Emma Bennett, Molly Bythell, Mark Chapman, Callum Costello, Lauren Drummond, Joe Jefford, Steven Lowery, Liam McCabe, Amy Roberts, Matt Wilkinson, Zara Worth

5-21 October 2017

Matt Wilkinson, Composition i, 2014, video, 6:37min

‘Dialogus’ presents works by eleven artists selected from this year’s issue of Lungs magazine contributors, whose media span across video, short film, photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, and illustration.

Lungs Project is a curatorial collective founded in 2016 by two artists and two curators. All MA graduates of the University of Sunderland, the team consists of Angela Wingate-Burdon, Marta Rubinato, Rebecca Burdon, and Sheyda Porter. Based in the North East of England, Lungs Project aims to establish a trans-disciplinary platform to promote the work of underexposed artists and to bring together various creative practices throughout the region. The project focuses on facilitating artistic development and network growth by merging visual arts, design, crafts, and literature to create a dialogue between various disciplines. Lungs Project’s team uses the North East as the heart of the project to reach out to new audiences and to build an ever-expanding support network. With most of its founding members having multinational backgrounds, Lungs Project intends to extend this network internationally with Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland serving as the centre for collaboration and exchange.

This year, the publication is particularly concerned with the production of knowledge and adopts a curatorial model informed by French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Rhizome theory. The issue seeks to explore the dialogical relationship between the pages of the magazine as well as artworks in the physical world. Hence, the current issue and accompanying exhibition are both composed of multiple paths of investigation on how we create meaning. The Latin origin of the word dialogue: dialogus (dia: through, logos: word/reason), suggests a natural flow of meaning permeates through everything, ready to be extracted.

Emma Bennett gained a BA Fine Art at Teesside University in 2009 and currently lives in Middlesbrough. She makes paintings, drawings, sculptures and site-specific wall paintings that consider issues of physical and emotional engagement with known territories and spaces. Interested in Modernist and Post-War Architecture, she uses the built environment to seek out structures to investigate within her painting practice.

Molly Bythell is a recent graduate of BA Fine Art from Newcastle University. Her work absorbs paint’s supple ability to abstract and reinvent recycled images and targets an unorthodox representation of the body. Focusing on female nudes, Bythell’s appetite for challenging certain traditions has resulted in her to paint with an inelegant awkwardness which stems from the stereotype of being a female artist.

Mark Chapman is a filmmaker and artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne. His moving-image work has been selected for numerous international festivals, and he was one of the participants in the Berlinale Talent Campus at the Berlin Film Festival. He currently teaches film production at Northumbria University, while working towards a PhD exploring creative nonfiction.

Callum Costello completed his degree in Media Production at Northumbria University in 2012. He is a filmmaker currently running his own production house, A Breath’s End Ltd, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Costello was a finalist in the Media Trust Dream to Screen competition, as well as the first participant in the inaugural Tyneside Cinema/Northumbria University Graduate Artist in Residence, where his work Nevermore was exhibited before being shown again at Coastal Currents in Hastings.

Lauren Drummond currently works as an artist in Newcastle upon Tyne. Her practice predominately focuses on sculpture, installation, and drawing. She typically creates large-scale wooden structures that demonstrate an interest in the forest environment, its architecture, and playful narratives around the hunter and the hunted. Drummond's work often responds to rural environments from the perspective of a city inhabitant.

Caroline Hardaker earned both her BA and MFA Fine Art from Newcastle University. Her poetry has been published worldwide and is inspired by both philosophy and the world’s most recent scientific, speculative, and sociological happenings. Caroline is currently the in-house blogger for Riotous Indie Press, Mud Press, and reviews poetry and drama for Three Drops from a Cauldron e-zine. Her first poetry collection Bone Ovation is released by Valley Press in October 2017.

Joe Jefford utilises digital illustration as a more direct method to address political, technological, and environmental issues. His works are composed of multiple projects which seek to inform and influence each other. He is currently in the early stages of expanding his illustrative work into graphic novel format.

Steven Lowery received his BA Fine Art at Northumbria University in 2002 and his Master of Fine Art from Slade School of Art, London in 2005. His rant-strewn drawings are made on lined note paper with cut price stationery, obsessively crammed with scattershot words and images and are fuelled by a desperate dissatisfaction with the mundane distractions offered us.

Liam McCabe graduated from Northumbria University in 2016, with an MRes in Art and Design. He is a visual artist exploring data, repetition and information overload in contemporary art practice. His work focuses on alternative facts and post-truths.

Matt Miller is a poet and a theatre maker based in Newcastle upon Tyne. His work explores themes of place, identity and belonging. He has performed his poetry in the UK and Canada and is currently the Nottingham Poetry Society Slam Champion. Miller has produced two solo theatre shows, Sticking, and Rob Hobson Needs to Talk, and has completed artists’ residencies at Live Theatre and Alphabetti Theatre. In 2014, he was selected as one of BBC’s Verb New Voices, and his poem River Fragments was broadcast on Radio Three.

Amy Roberts created F**k It Yoga (2017) during her final year of BA Fine Art at Northumbria University. Roberts finds the idea of Yoga fascinating and, through F**k It Yoga, she aims to disrupt the notion of ‘relaxing therapy’ by combining New Age trends with what would not typically lie with such a calming experience.

David Spittle completed a PhD on the poetry of John Ashbery and Surrealism at Newcastle University. He has been twice shortlisted for the Melita Hume Prize (2015/2016) and was included in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2016 Anthology (Eyewear Press). His first collection, All Particles and Waves, will be released in Spring 2018 by Eyewear Press.

Matt Wilkinson is a BA Fine Art graduate of Newcastle University. His practice is mostly based in video, photography and writing. Although these media overlap, offering their own outlets of expression, Wilkinson does not view his work as one with a primary medium. He is a current member of North East of England artist collective, MILK, and project photographer for the Newcastle upon Tyne based gallery, Slugtown.

Zara Worth studied MA Contemporary Art Theory at the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths in 2014. She uses current food and lifestyle trends to investigate the cultures and economies of Web 2.0 and the neoliberal condition through hybrid methodologies spanning performance, drawing, new media, painting and object-making. Since receiving a PhD Studentship from Leeds Beckett University in 2016, her practice-led research has focused on exploring how Instagram might be used as a site, strategy and subject for post-internet art practice. She was shortlisted for the Woon Foundation Art Prize in 2013 and is currently based in the North East of England.