing, models, book art and installation, all exploring the notion of built structure as a metaphor for the self and as a framework for belonging. Three artists who have collaborated in thought and process over the last three years present thought provoking, engaging work on the themes of strength, fragility and belonging in the context of habitation.

Ali Clarke’s concrete paintings, digital prints and architectural sculptures explore themes of enclosure, boundaries, decay and urban nature. They play with extremes of solidity versus the fragile and delicate. In this exhibition, Ali will be building a giant architectural model inspired by functional, industrial structures that questions how we belong and occupy spaces.

Claire Reed specialises in playful and reflective site-specific work using a diverse combination of traditional and digital media. Claire uses the interplay of word and image to explore belief and value systems, and is currently focussing on issues of belonging in a context of change. She will be creating a series of works on this theme inspired by experimental book forms and typographic elements.

Helen Scalway’s work is greatly influenced by her experience of working for some years as an artist within a university department of interior architecture. Her current work is based on the idea of the house or built dwelling place as expressing human identity. She explores the idea of ‘the habitation of the self’ through such elements as house façades, doors and openings as giving access to apparently outward looking spaces, but leading to walls, barriers, trapdoors, impossible stairways, guarding more inaccessible areas. She investigates this materially and metaphorically, often through drawing and book structures.

Biographies

Ali Clarke studied Spatial Design at Buckinghamshire College and Public Art at Chelsea College of Art and Design. She designed theatre sets and murals before focusing on sculpture and installation. She has exhibited sculptural work in galleries in London, Surrey and Sussex and created installations in outdoor locations. Ali was Artist-in-Residence at Orleans House Gallery where she created sculptural, architectural interventions in the woodland.

Claire Reed graduated with a First Class BA Honours Degree in Fine Art from the University of the Creative Arts and has worked extensively in the visual arts throughout her career. Her work has been exhibited and performed widely with her collaborative project ‘Letters:Cartas’ being presented at the World Congress in Dance Research, Athens. Claire was recently the inaugural Weybridge Artist-in-Residence, where she created a large-scale installation incorporating a 3-channel audio with works in 3D and on paper.

Helen Scalway graduated in Fine Art at Kingston University, followed by an M.A. in Sculpture at Chelsea. Since then she has worked in a series of artists’ residencies at Exeter University and at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she is currently artist in residence in the Department of Geography. Her works are held in various collections including the National Art Library at the V&A, London Transport Museum and Chelsea College of Art Artists Books Collection.