Open Frequency 2007: Kate Owens and Tommy Grace selected by Neil Mulholland

Open Frequency 2007: Kate Owens and Tommy Grace selected by Neil Mulholland Kate Owens and Tommy Grace, The Ill Tempered Waters, 2005. 800 x 800 cm. Timber, paper, chipboard, 52 x 2-litre bottles of fizzy juice

Neil Mulholland profiles the work of Kate Owens and Tommy Grace


Kate Owens and Tommy Grace share a curiosity with the decorative, and its relatively low esteem, in a contemporary design environment relentlessly pursuing the dictum of less is more (profit). Loosely Loosian design values have regrouped since the 1990s when Brutalism and neo-modernism resurfaced in the form of style bars, destination boutique hotels and right-to-buy council housing (so long as it was in Notting Hill and designed by Erno Goldfinger.) Typical products of gentrification, these developments were unevenly distributed, more visible, perhaps, in post-industrial city centres than in so-called heritage sites such as Edinburgh. While Edinburgh is not without its Ron Aradesque hotels and bars, mock-docks and post-war modernist housing schemes, its centre is disproportionately ripe with listed buildings, making it difficult to escape the past.

In such a neo-baroque environment, nostalgia for a singularly modernist version of a designed utopia has to compete with numerous other ideals. Thus the normative text-book based obsession with International Modernist architecture and design that we find in so much of contemporary art - a melancholic lingua franca articulating something that was never experienced by most young artists - is replaced with a more holistic view of what it meant to be modern in our different pasts. In Owens & Grace's work, the environments bestowed upon us from the past become playgrounds for present occupants who re-narrate them in their own images to meet their own agendas, making them new once more.

Working in and around heterotopic built environments, Owens & Grace's interests and approaches have dovetailed near aspirational interiors and dusty architectural follies. A mongrel environment that mixes neo-modernist, modernist, beaux art, arts and crafts, neoclassical, Scots Baronial, gothic and Islamic forms provides the basis for experiments with materials that imbue the promise of luxury tainted with the perils of over consumption. Grace's works are predicated on the integral accident, the way in which the presence of a designed orderliness always necessitates the existence of its polar opposite - the chaotic and ingenuous. A prominent series of works are produced by controlling wine stains, using thick blotting paper to produce images that draw on architectural orders that attempt to achieve balance and harmony. These works accompany Owen's elaborate architectural constructions made from an array of the world's reformed maize and potato snacks, coloured soda bottles, and bottles of Lambrini and Prosecco. Owens sees these snacks and drinks as artifice incarnate - a simulacra of real food much decried by the organic and slow food movements - an architectural cuisine concerned with the assemblage-aesthetics of consumption (a non-egological monster that accompanies the post- or trans-human body) rather than the nutritional or sustainable development that eating should bring.

These choices of materials and subject matter incite an appealing analogy with the way that we exploit our built environment for momentary effect. Owens & Grace tend to present the flirtation with the past in terms of the absolute present, in relation to the pleasure principle embodied in everyday experiences and materials (binging on Lambrini in the park), optical-tricks such as 3D, romantic ghost-stories invented for tourists and tacky power-how-to (Peter York's Dictator's Homes is a good primer). The collaborative performance 'The Ill Tempered Waters' (Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee, 2005), is a good example of this provisional process in motion. A miniature amphitheatre becomes a short-lived fountain as Owens & Grace spurt bottles of shaken soda over the top of the steps, allowing the multicoloured juices to trickle-down towards the feet of the audience. A fountain removed from the civic arena and provided with a very limited supply of commercial sugary carbonated drink (as opposed to free running water) is one which plays a different social function to that envisaged by the modern philanthropists who facilitated such communal amenities. Like most of the public space bequeathed to us by our forebears that has surreptitiously entered into private hands, it is superficially glossy and new but turns out to be a short lived, wasteful and rather sticky spectacle.

It should also be noted that Owens & Grace have been of central importance to recent art in Edinburgh as founding committee members and curators of Edinburgh independents Win Together Loose Together Play Together Stay Together and The Embassy. They have played key roles in establishing the tone and form of Embassy exhibitions and events adding a strong dash of Bacchanalian flavour to the proceedings and aesthetics. Grace has designed websites, posters and graphic identities for many of the most feted of Edinburgh's recent independent projects, including The Embassy - www.embassygallery.co.uk, Young Athenians - www.youngathenians.co.uk, the Edinburgh Annuale - www.annuale.org, The Wee Red Bar http://weeredbar.co.uk as well as a number of artists private sites (see www.tommygrace.co.uk).

Neil Mulholland, May 2007


Artist's biography

Owens & Grace first collaborated together for The Garden, an exhibition at Castlefield Gallery (Manchester 2005). Further collaborative exhibitions have included Function Form Follows, Cooper Gallery, DJCAD (Dundee 2005), In-Residence, The Royal Scottish Academy (Edinburgh 2006) and Four, Collins Gallery (Glasgow 2006). Previous individual solo exhibitions include Ambush at Lovers' Rock (Tommy Grace) at Aurora in Edinburgh, 2004 and Gates of Ades (Kate Owens), a Collective Gallery off-site project in Edinburgh, 2005. Forthcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh and Young Athenians, which will be restaged as part of the Athens Biennial: Destroy Athens (September 2007).

Kate Owens and Tommy Grace have recently relocated to London where they live together. Kate is currently on the MA Sculpture course at The Royal College of Art.


About Neil Mulholland

Dr Neil Mulholland read History of Art and English Literature at the University of Glasgow (MA 1995, PhD 1998). He is currently Director of the Centre for Visual & Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art and a Reader. He supervises doctoral students, teaches on the MFA and leads the MA in Contemporary Art Theory and Criticism.

His work focuses on grass-roots parochialism, narratology, magical realism and metafiction in recent art and criticism. The outcome is manifest in art, criticism, fiction, exhibitions, zines and documentaries. He is author of The Cultural Devolution: British Art in the Late Twentieth Century, Ashgate (2003) and has recently contributed to Rampley, Matthew ed. Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts, University of Edinburgh Press (2005) and Gooding, Mel. (ed.) The Book of Shrigley, Redstone Press (2005).

He writes regularly for Flash Art, Frieze, Untitled, Modern Painters and Art Review among other magazines. Recent exhibition organisation includes Clueless, OneZero, Edinburgh (2006), Strategic Art Getts, The Embassy, Edinburgh (2005); The Garden, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2005),Campbells Soup, GSA/Glasgow International (2005) and We Go Round and Round in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire, Liverpool Biennial/New York (2004).

Currently hes editing on a reader on postwar Scottish Art, writing a book on the cultural logic of ambient and curating an exhibition for the Blackpool Museum of Contemporary Art.


Open Frequency keeps you in touch with new developments in contemporary art practice from across the UK. The artists are selected and profiled by leading curators, artists and writers, presenting the work of artists to watch out for over the coming year. Open Frequency represents a forward-looking glance today of the artists who will be setting the agenda tomorrow.