Jamie Shovlin: Aggregate

ArtSway is pleased to be hosting Aggregate, a major touring exhibition of work by Jamie Shovlin, a contemporary visual artist with a growing reputation for innovative and unique work. Shovlin has increasingly been recognised by a range of national and international institutions as well as a host of critics and writers and has recently exhibited in Beck’s Futures 2006, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and the Art Now Space at Tate Britain, London. Aggregate brings together a series of new works commissioned by four UK venues: The City Gallery, Leicester; ArtSway, New Forest; Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh; and Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Shovlin is known for taking a hybrid approach to his work that allows him to act as artist, researcher, archivist, and curator in works such as the Naomi V. Jelish project (2001-2004) which has been acquired for the Saatchi Collection. In Aggregate, Shovlin muddies the boundaries between authoritative systems of knowledge such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, and apparently inconsequential ways of making sense of the world such as jigsaw puzzles and amateur bird watching. These small hobbies and pastimes are re-framed by the artist as small exercises in control and order; in The Birds in her Garden (2006), the artist draws together his mother’s daily observations about garden birds with illustrative and textual examples culled from the long history of ornithological illustration and taxonomy.

Recent solo exhibitions include Lustfaust: A Folk Anthology 1976-1981 at Freight + Volume, New York and Fontana Modern Masters at Riflemaker, London.

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Jamie Shovlin: Aggregate