Bullseye Projects returns to London for Collect 2020, an international art fair for modern craft and design. Bullseye Projects is again presenting work by emerging and mid-career artists who have deep ties, either as alumni or faculty, to British art and design programs, including new work by Heike Brachlow, Celia Dowson, Joshua Kerley, Joanna Manousis, Anne Petters, and Karlyn Sutherland. Collect 2020 will be held, for the first time, at Somerset House. To celebrate this change of venue, Bullseye Projects will debut a collaboration with London-based wood carver Zeinab Harding inspired by the architecture of this unique and historic building.
Heike Brachlow's impossibly complex cast glass forms capture and transmit light, projecting subtle gradations of illuminated color. The curving planes have the appearance of a Möbius strip, creating a seeming weightlessness to the undulating mass of glass. These works, like much of the work that Brachlow is known for, are also kinetic and invite the viewer to break from norms surrounding artwork, allowing each piece to have multiple orientations and, in certain positions, precariously rock and swivel.
Bullseye Projects first presented the work of Celia Dowson, at Collect 2019, shortly after she finished her studies at the Royal College of Art. The landscape of Swansea inspires her exquisitely crafted designs in both glass and ceramics. Dowson's newest designs in glass expand the scale and color range of her previous work while maintaining a connection to the Welsh coastline.
In 2019, Bullseye Projects also introduced the Collect audience to the work of then Royal College of Art student Joshua Kerley. Kerley's practice is informed by a playful approach to materiality that is evident in both his sculpture and design. By combining and juxtaposing traditional glass techniques, such as pâte de verre, with mundane materials such as cork or common brick, Kerley upends perceptions of glass and crosses boundaries to arouse curiosity. Since 2019, Kerley has received the Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize and, most recently, the Saxe Emerging Artist Artist Award.
British - American artist Joanna Manousis reappropriates cultural and charged forms caught in an liminal moment and casts them in glass. Referencing decorative and artistic modes of symbolic representation, Manousis creates voids within solid clear or translucent glass forms. This absence appears as a secondary form within the overall shape. A pear or knot of rope within a bottle emphasizes the material qualities of glass. It allows us to see but not access, inspiring open-ended meditations on material, form, and meaning.
Anne Petters, a London-based artist originally from Dresden, is most known for her use of paper-like pâte de verre sheets that are delicately folded and suspended into ethereal sculptural forms and installations. Often embossed or inscribed with inchoate writing or drawings, Petters uses material and representations of the natural world in metaphoric or poetic shimmering reflections on fragility and vulnerability.
Karlyn Sutherland and Bullseye Projects began working together when she was pursuing a doctoral degree in architecture from the University of Edinburgh. Since then, Sutherland has become an award-winning artist and designer, adapting her interest in architectural space into multi-layered geometric glass panels. For Collect 2020, in addition to her artwork, Sutherland is debuting a new series of table designs that she has been developing in collaboration with Bullseye.
Bullseye Projects will exhibit a collaboration with London-based wood carver Zeinab Harding who will translate architectural motifs of Somerset House into carved wood. These panels will then be transformed into glass and incorporated in furniture pieces designed in consult with Bullseye’s fabrication studio.
Bullseye Projects explores contemporary glass through collaborations, touring exhibitions, artist residencies and educational activities, and promotes the work of innovative kiln-glass artists from around the globe. Bullseye Projects is part of Bullseye Glass Co., a manufacturer of colored glass for art and architecture based in Portland, Oregon. Bullseye was founded in 1974 by three art school graduates and maintains a strong commitment to research, education, and collaboration with artists.
