An exhibition of installation works by Ilse Mikula

Private View: Friday 2nd of July 2010 - 6 pm to 11 pm
Exhibition runs from: Friday 2nd of July - Thursday 8th of July 2010
Gallery Opening Hours: Mon - Fri: 11am to 6.30 pm - Sat: 12.30 pm - 5.00 pm
Last day of Exhibition: Thursday 8th of July: 10.00 am to 5.00 pm

Ilse Mikula endeavours to explore what links us to a place and a sense of belonging. When we are in a place, it is determined by its physicality and spatial limitation, once we leave the location, all that links us to the space is a process of reminiscence and emotional reflections. Thus through absence the place becomes memory.

Mikula
first explored this concept with her project "Solis Journey". The
intervention entailed the displacement of a laundrette as a 3-D photographic
representation in the form of multiple light-boxes which were then placed on
the banks of the river Thames. The small laundrette light-boxes removed from
their original form & functionality seemed to occupy in essence more of
what they actually were; vessels for often migrant people’ to the UK's
thoughts, senses of longing & nostalgia.  Later the light-boxes were
floated on the river and when photographed became abstract and fleeting. 

These
ideas were again revisited through her work “Departure”. Inspired by a chance
meeting with 89 year old retired shepherd, Stanley Akrigg, Mikula, visited his
dry stone walls and began to explore the nature of nostalgia when related to a
certain space (your childhood home for instance). Stanley Akrigg completed
nearly 8 miles of dry stone wall which could be considered as a physical
imprint of his time there. In “Departure” Mikula relocated Stanley’s wall in
her Chelsea degree show, accompanied by his voiceover of recollections
associated with this place invoking a profound sense of place and memory.

Ilse
Mikula is continuing conceptual ideas of place in her present and future work.
She comments: "I’m further
displacing “Departure” within other physical contexts. The work for my
forthcoming show at Red Gate Gallery, will display a WW1 U-boat lying partially
submerged in the floor of the gallery, its menacing presence and place in
history, is re-interpreted. This comes from my personal investigation of an
event which involved my great-grandfather. Event rather than place becomes the
link, for the place is in the middle of the ocean. The place itself remains
intangible.