Notes For press:
Club Shepway
Club Shepway is a group of emerging artists and writers based in Folkestone, Kent. With a core curatorial team of Laura Mansfield, Niamh Sullivan and Matt Rowe Club Shepway aims to stage events and exhibitions that engage with the architecture, history and regeneration of the surrounding South Kent area. The Kent coastline has a rich history of harbor industries, smuggling, military defenses, pilgrimage and the glamour of the Seaside resort. The coastline marks a departures point for Europe and a site of exchange between continental and British goods, shared folk tales and built industries.
Club Shepway projects to date have involved using key sites within the local area as points for interactive exhibition and installation, often reactivating redundant spaces with contemporary art works that allude to the history of the area and play with its many narratives and myths. A key thread to Club Shepway’s working practice is the use of collaboration with a variety of artists and disciplines, exploring our concerns through different media and means of approach. Alongside staging curatorial projects Club Shepway functions as a platform for artists and makers to produce work and discuss their critical practice. Club Shepway involves a group of artists whose practice uses British histories and curiosities as a thread within their contemporary work.
Many artists in the group share a further concern over the material of the object, working with traditional techniques such as ceramics, taxidermy and carving, reconfiguring the artisan into curious and engaging art forms.
Club Shepway are based at The B & B Project space situated in Folkestone’s creative quarter. This former bed & breakfast/brothel & Tobacconist has been renovated maintaining many of its original Edwardian features creating a unique platform for emerging and established artists to showcase
work and develop dialogue raising cultural awareness in the area.
visit blog
www.clubshepway.com
Vernacular Spectacular
Published by Club Shepway ISBN 978-0-9561863-0-0
Designed & edited by Laura Mansfield, Matt Rowe & Niamh Sullivan text written by Laura Mansfield All photographs taken by Matt Rowe
Laura Mansfield
Laura Mansfield is a writer and researcher living in Manchester. She has written on a variety of artists work for AN Magazine, Situations Papers, Spike Island Gallery, and Circa Magazine alongside a number of exhibition catalogue essays. In 2006 she produced and edited the publication Spike Island Journal 2 Currency and Exchange, an international exchange of texts exploring notions of local and global identity. Over the last two years Laura has worked closely with the artist Daphne Wright delivering papers on Wright’s work at the International Conference of Death, Dying and Disposal (University of Bath 2007) and The National Gallery of Ireland (2008).
Most recently Laura is a member of the Corridor 8 editorial team. Corridor 8 is a new visual arts magazine based in the North West. For the launch of the magazine at Manchester’s Urbis in July this year Laura devised an audio guide for the city based on a walk performed by the writer Iain Sinclair.
Laura has also recently completed a project for the great north run in Newcastle working in collaboration with the artist Amy Feneck. Together Laura and Amy devised a billboard and series of texts in the local paper to produce an alternative map of the city. Laura is currently working for the Contemporary Art Society developing a guide book to public collections of contemporary art throughout the UK due to launch in January next year.
Matt Rowe
Matt Rowe is an Artist and Educational Practitioner based in Kent and the London area. After Graduating in 2004 with an MA in Ceramics, Rowe founded the B&B Project Space and the Club Shepway arts organization. Responding to the changing identity of the English seaside resort, Rowe cultivated and staged a series of events and exhibitions in Folkestone and the surrounding area.
Selected events included: O Dreamland in collaboration with Transition Gallery, Folkestone Fringe, Annual Sea Side ReviewMiss Club Shepway Bathing Beauties Parade and most recently, the Vernacular Spectacular publication and the I am Local arts index.
Rowe’s multi-faceted practice primarily incorporates Ceramic process, photography and actions to create works of a distinctively English folk identity.
Recent exhibitions include Fan Fair, Where Has All The Good Time Gone and the The Art Car Boot Fair. Find out more at www.gogowhippet.com
