Glossaries

Glossaries
Hannah Hughes and Dafna Talmor

Download list of works

Exhibition text by Dr Briony Carlin

Exhibition review in c4 Journal by Louis Stopforth

The publication 'Glossaries' is a collaborative publication by Hannah Hughes and Dafna Talmor published by Folium. For more information and to order, click here.

Translation, hybridity and transposition are some of the ideas behind Glossaries, a duo exhibition by Hannah Hughes and Dafna Talmor. Stemming from an ongoing dialogue based on shared interests around forms that shape their practice, the artists have taken the opportunity to develop new work individually and collaboratively in the form of a site-specific wall piece and an upcoming publication with Folium, including a commissioned text by Dr. Briony Carlin. 

Drawing references from the formal structures of musical scores, dance notations and cuneiform writing, the collaborative wall-based installation consists of C-type photograms produced in the colour darkroom. This series of notations re-purposes the artists’ individual archives of forms into a shared system, in which sequences of interactions propose a new combined language. The hand-cut shapes, which have migrated between several modes of mechanical and digital reproduction before being printed photographically, have been reconfigured and altered through light and chemistry. In dialogue, these printed forms suggest compositions for movement or sound, inviting the viewer to form their own readings.

Hannah Hughes often uses discarded materials and overlooked forms as the starting point for her collages and ceramic assemblages. The collages on view in Glossaries originate from fragments of images of negative spaces, creating the impression of new volumetric forms through the interplay of light, shadow, tucks and folds. Hughes’s ceramic works also refer to ideas of absence, casting fragments of discarded paper pulp packaging in porcelain paper clay, which are then arranged using museological modes of display. In a new sequence of works titled Wrap the porcelain sculptures are held within outer clay structures which recall both the forms of throwaway packaging and miniature stage sets.

Dafna Talmor extends the Constructed Landscapes series, an ongoing body of work that takes negatives from her personal archive as its starting point, to produce reconfigured and abstracted representations of landscape, consisting of three volumes to date. Newly produced work for this exhibition consists of C-type handprints made from collaged negatives, preparatory studies, a play on the idea of contact sheets and a 3D iteration of Constructed Landscapes, shown for the first time in the UK. The large-scale sculptural installation plays further with the idea of a plurality of viewpoints via multi-directional landscapes, which aims to defy traditional notions of Western pictorial conventions that embody singular, fixed and idealised views. Constructed as one handmade negative at its source that generates multiple images, split across a number of printed panels, elicits more dynamic ways of seeing. A deconstructed square and black voids, negative spaces created due to the interlocking oppositional L-shaped panels, playfully reference - yet disrupt - the notion of a traditional photographic frame. 

The publication Glossaries, produced by Folium, will be launched at a closing event for the exhibition in February 2023, details to be announced soon.

Artist Biographies

Hannah Hughes is a London-based artist. She graduated from the University of Brighton in 1997 and has since exhibited in the UK and internationally. Selected recent group exhibitions include: Monochrome, Colman Projects, London, (2022); No Place is an Island, Photo50, London Art Fair, (2022); The State of Things, Landskrona Festival, Sweden, (2022); Gleaners, a two-person exhibition with Olivia Bax at Sid Motion Gallery, London, (2020); Super Flatland, White Conduit Projects, London, (2020); Art Rotterdam, NL, Galerie Wouter Van Leeuwen, (2020); New Formations, Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, USA, (2020); and The Office of Revised Futures, Format Festival, Derby, (2019). Hughes produced a site-specific work for Entractes #15, The Eye Sees, Arles, France, (2021). Her work is included in Material Immaterial, (2018-20) an experimental publication by Rodrigo Orrantia, which has included performances at Cosmos, Arles and Offprint, Paris; and Look At This If You Love Great Photography: A critical curation of 100 essential photos by Gemma Padley, (Ivy Press, 2021).

Dafna Talmor is a London-based artist and lecturer whose practice encompasses photography, spatial interventions, curation and collaborations. Her photographs are included in public collections such as the National Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum, Deutsche Bank, Hiscox and private collections internationally. Recent solo shows include Constructed Landscapes, Carmen Araujo Arte, Caracas, Venezuela, (2022); Constructed Landscapes (vol. iii), TOBE Gallery, Budapest, (2022); Straight Lines are a Human Invention, Sid Motion Gallery, London, (2019); Recent group exhibitions in 2022 include Occupying Photography: To the Milky Way via the Sea, NŌUA (Bodø); Stories We Live With - Selection from the Somlói–Spengler Collection, QContemporary (Budapest); No Place is an Island, Photo50, London Art Fair; and Filling the Cracks, Unseen Unbound, Unseen Amsterdam, (2021); Selected books featuring Talmor’s work include Look at This If You Love Great Photography by Gemma Padley, Ivy Press, (2021); Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera by Robert Shore, Laurence King Publishing, (2014). Her first monograph - Constructed Landscapes - published by Fw:Books was released in October 2020 and longlisted for the 2021 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. Talmor has just been awarded an Honorary Fellowship by The Royal Photographic Society and her work is currently on display in Known & Strange: Photographs from the Collection at the V&A Museum (London) until February 2023.