Writing — Hywel Livingstone

roost | exhibition essay | 2018

A term frequently used when writing about art (especially sculpture) is process. “What is your process?” people want to know. “How important is your process to your practice?”; “Is your process visible in your work?”. Process is a term ambiguous enough to encompass what none of us truly understands: How on earth does a sculpture come to exist?

roost | press release (olivia bax, 26/09 - 4/11) | 2018

For her exhibition at Lily Brooke gallery, Olivia Bax has created a sculpture that has both an affinity with the concise domestic space in which it is shown and is completely alien from it. Roost fills the gallery with purpose, demanding that we get in close and measure it against what we know (or think we know).

*Beyond the Wall*
Exhibition Essay

2016

beyond the wall | exhibition essay (patrick o’sullivan, 25/02 - 13/03) | 2016

O’Sullivan is aware of this conceptual freezing of time, and the crucial importance of an appropriate viewing context in igniting the reality of the artwork. The fragility of this moment when the painting is vulnerable, missing the safety of its frame and the validating gaze of the viewer is where O’Sullivan’s work is situated.

*Patrick O’Sullivan*
Press Release

2016

Paintings and Other Constructions | press release (patrick o’sullivan, 25/02 - 13/03) | 2016

O’Sullivan takes his unique understanding of both painting and sculpture, and combines it with his sharply observed understanding of viewing behaviour to create works that move with pre-possessing ease between both mediums. The works are confident in their hybridity, defying us to deal with them rather than pander to any convention.

Facet | press release (neil ayling, 14/11 - 5/12) | 2015

Neil Ayling’s sculptures have the mercurial quality of being able to insinuate themselves into any given space, commandeering their surroundings with an air of almost aggressive presence. Ayling has exhibited his sculptures in outdoor pastoral settings, in pristine Mayfair galleries, in dilapidated, poorly lit townhouses and industrial cityscapes.

John wallbank | essay | 2014

We exist in a world of binaries, from the software programming of zeros and ones to the concept of good and evil and the emotions we experience every day. The efficacy or potency of these phenomena are measured not by their singularity, but by the comparison with their opposite.

*Art on the Screen*
Ambit Magazine

2014

art on the screen: from real to virtual space | ambit magazine | 2014

The leap from framed image on the wall to framed digital image on the screen is significant and can be explored exploited and refined. But how do sculptors deal with the screen? It has become unfashionable today to categorise artists as either painters, sculptors, printmakers and so on, yet sculptures still exist as do the people who make them, and the basic necessary criteria for the making and viewing of sculpture is fixed – space is required, the displacement of which through the creation of a three dimensional object forces the viewer to move and therefore engage in an ambulatory rather than static fashion.

composite order | essay (neil ayling, berloni gallery) | 2014

In his new solo exhibition at Berloni gallery, snapshots of imagery either bounce off or slowly emerge from beneath the surface of Neil Ayling’s sculptures; fleeting, flat representations, memories of places we’ve been.

*Composite Order*
Exhibition Essay

2014

gothic architecture | essay | 2014

We can state with some confidence that the fountainhead of all that was to follow in the rich and diverse (and sometimes tenuous) world of the gothic aesthetic was Gothic architecture. as with most historical “isms” and movements, a retrospective quip gave us the title, and an accumulation of scholarly sparring over subsequent generations gave us the content.

gothic Art | essay | 2014

In an era when literacy was reserved for the ruling elite, the communication of ideas, instructions and information had to be either aural or visual. The large medieval church or cathedral was the ideal setting for controlling a willing and awestruck public – we know that their dramatic cavernous spaces and gravity defying architecture set the scene and atmosphere. But in support of this display of evangelizing power, there needed to be detail.