Platform 20: Heavy Water – in-conversation with Maud Haya-Baviera, Joanna Whittle + Victoria Lucas

Artists

Maud Haya-Baviera

Maud Haya-Baviera was born in France and currently lives and works in Sheffield, UK. She works with a variety of media and methods including video, photography, sculpture and installation employing the strategies of appropriation, performance and participation. Her recent works, Things Fall Apart and Wish you were here, respond to a sense of isolation heightened by recent times. Within these works, several depictions of cultural histories have been playfully appropriated to question past representations and to construct new narratives. Her current interest lies in collecting images that have migrated through different cultural perspectives; this includes postcards, films, advertisements, TV series and archives. This material is digitised to create moving images that are intense and emotional fabrications, able to convey both personal and social histories.

Joanna Whittle

Joanna Whittle is a painter who also uses ceramics as part of her practice. She is a member of the Contemporary British Painting Society and studied Painting at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art. Her paintings unravel traditional landscape tropes; creating rich and seductive miniature paintings which draw the viewer into an uneasy world. They are highly detailed but also contain contradictions which erode certainty so that they become like hallucinations, which yet remain stubbornly painterly and viscous. The temporary structures she depicts such as tents, shelters, fairground facades and shrines describe fragile and moveable realities. But rather than moving, these makeshift structures sit in mud or water, vulnerable to time like weather brittle ruins. Within these works Whittle explores themes of ungroundedness and loss; of shifting perspectives and hidden activities and the residue of these in the landscape. Her ceramics emerge as artefacts from invented worlds and lost islands, taking the form of objects borne from rituals or ephemeral souvenir objects. In both practices Whittle presents the unreal as factual and explores different methods of display to authenticate this.

Victoria Lucas

Victoria Lucas lives and works in Sheffield. Recent artworks reference the language of quarrying and material extraction, as creative processes deconstruct and reconstitute ravaged landscapes and notions of female experience. Photogrammetry, video editing and 3D modelling techniques are combined with sculptural, sound and photographic processes. The artist’s voice becomes central to these works, as women’s experiences are symbolically dug out of the land through narration and performed action. These visual methods of remapping speak of a posthuman re-connection with the organic, as a reclamation of female subjectivity away from the dominating hold of extractive capitalism. This project also forms part of Lucas’ practice-led PhD enquiry at the Culture & Creativity Research Institute, which she is undertaking part-time at Sheffield Hallam University. Lucas has also recently been accepted on to The Posthuman & New Materialism course at Utrecht Summer School (2021), directed by Rosi Braidotti.