about
Rose Arbuthnott, The Spell, Mixed-media installation, 2023
Biography
Rose Arbuthnott (b. 1987, Cheltenham, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist based in London. Though she is Arbuthyes, she goes by the name Arbuthnott. Interested in colour, form, and space, she pursues Modernism without a cynical depression. She has recently discovered El Lissitzky who orders chaos in colour. It is now, in the 21st century, time to call into question the primacy of a mess and the potential for the universe to be organised. For the natural potential for organisation to exist in the universe is materially real. Malevich meets Paul Klee.
Rose Arbuthnott’s style is not uniquely her own, she has squandered everyone else’s ideas. But, if you are being generous, you can say that Rose’s work is the best thing you’ve ever seen. Rose often gets urine infections meaning that she has to often dart from the easel to the toilet several times during one painting.
The Still Lives were obsessive but the Grids proved to be even more so. The square became the basic archetype repeated everywhere. She started observing architecture which is hugely grid-centric. She went through many phases of this reproductivity from centimetre, to metre, to parameters in which productivity flourished boringly.
As far as purpose is concerned where does the purpose start? How can the arrangement of objects be purposeful? In pursuit of what can be done one loses the thread and recaptures it again. You may wonder if purpose is what the artist does just by making something or leaving something; behind perhaps.
Rose Arbuthnott was born in Cheltenham in 1987. She began painting in 1999 when a school teacher gave her a box of oil paints and asked her to copy Monet. In 2006 Arbuthnott pursued an undergraduate degree in Fine Art and Art History at Edinburgh University. She intercepted her studies at Edinburgh with a year at The Royal Drawing School in London. There she was awarded the esteemed Second Prize (2010). In 2008 Arbuthnott began as a Sculptor at the Pangolin Foundry, where she created wax moulds for sculptures. In June 2009, she worked to raise £70,000 for the advancement of a trial bowel cancer drug that helped to save her father’s life. Cetuximab has now been approved by NICE and is being used to treat NHS patients.
Arbuthnott co-founded ‘The Owl Barn’ Artist Residency in Gloucestershire in (2011); a community space for artists, makers and thinkers to develop their creative practice and engage with local community groups. She has since undertaken an artist residency at The First Food in Mexico (2014), and at the Xavier Project in Uganda (2015). Arbuthnott has developed her poetry with courses at Faber & Faber Publishing (2015), Goldsmiths University, London (2015), Ledbury (2019), and Arvon (2020). In 2018 she undertook a curating course at Central Saint Martins, London. In 2023 Arbuthnott graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Sculpture and a distinction for her thesis. She is currently undertaking a programme at MASS Art School in Woolwich, London.
Selected solo exhibitions include ‘He, She or They’ at Pintora Gallery, London, (2015), 'Still Lives', at Sixteen Gallery, Cheltenham, (2021) and ‘The Dowdry', at The Bothy, Cirencester, (2022). Selected Group Shows include, ‘Rose Arbuthnott and Alex Goodman: Tangled Roads, Journeys of the West Coast’, at Wetpaint Gallery, Stroud, (2015), ‘SOFT & HARD, Beyond Recognition and Queer Coding’, curated by Whiskey Chow for FESTUS 2023, (2023) and, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy, London (2023). In 2015 Arbuthnott was longlisted for the John Moore Painting Prize, at Tate, Liverpool.
Artist Statements
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An exploration of modernism (and the hereafter) , especially in the history of the use of colour. I completed a cycle of grid paintings last year. Where material meets the surreal, I have painted for a long time. I include two old paintings in this application so you can see. I painted near 100 still life paintings in 3 years. Somehow now it has become sculpture/installation, I am inspired by the use of colour in worlds cultures as it always has been- not just the west. I also am inspired by architecture. I draw all the time. It comes from carefully controlled daily energy. I know it’s a cliché in art but I am virtually blind to the meaning that they hold, but eventually it does come to me when I get some distance and I know ‘the why’. It’s a balance of worldly and private, this is important to me. I’m bereft of temporality, my sculptures are made of biodegradable materials, they are there and then gone, which I am bereft of often used in the next and next work. I would like to find more unity, between works I make, this I what I hope for on this residency. Ideas like that of materiality and the notion of intention are close in my thoughts. I am both feet in. I go to the national gallery draw from titian, recently, I could name a million inspirations, they come and go. I write poetry I make artists books with them, I’ve studied book art. And performance is on my cards, I like to perform. I think this comes from dyslexia the frustration with the self representation in word or something makes you want to be seen directly.
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My work is predominantly an escape from painting into sculpture, I am fascinated by the materiality (for want of a better word) of found things, from which I mount up installations.
I am interested in the environment, and how we care for it, from domestic places to the ocean and the jungle, how people can have a beneficial impact on the world, rather than feeling horrible about how it's going. The world is both internal and external, and bridging this is colour, which I sometimes work with in painting and installation, unseparated, context is very important to me, and I make installations with paintings to go further in expressing how I feel. This is where I am at the moment.
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After a slow start, with some help from my friend (Graham Hudson), instalationing started to snowball, each week more was added, more was taken away. Decoration, colour, things that mean things…
Translucency, paleness, a certain drift, groundswell, possibility, taking the happennesics of painting into sculpture, I was unsure what I was here to do. I feel like I’m feeding and watering a rabbit, or even a guinea pig, and it sniffles out of its sleeping hole a little bit more each day.
I have to pay close attention to what it likes to eat, sometimes it matters that there’s not much, sometimes it’s a free for all but it needs to be dragged back to be meaningful other than exuberant
In fact it is between this and fineness, or control, or beauty, about being inside something.
It almost doesn’t matter what I do just that I do it properly,
On the other hand, my work in all honesty with my whole heart, this year, started with a belief that art could respond to climate change, to make itself useful, and as soon as I introduced colour to the matrix it totally avoided this dream. This bothered me a bit, a lot!
What side of the divide do I stand, can art stand up or does it need to be recycled, to make useful people useful. In my politics it’s a no brainer, I suppose its all to talk about.
I also have an appropriation problem with some of the objects ‘I sequestered’, I wish to learn from them. Some people call me earthy which I am growing to understand. I think they mean how Beuys is earthy. A materiality, this is how I draw. I wait for the matrices to pull together, I place questions on them, I ask them to reveal themselves. I have been called modernist.
I can put up with a small amount of erasure or taring.
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I have a postgraduate diploma in life drawing so it is a shame this practice is on the back burner, I mean to get really into it this new term.
Unrelated, I also have a practice of abstract ink drawings in the school of Michaux like Appel too. They have transformed over a 6 month cycle, I'm not sure exactly when I started, half way through last spring. A few artist’s books, sketch books later they have drawn a presence between control and freedom, bordering on flatulence, bordering on travel, maybe instead of travel, in England, bordering on a tension of white paper and black line, that all is possible, so why this?
They have had the same measurements, and different scales, also including some lithography.
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I learned zinc plate lithography last term, these have become as well as pieces themselves but also elements in my installations. Layering colour, and working more intently with the quality of marks.
Control is a big question here, with installation there demands a control of the environment in question, in abstract art control is questionable too.
It is a lot about the eye, for me choices are made posthumously, and then as I gather experience they occur in the making, I become a fine artist, it's been in a below ground way, a lower route,