Richard Waring

There are two strands to my research, my art practice and my pedagogy.

Art practice

I investigate the compression of space and sound into surface. There are two main ways in which I do this, by painting and by working on audio-visual performative projects.

Commissioned project:

Transmission, an Arts Council England and AUB funded work by Waring and Hutchings, re-envisions Anthony Caro’s sculpture, Sea Music, as an 8-minute long performative spectacle. In Transmission, the sculpture becomes a stage for a new work combining projection, sound and movement.

https://vimeo.com/247467411
password: transmission151218

Excerpts from press release by Liz Orton:

The work plays with the multiple meanings of scan. To scan is to search; to traverse; to resolve for transmission; to analyse the rhythms of sound; to convert into digital form. This conversion, the transformation of objects into numerical code, has enabled the digitisation of archives, libraries and collections across the world. The scanner is like a vast universal eye flicking through space, translating everything in its field into signals. These signals, compressed and stored as bits and bytes, can be called upon at any time to reveal the world as an image.

For a long time, starting from Plato, it was believed that the eye itself was a source of light, making the world visible through the emission of its beams. Waring’s gesture connects us to these ancient ideas of seeing: the Platonic eye roaming the world with its rays. His projected pulses of light transform the dimensional world into the planar world, framing and recomposing the sculpture as an image.

This becoming image enacts a dimensional loss, the collapse of volume into surface.

Pedagogic Research

“Negotiating Identities: Collaborative art practice between students and tutor.”

When a Fine Art tutor works with several students on a shared practical project, how are the multiple artistic and personal identities of the student and the tutor reflected in the singular collaborative artwork?

This research sits at the axis of art practice and its pedagogy by investigating collaborative project-led learning through a contemporary art project called Sonic Camouflage. Sonic Camouflage responds to an ancient language, the Hammer Whistle, invented to disguise the human voice as bird song to evade capture by an enemy. The language is listed as critically endangered by UNESCO as it is used by only a few people on the Greek Island of Evia.

The project is created in conjunction with students and staff from the Arts University Bournemouth's undergraduate Fine Art Degree, bringing them together to create a sonic and performative artwork through participants taking part in several improvisational and developmental workshops.

New Paintings
PRESS RELEASE

For his exhibition at SPACE Studios Commissioning Space, Richard Waring is presenting a series of nine new works, which investigate the relevance of the still life genre within contemporary painting.

Small, abrupt and pleasingly awkward, the pace of the paintings initially seems intense; sweeping expressive gestures and a complex use of colour appear to be out of kilter with the scale of the works. On closer scrutiny there is a careful and slow refinement of marks and a subtle interplay of zones and colours within the picture plane, managing to cohere the paintings.

Resisting definition, the paintings look like they could have been made in the 1950s or 60s yet still retain a feeling of newness and an engagement with recent anachronistic painting. Some look faded or sun bleached and utilise a peculiar choice of disparate application techniques; Waring’s intrigue with painterly categorisation is clear, there is a visual indeterminacy that creates a curious feeling of elusiveness.