WORKHOUSE (Moss)
I was invited by Naomi Lethhbridge to take part in an exhibition that she was curating around the theme of intensive labour. For this, I wanted to make a sited piece around the location of the gallery. After observing and documenting the area I became very drawn to a section of moss that could be seen whilst standing in the gallery. Due to the moisture as a result of poor drainage, this rich green moss had begun to draw itself, creating a beautiful pattern across the red brick of the wall behind.

I wanted to add to and continue this organic drawing by adding my own marks to the wall. A subtle intervention that draws attention to the themes I have been looking at more recently with regard to nature versus the urban environment.

CUBEOpen 2010
Here are some images of work from this years CUBEOpen exhibition which I was selected for.

Exhibition runs 19th November - 22nd January 2011

CUBEOpen 2010 is the UK’s only annual open competition and exhibition of its kind! Launched in 2007, artists, architects and designers are invited to apply with work that reflects current trends and debates surrounding the spaces and places in which we live, each year the exhibition highlights contemporary insights into the urban environment. The CUBEOpen receives applications from around the globe, visitors to the exhibition will have the unique opportunity to see the diverse and engaging ways that artists, architects and designers have been influenced by our surroundings.

Selected artists include:

ALNIS STAKLE, ESKILD BECK, HANNAH WILES, CARLY FISCHER, ALBAN LOW, CAITLIN MASLEY, ELIZABETH WEST, CHRIS PICKUP, BEN COVE, ORTELIUS DREW, EMILY SPEED, DARA MCGRATH, LEE CAMPBELL, SHAN HUR, BEARD AND FERGUSSON, YAEL SCHMIDT, DAVID THEOBALD, DAY BOWMAN, JOE KENNEDY, JAMES O'HANLON, MATTHEW VERDON, CHRIS WRIGHT, MARY RUTH WALSH, URBAN (COL)LABORATORY, MARC PROVINS, SHAUN PAUL, MICK TIMPSON.

Gallery 1, CUBEOpen 2010, images © Nick Harrison

Forgotten No.2, 2010, by Shan Hur, CUBEOpen 2010, images © Nick Harrison

Throwing It All Away #4, Throwing It All Away #8, by Carly Fisher (backrounf Tokyo Palms 2010 & Still Building Within the Wall - Towards Jerusalem Westbank Palestine 2010, by James O'Hanlon), CUBEOpen 2010, images © Nick Harrison

Gallery 3 & 4, CUBEOpen 2010, image ©Nick Harrison

 

Egg-nest-home-country-universe 2010, by Emily Speed, CUBEOpen 2010, images © Nick Harrison

Press Coverage
26/11/10 Manchester Evening News 
30/11/10 Metro
18/12/10 Guardian
11/12/10 Guardian

Selected for CUBEOpen 2010
I submitted my work Monotony(Benches) into CUBEOpen 2010 and my work was selected.

This is the work as it was displayed in the gallery:

And this was my proposal:

'For me, places are experienced concretely, not as equations of function to form. In this sense, architecture is ‘not’ place until and unless we subvert it with the contents of our lives. In other words, places are where time takes route, and it is time in its forms of personal and social memory and in its connection to the cycles of nature that we have attempted to design ‘out’ of industrial society. For this reason I find it difficult to draw any form of inspiration from newly built developments that for me have no character and no history. They lack the vernacular layers of natural and social landscape that keep the world interesting. I am therefore against a monoculture and have an interest in globalisation and what the effect of the global on the local appears to be. Through my work I hope to resist commodification, globalisation and uniformity by highlighting differences, imperfections and the marks of human existence.


Thinking about local distinctiveness and the effect of the global on the local, I wanted to draw attention to the monotony of the street furniture that we find in Manchester. Using red thread, I cross-stitched the letters of the word ‘monotony’ onto eight consecutive bus stop benches in order to highlight the homogeneous quality of these identical bus benches that line Oxford Road. This piece of work became the first in a three part series called Monotony. It seems to me that if we continue with this strategy of homogenisation, we are headed for a very bland and dull urban environment indeed. This is not to say that the corporate powers that be should start a production line of bus stop benches that are each slightly different. I am not interested in difference for its own sake. It is about recognising the richness that comes organically with heterogeneity, history, culture and ecology.


Utilising existing structures such as street furniture, my work rides the dominant culture physically and exposes social controls whilst its quiet nature has the ability to activate the consciousness of a place through subtle markings without disturbing it.'

Wolstenholme Creative Space:
With These Walls We Are Touched
I have been selected to take part in an exhibition in Liverpool as part of the Biennial Independents show. Here is the flyer:

The gallery's second installment for the Biennial Programme invites 14 established artists selected by open submission: to create site-specific work within the gallery's crumbling walls.

Artist(s) Michael Coombs (UK), Henrietta Simson (UK), Su-Chen Hung (Taiwan/USA), Andrew Brookfield (UK), Junichrio Iwase (Canada), Ulrike Oeter (Germany), Cait Walker and Robin Heap (UK), Carol Ramsay (UK), Hannah Wiles (UK), Claire Freeman (UK) and Kate Fallon-Cousins (UK)

This exhibition will showcase the artists' varying concepts and reactions to such a unique environment. They explore being touched by both the walls of the places and environments we inhabit, as well as the walls and structures we create within our awareness in relation to others, feelings and communication.

PRIVATE VIEW: Wednesday, 27th October 6.30pm.
Thursday, October 28 at 11:00am - November 28 at 5:00pm

I am registered on the Liverpool Independents website here: http://www.independentsbiennial.org/2010artists/1123-wiles-hannah