This major exhibition of new and recent work by Manchester based artist Stuart Edmundson encompasses painting, drawing and sculptural work concerned with abstraction and an often playful process of making; creating assemblages, drawings and objects using unremarkable functional objects.
Edmundson’s assemblages and objects retain the identity and characteristics of their materials, and their production and final form is directed by the inherent set of physical restrictions imposed by their materials and those of the space in which they exist.
Within Grundy’s largest exhibition space, the artist has constructed an assemblage comprising of pink and white striped paper bags. The bags are folded, cut and pinned to an expanse of gallery wall in a manner that allows the bag’s design to evolve within its given space into a drawing of cross-hatching and an illusionary sculptural form.
Structures comprising of sheets of white Perspex, adorned with light bulbs and supported by timber frames, sit a-blaze with light. These works, as with Edmundson’s entire practice, have evolved from his previous responses to contemporary abstract painting practice, and demonstrate the artist’s convictions to create pure works of art.
Small delicate towers made out of cocktail sticks sit vulnerable upon the gallery floor, their development curtailed for risk of collapse that building higher or bigger would induce. Although they exist as finished works, they suggest proposals for larger, more ambitious structures.
Such proposals also appear as written statements or drawings for unrealized projects – due to a lack of funding or the practicalities of their production and display – these simple statements express an idea and its set of rules : “Make a maze in a space out of mirrored walls”. By suggesting the work through a drawing or statement in an uncomplicated manner, the artist enables the viewer to perceive the work through their own imagination.