Bearing Elsewhere at Bloc Projects

10th -25th September
Private View: 10th Sept, 7-9pm
Bloc Projects, 71 Eyre Lane, Sheffield, S1 4RB
http://blocprojects.co.uk/

Bearing Elsewhere is the first solo UK exhibition of new works by Hondartza Fraga. Drawing and video are the chosen mediums to ponder about the notion of journey, both geographical and mental, as a place in itself. Taking the position of a traveller who observes the world from the safe distance of an endless wandering, neither here nor there. This new work seeks to confront the fictional and elusive character of home and the exotic.

In the video work footage has been taken by the artist from different moving transports: trains, planes, boats etc. The resulting sequence does not follow a particular narrative or chronology but presents instead a journey in a constant state of recurrence, never complete or definite, never arriving; so in many ways, it remains completely still. In another work the camera pans through a landscape of ambiguous scale, accompanied by the sound of a traditional Nyckelharpa (in collaboration with artist Markus Lantto). Image and sound seem to oscillate between hesitance and resolution, melody and dissonance. Halfway between daydream and anticipation the viewer is left to linger in the imprecise space that lies between departure and arrival, between home and elsewhere.

The drawing works establish connections between the familiar and the unknown: a blank globe, a broken doily in which missing fragments we can almost guess the outline of the arctic region… If we share a universal fear of getting lost, we also share the need for control, for measuring and visualizing the world to make it less frightening, to overcome our individual vulnerability. A map’s main function is to help us find our way or get home safely. But on a blank map there are no marks, no boundaries, paths or points of reference: there can be no home in a white map. The designs in some circular doilies are reminiscent of the Polar Coordinates system; this seemingly random connection between the two subjects serves in the drawing to force a dialogue between the domestic and the abstract reality of maps.

Hondartza Fraga, currently based in Sheffield, was born in Galicia (Spain). After a BA (Hons) degree at The University of the Basque Country she completed an MA degree in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in 2007. She has exhibited nationally (Liverpool, Leeds, London) and internationally (Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Norway). Earlier this year she did an artist-in-residence stay at LKV studios in Trondheim (Norway), from which the works in this exhibition have originated.