GATE CRASH

The Gate Art Collective presents GATE CRASH the last of 4 exhibitions at 57a Goldhawk Road - located beside Goldhawk Road tube station. This closing exhibition will open on Tuesday 10th June at 2pm, with drinks after at The Gate - 54 Richford Gate, Richford Street

Forms of art take over this unit (the ex-florists) for a few more days before the new tenant moves in. Today's temporary art space = tomorrows eternal coffee shop. There was no rent or electricity to pay for this 1 month occupation. It was free TfL PR, based on The Gate's charitable status - an organization where art and music are made by people who have what is called learning disabilities. In between garbage bags lie fake bombs surrounded by banners, shields, flag maps and Atos painting. On one wall hangs a sculpture of a naked woman made by one of the members of the collective who has recently started investigating her lesbian identity.

 

 

 

 

WRITING PICTURES

The Gate Art Collective presents WRITING PICTURES the third of 4 exhibitions at 57a Goldhawk Road - located beside Goldhawk Road tube station.  The exhibition will open on Tuesday 3rd June at 2pm, with drinks after at The Gate - 54 Richford Gate, Richford Street.

Asemic writing is a wordless form of art writing, characterized as unreadable in a traditional sense. This is due to its mostly abstract, wordless nature and because the writing is not a notation system of any existing spoken language. As such, a reader of a piece of Asemic writing is left to their own power of interpretation, so as to grasp the content of what is written. Within my work with people who have what is called learning disabilities (and further interest due to my son Ruairi, who was born with down syndrome) I found this most interesting. Given its focus on attempting to find different ways of communicating I became very interested in the precepts of Asemic writing and what it could mean in my own work; learning their ways of communicating rather than forcing ours on  them - could this be the way we should be working with individuals considered learning disabled? I began to test this by posting work on an Asemics group on Facebook, without revealing that the artists had disabilities. This was successful and led to a further group to showcase their art. It has also ignited an interest in my own attempts at Asemic work, despite never having been artistically active (at least visually) before. Included here is work we felt is perhaps representative of Asemic writing, work made with the techniques of this discipline in mind, Individual works, as well as collaborations between myself and the other members of the GATE arts collective (and my son).

Arlo Yates 2014

 

THE OPENING