Maya Ramsay's blog
www.axisweb.org/mastarsaward
I will be showing this piece ‘Incarceration’ (surface lifted from Bletchley Park wall with cobwebs & coat rack) at The London Group Centenary Open 2013, The Cello Factory, 33-34 Cornwall Rd, London, SE1 8TJ.
Exhibition open daily 12-6pm 15th-24th May, Artists’ Talks Thurs 23rd May 6pm.
STATION X exhibition at Bletchey Park Museum
The latest installment of my exhibition STATION X will be on display in Alan Turing’s hut at the Bletchley Park Museum until end of June, 2013.
This follows the critically acclaimed STATION X exhibition presented at MK Gallery Project Space earlier this year, as featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
BBC Interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-17730926
BBC Gallery of images: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-17879181
BBC Radio Interview: http://soundcloud.com/mkgallery
Jotta Interview: http://www.jotta.com/jotta/published/home/article/v2-published/1912/maya-ramsay-lifting-skins
STATION X blog http://documentingstationx.wordpress.com/
STATION X facebook https://www.facebook.com/documentingstationx
‘Incarceration’ (details, surface lifted from Bletchley Park wall with coat rack and cobwebs), 2012
A review of my recent exhibition ‘Harboured Guest’
‘Harboured Guest’ at 4 Windmill Street, W1T 2HZ, off Tottenham Court Rd. 24th Oct to 17th November. Open Thurs & Fri 2-5pm and Sat 11-5pm.
Image: ‘Incarceration’ (surface of wall with cobwebs & coat rack lifted from Bletchley Park).
I’m currently showing some new work in a new gallery off Tottenham Court Road. This work was made on site in derelict buildings at Bletchley Park used by the WW11 code-breakers.
4 Windmill Street, London, W1T 2HZ
Gallery open Thursday- Friday 2-5pm & Saturday 11-5pm. Untill 17th November.
Image: ‘FIRST AID BOX POSITION’, Maya Ramsay, 2012
The latest installment of my exhibition STATION X will be on display in Alan Turing’s hut at the Bletchley Park Museum untill 2013.
This follows the critically acclaimed STATION X exhibition presented at MK Gallery Project Space earlier this year, as featured on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
BBC Interview: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-17730926
BBC Gallery of images: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-17879181
BBC Radio Interview: http://soundcloud.com/mkgallery
Jotta Interview: http://www.jotta.com/jotta/published/home/article/v2-published/1912/maya-ramsay-lifting-skins
STATION X blog http://documentingstationx.wordpress.com/
STATION X facebook https://www.facebook.com/documentingstationx
SHADOW LINES
ANNE HARILD | ROSE O’GALLIVAN | MAYA RAMSAY
9 November – 10 December 2011Wed-Fri 11-6, Sat 11-4 T I N T Y P EThird Floor18 St Cross Street
London EC1 8UN
info@tintypegallery.com 5 minutes walk from Farringdon/Chancery Lane Underground Palimpsests and left-over traces can be glimpsed every day, particularly in a city: pieces of time left hanging. SHADOW LINES features the work of three artists who source the material presence of past fragments.
Maya Ramsay works with buildings due to be demolished or renovated. She is currently working at Bletchley Park in the huts used by the code-breakers. Ramsay has developed a process of lifting pigment, debris and the texture of surfaces to create a kind of epidermis. These are presented, like paintings, on the wall but they are simultaneously archaeological documents. Their titles, which refer to military conflicts and death tolls, suggest a political undertow in Ramsay’s presentation of rejected, left behind strata.
Anne Harild’s stop frame animation, Looking Glass, uses discarded window frames to reflect an entirely different architectural space: the Victorian church in which she was working. The film evokes glimpses of a place and the passage of time. Harild describes it as a performance she has set up in which it is the space that performs.
Rose O’Gallivan’s work pivots on the idea that the mute can be presented. Contradicting the presumption that a work has a message or needs to inform, O’Gallivan is more interested in absence creating a presence. Leftover traces, that can be as minimal as the mark left in a piece of folded material, become part of print/paper/fabric/sculptural installations. She often crops or obstructs images in a way that foregrounds textures and materials.
I have been working on a project entitled STATION X for a year at Bletchley Park, Home of the World War Two Codebreakers.
STATION Xoffers a multi-sensory insight into the disused buildings of Bletchley Park, (otherwise known as STATION X), the home of the World War Two Codebreakers, and arguably one of Britain’s most important historical sites.
Eleven thousand people worked in secret at Bletchley Park during World War Two and were sworn to secrecy about their activities for the following thirty years. Bletchley Park is where the first programmable electronic computer was invented and this exhibition coincides with the centenary celebrations of the birth of Alan Turing, the ‘father of computer science’, who worked at Bletchley Park.
This exhibition documents the visual and aural histories imbued in the very fabric of the disused buildings, before they are lost when planned renovation takes place.
Four artists were granted special access to document these highly atmospheric buildings, which are usually inaccessible to the public owing to their dangerous state of repair. Over the period of a year, the artists endured extremely harsh conditions whilst working in rooms that have been unventilated and only occupied by rats and pigeons for decades.
The exhibition is the result of a unique collaboration between sound artist Caroline Devine, photographer Rachael Marshall, fine artist Maya Ramsay and filmmaker Luke Williams. Together they provide a contemporary interpretation of Station X; this includes work made from surfaces lifted from the walls of the buildings, recordings of sounds produced by and within the decaying buildings and photographic and filmed documentation of the buildings.
In some of the buildings it appears as if the workers have just downed tools and left; a rusty coat hanger swings on a hook with a name scrawled on it and diagrams lie in a file covered in mould. Others provide fascinating insights into what happens when nature is left to its own devices in a building for two and a half decades.
