THE JERWOOD CONTEMPORARY MAKERS SHOW
The most satisfying thing a human being can do - and the sexiest - is to make something.
Life is about relationship - to each other - and to the material world. Making something is a relationship
The verb is the clue. We make love, we make babies, we make dinner, we make sense, we make a difference, we make it up, we make it new....
True, we sometimes make a mess, but creativity never was a factory finish.
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Tracey Emin
Arguments that begin, But is it art? miss the point. The point is that Tracey Emin has done more for public awareness of art, both as a force in its own right, and as a necessary part of life, than any other living artist.
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Liza Lou
It's a creative moment in itself, bringing Lisa Lou to White Cube in Hoxton. In 1875, a young orphanage lad, a road sweeper and rat catcher turned barrow boy, noticed how London's East End Costermongers, in old Spitalfields Market, decorated the seams of their jackets and trousers with pearly buttons. These flash boys, in their 'flash boy suits', as they called them, wanted to stand out from their pyramids of fruit and veg. The young boy got excited by these self-made peacocks, and he took a whole suit and hat and sewed the lot with buttons, sequins and beads. Every surface inch was beaded. The Pearly King was born.
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Barbara Hepworth
Jeanette Winterson is spellbound by the radical achievement of Barbara Hepworth whose centenary year is celebrated by exhibitions at Tate St Ives and in her nativeYorkshire.
Henry Moore called 1932 'The Year of the Hole'. The fact is that Barbara Hepworth made her first pierced form in 1931, the year she gave birth to her first child.
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Tacita Dean
This summer we had the pleasure of walking along the River Thames between the Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern, and finding not one, but two, major women artists dominating both spaces. Rebecca Horn and Frida Kahlo were an exciting double first, and this autumn, women will again be major players in the art galleries, with new work by Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing and Tacita Dean, all coming our way.
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Frida Kahlo (X2)
Icon. Muse. Celebrity. Frida Kahlo is now considered by many to be the best female painter of the twentieth century, and a woman whose personal story is so persuasive that Hollywood has turned her life into big screen drama.
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Jeanette Winterson interviews Rebecca Horn for her Retrospective at The Hayward Gallery - London 2005
'In 1964 I was twenty years old and living in Barcelona in one of those hotels where you rent rooms by the hour. I was working with glass fibre, without a mask or anything, because nobody said it was dangerous, then suddenly I got very sick. For a year I was in a Sanatorium. My parents died. I was totally isolated. That's when I began to produce my first body-sculptures. I could sew lying in bed.'
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Matisse
'There's nothing to be done but to live in and for yourself - today you're a great genius - tomorrow they'll despise you - it's only natural.'
At the close of her first volume, The Unknown Matisse, Hilary Spurling left us with Matisse just short of his fortieth birthday in 1909, tentatively toasting the future. For twenty years he had lived hand to mouth, accepting ridicule and misunderstanding, relying on a few buyers like Sarah Stein, (Gertrude Stein's sister-in-law), to put food on the table and pay the rent.
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Paul Johnson
Ruskin said, 'Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts; the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art... of the three, the only trustworthy one is the last.'
Few of us nowadays trust politicians or newspapers. Not many of us believe in the objectivity of history. We have learned to question events past and present, with a cynicism that Ruskin, and his nineteenth century contemporaries, would find bewilderingly painful, but the notion that art might be the place for faith and optimism - which is how I would define trust - is probably as ridiculous to most people as Tracy Emin's My Bed.
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Eva Hesse
'There isn't a thing in my life that hasn't been extreme - personal health, family, economic situations.'
Eva Hesse had the perfect personal CV for an artist. Her family were forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1939, and she and her sister were separated from their parents for five months. Eva was only two when she was put on a train to Holland to escape Nazi persecution. Her father was a criminal lawyer and the family was well to do. When they eventually settled in Washington Heights, New York, they had to take in a boarder to pay the bills, and her father worked as an insurance broker.
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