Wolfgang Buttress - Murmuration
5 March-23 April, 2022
Thursday-Saturday, 9-5pm
or by appointment
Exhibition Launch Party:
Saturday 12 March, 6.30-10pm
Free entry, no booking required, everyone welcome
Murmuration is a new exhibition at Beam by artist Wolfgang Buttress. The exhibition presents a significant new work Murmur inspired by one of the most extraordinary phenomena of the natural world.
A murmuration is a large group of birds, most commonly starlings, that perform coordinated and breathtaking aerial stunts throughout the winter months when migrating to the UK from colder climates. Ornithologists believe these murmurations help starlings to keep warm, repel predators and exchange information about good feeding areas.
Through a series of hand-printed analogue photographs printed onto glass and then worked into with sandpaper, oil sticks and graphite to create 42 palimpsests, Murmur explores transient and increasingly rare murmurations witnessed on a series of trips to Netherfield and Attenborough Nature Reserves in Winter 2021/22. The number of murmurations in the UK have been profoundly affected by the current environmental crisis, falling 68% since 1993 (The British Trust for Ornithology).
Murmur expresses two constant themes found in Buttress’ work – our disconnected relationship with the natural world and the memory of place. Made with photographer Daniel T. Wheeler, this new piece brings together a photographic process with techniques and gestures that can be found in the artist's paintings. The work is also a metaphor for human migration and resonates with the artist's personal history. In 1944 the Buttress family were displaced as a result of WWII and walked over 5 hundred miles from Pomerainia eventually arriving in a refugee camp in Osterholz- Scharmbeck near Bremen, Germany.
The exhibition includes three paintings, Rise II, III, IV. These works are a continuation of ideas and themes from his major public sculpture of the same name, a site specific work located on a historic political threshold in Belfast, Ireland. After spending time observing the reed beds near his former home in the Lady Bay area of Nottingham, these paintings explore natural thresholds. Reed beds are liminal spaces that exist between land and water. The paintings echo this sentiment with their ethereal painted surfaces and circular forms that represent both the sun and the moon. The reeds are part of the same murmuration habitat as Netherfield Nature Reserve, the inspiration for Murmur.
In the viewing room there is an installation of two sculptures by the artist, Spaces No.3 and 7. The work is constructed from a series of clear acrylic sheets covered with handwritten words and stacked to form a cube. When one moves around the space the sculptures reveal a cube and sphere within. The work resonates with the intangible energy of natural phenomena like the sun, moon and the movement of murmurations.
About the artist:
Wolfgang Buttress is a Nottingham-based artist who has produced and exhibited work globally. He is known for his large-scale multi-sensory sculptural works, most notably The Hive, an abstracted analogue of honeycomb which expresses the energy and life of a bee colony in real time through light and sound.
