3 March - 7 March
According to Gaston Bachelard, “Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.” * For this exhibition some 130 individuals have each contributed a single work whose sole criteria is that it occupy a space no larger than 7.5 x 10.5 x 7.5 centimetres. No other rules apply, with artists having free reign in terms of medium, production, and idea. Every work submitted has been displayed, provided it adheres to the stipulated restriction on size.
While the majority of contributors are MA Fine Art students at Camberwell College of Arts and are mostly at the beginning of their practice or career, their tutors and technical staff are also represented in this show. A further dozen artists from outside the college have been invited to submit works. The broader picture given here thereby ranges from the “student artist” to practitioners who regularly exhibit in established galleries. Forces of the Small is a playful microcosm of artistic production at the present time.
While nothing larger than the show’s strictly-set dimensions is included, pieces tending towards a further reduction in scale were welcome. Artists usually crave “visibility” but, here at Filet, invisibility apparently beckons, a perverse temptation for the ambitious artist keen to demonstrate their often-expansive concerns.
In asserting the power of the miniature over the gigantic, or even against the merely “standard” scale of most contemporary art, Bachelard highlights a sharp paradox. This exhibition encourages both intimacy and intensity through perceptual diminution; it modestly stages a large spectrum of responses to Bachelard’s difficult, but astute, demand.
*Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, 1969, p. 155.
Exhibition title from an essay by Peter Suchin, “Forces of the Small: Painting as Sensuous Critique”, in Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, The Future’s Mirror, Locus+, 1997.
