Claire Brewster & Nik Ramage
The Beautiful and the Useless
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The Beautiful and the Useless was about retrieving the discarded, celebrating the unwanted and giving new life to the obsolete.
In between glossy retail consumption and the rubbish dump is the netherworld of second hand. It is in this netherworld that the artists Claire Brewster and Nik Ramage find the inspiration and raw materials for their work, though each artist proceeds to a different conclusion.
Claire Brewster composes wall based collages, some of which are complemented with sound installations; Nik Ramage constructs three dimensional machines. Both aim to reanimate their finds in order to create new and unexpected things from old and discarded materials.
Claire Brewster has a passion for collecting ephemera and images found when rummaging through the detritus that turns up at car boot fairs and charity shops.
Brewster enjoys the serendipity of these finds, the idea that they are lost items, no longer wanted by their original owner and abandoned to their fate, awaiting rescue and to be given a new lease of life.
These recovered materials become starting points for the collaged images, combining diverse pictorial elements with sound installation, resulting in work with lyrical, rhythmical and theatrical qualities.
Nik Ramage makes machines from a pre digital age. In contrast to machines made for industrial or domestic use, designed to be labour saving and efficient, Ramage’s constructions are non utilitarian and fragile.
Assembled with components from obsolete devices, he embraces the damaged and worn out. Some of the machines work relentlessly at their tasks for the world of the almost useful; others, with more hesitant actions, struggle under their loads, attempting to get somewhere or do something but are continually thwarted.
This is technology from the shadows, absurd, paradoxical and on the verge of giving up.
Link: www.nikramage.com