Affordable Art Fair with Artist Jeremy Knowles
Words by Sabrina Garnier
Platform Projects section featured 5 exciting artists, with immersive stand-out works and installations. For the first time, the Affordable Art Fair Battersea appointed an external curator for the Platform Projects. Becca Pelly-Fry, Head Curator at arts hub Elephant West, invited 5 artists from differing disciplines. Works by the contributing artists were themed around the ideas of place, memory, and how we relate to our environment.
INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST JEREMY KNOWLES
Jeremy Knowles was born in Hertfordshire, UK and lives and works in Berlin. Graduated with a degree in Fine Art Photography from Camberwell College of Art (University of the Arts London) in 2015.
Knowles is a lens-based artist, influenced by personal encounters, his work lies between documentary and conceptual photography. While pottering around the streets of Berlin, Knowles looks for abstractions in the urban landscape and catalogues everyday mundane objects with vibrancy and surprising angles.
Knowles explains: “Series are driven by stories and accounts that explore the human experience by connecting person to place… Pattern, repetition and coincidence structure my approach to ongoing projects.”
AF: What’s the focus of your practice, and the medium/scale you work in?
My work is at an intersection of documentary and conceptual photography, concerned chiefly with highlighting things that stand out from the mundane. I’m drawn towards patterns, repetitions and anything that jars the eye.
A key approach of my practice and a tried and tested means of generating ideas that I developed while living in London is to move, observe, document and reflect. In recent projects (8am Walks 2017-2019, Dresden nach Prag 2018) the series literally describes a journey.
AF: TELL US ABOUT YOUR PROJECT FOR AAF BATTERSEA?
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of presenting new work from my Berlin series 8am Walks at the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park. For this installation I wanted to find a way of hanging photographic work from the series away from the exhibition wall in order to encourage a sense of play and chance encounter – strong themes within the series itself. To achieve this I made use of plastic packing crates, which feature in my work several times as colourful focal points, as building blocks for columns and walls on which to hang unframed prints. At times chaotic (and at other times working in waves of harmonious saturated hues), the installed crates became an interesting but nonetheless challenging background for an already colourful series.
Though it is sometimes hard to register, the balance of chaos and harmony between prints and crates is intentional. My decision to build columns from stacks of crates was also influenced by Berlin itself. Their form is intended to subtly mimic city tower-blocks, walls and all the other familiar and repetitive urban architectural structures we encounter regularly in built-up cities.
Knowles looks at the overlooked and often unnoticed aspects of our existence that make us human.
“Deeply influenced by personal encounters and often captured within the frame of a single day, my work borders both documentary and conceptual photography. Series of works are driven by stories and accounts that explore the human experience by connecting person to place, and have either stemmed from observations made along journeys or are otherwise records of journeys in themselves. Pattern, repetition and coincidence structure my approach to ongoing projects.” Jeremy Knowles
Knowles captures the overlooked and often unnoticed aspects of our existence that make us human.
AF: What’s next? Any upcoming projects?
Vol. 2 of my 8am Walks series is still ongoing (and will be for at least for another year). In June I will be studying at the Universität der Künste, Berlin (UDK), participating in a workshop addressing psychogeography (a term coined by Guy Debord and The Situationists) and methods of encounter within the city. Alongside my Berlin observations I will be undertaking several research-based projects this year.
One project takes me back to the UK to explore village life in Cambridgeshire, another in the spring will take me to Slovenia, and next month I will be making the second part of my cycle-series from Prague to Linz.