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How Green Was My Valley
Miya Kosowick & Phillip Rhys Olney
The Art House
30 - 36 Pritchards Road, London
Curatorial Text
A duo exhibition examining qualities of desire and faith in familiar locales. In the form of casts and sculptural paintings as artefacts, or stainless steel led religious rites, these artist catechize ideas of relic an authenticity through narrativised ephemera. Ultimately, 'How Green Was My Valley' presents works by two artists who seek to question these traces' authority. Kosowick’s sculptures, paintings, and mixed media works suggest speculative settings ambiguously suspended in time (past or future). Her sculptures reimagine a pre-existing folly in Sydenham Hill woods, constructed during the Victorian era as a bespoke decorative Roman ruin. Through 3D scanning, printing, and reproducing fragments of the folly in Jesmonite, Kosowick subverts its original intention and expands upon its legacy. Olney’s works see labour as a vital component of meaningful art practice, and are drawn from the stainless steel and detritus of the commercial kitchens in which he has worked. In their reproduction and consolidation, these remnant interrogate the cultural role of sites of both traditional and contemporary working industries. Olney's latent attention toward sites of labour casts artistic practice within the workplace as political action, using material produced 'surplus to need' through employment as indicators of the oft-overlooked yet generative practices within it.
Miya Kosowick & Phillip Rhys Olney
The Art House
30 - 36 Pritchards Road, London
Curatorial Text
A duo exhibition examining qualities of desire and faith in familiar locales. In the form of casts and sculptural paintings as artefacts, or stainless steel led religious rites, these artist catechize ideas of relic an authenticity through narrativised ephemera. Ultimately, 'How Green Was My Valley' presents works by two artists who seek to question these traces' authority. Kosowick’s sculptures, paintings, and mixed media works suggest speculative settings ambiguously suspended in time (past or future). Her sculptures reimagine a pre-existing folly in Sydenham Hill woods, constructed during the Victorian era as a bespoke decorative Roman ruin. Through 3D scanning, printing, and reproducing fragments of the folly in Jesmonite, Kosowick subverts its original intention and expands upon its legacy. Olney’s works see labour as a vital component of meaningful art practice, and are drawn from the stainless steel and detritus of the commercial kitchens in which he has worked. In their reproduction and consolidation, these remnant interrogate the cultural role of sites of both traditional and contemporary working industries. Olney's latent attention toward sites of labour casts artistic practice within the workplace as political action, using material produced 'surplus to need' through employment as indicators of the oft-overlooked yet generative practices within it.
