The Current Exhibition

Throughout August 2010: Rebecca Freeman: The Half-Remembered Memoirs of a Wayward Brother

Born 1985 Essex. Currently lives and works in Essex.

We are delighted to welcome Rebecca Freeman back to Neo’s Gallery for a solo exhibition of her new work. This exhibition will launch Neo’s new gallery space in the basement bar of Cafe Renroc, our new location in Edinburgh. Invitations to the Private View will be sent out in mid July. For further information please email the gallery.

Freeman studied Fine Art at the University of Cumbria where she developed her love for printmaking as well as animation and shadow theatre. This is her second exhibition with Neo’s Gallery: In early Spring 2009 she exhibited printmaking and drawings as Freeman and Fine in collaboration with Adam Fine (USA). However, the main focus of this earlier exhibition was the screening of their film In You Everything Sank, a stop motion film transcribing works by T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas. In Autumn 2010 she will continue her studies in Illustration: Authorial Practice at University College, Falmouth, Cornwall.

Her prints are illustrations to untold stories. She creates charaters that are familiar and sometimes perturbing, certain references can be made to the zoomorphic cast of folk tales, along with their peculiar situations. Freeman takes ideas from the universal act of living, employing aspects such as hope, alienation, love in all its forms and the family construct to build series of related images. The characters themselves pop into her head uninvited and are worked into narratives of their own. These stories are not written and are not to be dictated. They are for the viewer to draw out what is important to them and bend the narrative their own way.

So follows the tale of a tiger, his human mistress and the children they have ….

About the Printmaking Process

Rebecca’s prints are made using zinc plates etched using nitric acid. The process starts with coating the plate with an acid resistant layer of wax and grease (’ground’), then smoking it to add a protective layer of carbon. Using a ‘point’ (essentially a pin stuck in a wooden grip) she draws her design, thus exposing the metal beneath, before bathing the plate in acid to ‘bite’ the design. After cleaning and de-greasing the plate, the print is made by pressing ink into the grooves, then wiping the excess off the surface and passing it under a press under water- softened paper. To add texture a ground of softer consistency can be used and marked using a variety of tools. To add tone aquatint is used. This involves dusting the plate with a powdered resin, then heating and melting it to cover the plate with tiny droplets. The plate is then introduced back to the (diluted) acid in stages, blocking areas between with varnish. The longer the metal is exposed to the acid, the darker and stronger the mark will be.

Here is a text by Rebecca Freeman’s sometime collaborator, Adam Fine.

Rebecca Freeman

“Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.” (Anish Kapoor)

The sagas of the Nords, the poems of the Celts, the mystery plays of the early Christians, and the fables of the Greeks, where anthropomorphic animals, earthly spirits and gods mingle, enlightening the reader or listener to a much greater truth: all of these follow a tradition where art, narrative and illumination converge. The passing of knowledge, of concepts, is performed by the bard and not the scholar.

“One lesson we can learn from pre-industrial peoples is the power of storytelling. I am struck by how important storytelling is among tribal peoples; it forms the basis of their educational systems. The Celtic peoples, for example, insisted that only the poets could be teachers. Why? I think it is because knowledge that is not passed through the heart is dangerous: it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip; it may squelch life out of the learners. What if our educational systems were to insist that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists? What transformations would follow?” (Matthew Fox)

…. As Fox suggests, emotive response is key to understanding.

On another note, there exists within the arts certain perceived hierarchies between its forms, such as theatre, illustration, opera, photography, film, poetry, prose, and of course—upper case, mind you—Fine Art. When an illustration transforms the written word into a different and unique visual form, in many circles, that is somehow lower on the scale than Fine Art. And even within the fine arts, emotional response to a work often takes a backseat to the supposed intellectual response or clever piece, the one the viewer will get only if he or she makes the connection between the Calder reference and the b-side from a little known proto-punk band from the early 70’s. Those in the ‘in-crowd’ relish in the clever nods, deriding that which emotes to them and especially those beyond their circle. To further the musical metaphor, it’s somewhat like disliking your favourite band once they get signed to a major label, become available to a wider audience, and get played on the radio. Well, perhaps the radio bit is going too far.

So what happens when the illustrations do not come from a story, nor will a verbalised story ever follow?

Such is the work and practice of Rebecca Freeman. Her prints, drawings, sculptures, paintings, installations and animations utilize the language of illustration, whilst offering the viewer the opportunity to make sense of it all: a narrative suggested, but existing beyond firm reach in the aether. The work itself is difficult to define, as she fully intends it to be. What is the viewer’s moral of the story? Is this a metaphor for […]? It is the lasting power of the myth, the story, the fable, which drives her decisions and imagery. And, whether she wants it to or not, Freeman challenges the arbitrary hierarchies of the arts. Her work begs a greater interpretation like the Kuleshov Effect on paper, in a controlled and unapologetic manner. It has not only an emotive effect; it asks the viewer to recall the childhood truth of Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, the unsettling and uneasy logic of dreams, the moment when she or he questions if she did just see a light in the dark, wooded distance. It exists in the liminal space between countless variations of a single truth, where your mind has to fill in your own unique explanation.

Adam Fine, 2010