Digbeth First Friday: Summer Camp

For this year’s ESP Summer Camp, Chloe Ashley, Laura Cooper, Aileen Doherty, Luke Routledge and Emily Warner occupied the gallery, turning it into an expanded studio to test new work and ideas. For August’s First Friday they joined a whole host of other ESP members who added work into the mix for the Summer Camp Show.

For one evening ESP’ers Bethany Slinn, Laura Cooper & Hermione Spriggs (AooA) and Emily Warner presented scratch performances and in the second gallery ESP members’ displayed moving image works.

Chloe Ashley investigates the medium of analogue photography through sculpture, installation and text. She is particularly interested in photography’s process, materiality and history, to question and distort the photographic medium. Recent projects include: ‘Master Class 2018’, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2018), ‘Spelunking with Open School East’, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2017) ‘The Building as Material’, The New Art Gallery Walsall (2016), ‘ESP Production Residency I’, Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2016).

Laura Cooper is a visual artist interested in exploring encounters with places and their inhabitants, and looking at the complex relationships between humans, nature and other animals. In 2017 Laura exhibited at Harvest Short Film Festival, Lower Hewood Farm; Third House, Titanik Gallery, Turku, Finland; Softening The Grid, Milton Keynes Arts Center; New Normal, Istanbul, Turkey.

Aileen Doherty  seeks to examine the widening dichotomy between the world we experience and the abstracted laws described by science. Recent exhibitions have included; New Art West Midlands, Exhibitor, Birmingham Museum (2018), Imago, Margaret Street School of Art (2017), Prologue, Margaret Street School of Art (2017).

Luke Routledge  is a visual artist working primarily in sculpture, currently based in Birmingham. Luke’s work uses the human figure as a framework for material experimentation, where everyday objects and materials are combined into life size figurative works. Luke has exhibited most recently at the residency space Bunkhouse in London and in 2017 participated in NAWKI, where his work was screened at 10 different locations across the UK including: CBS; Liverpool, EBC; Bristol, Focal Point Gallery in Southend and Limbo; London.

Bethany Slinn is an artist focusing on spoken word and performance. Alongside her own practice she a Creative Practitioner with Beat Freeks, Free Radical in Birmingham.

Emily Warner  devises project-work with a commitment to process and collaboration. Taking a research-based approach to making, she draws on movement techniques, performative interventions and intersperses these actions with documentation processes, text and mark-making. She was a Fierce Festival bursary recipient in 2017, and has made and shown work at Birmingham Open Media, Savorr Norwich, and Salzamt Linz, Austria. Alongside Claire Hickey she co-devised Make/Shift/Space, an ACE-funded project which presented art-making in public sites around Birmingham in 2016.