Bethan Hews

Bethan Hews

Work from her oeuvre.

“‘Piss off I’m a fountain!’ an abusive notice board proclaims in white plastic letters on a black ground. Are these the words of an offended ornament that we have mistaken for a urinal? Or are they the angry reaction of a readymade that feels it has not been identified promptly enough as a Duchampian paradigm? In fact, there is no object in sight to which the text might refer: in this piece, entitled Word (2003), Bethan Huws plays with the mere possibility of an object, a situation, a perception. Formerly used for official announcements in offices, these sober blackboards with their aluminium frames and moveable white letters have, for the past eight years, served Huws for her polysemantic language pictures. One might say she writes scripts for potential encounters with possible art works.

Huws grew up speaking both Welsh and English; she employs various media, but her work is always based on a special relationship with language. She often references names of artists and titles of art works associated with the history of the readymade and Conceptual art. Her oeuvre skilfully links the mythology of the Duchampian industrial object that was once upended and signed, with an ironic questioning of the story of its creation. She is concerned with exploring her own creativity: how does one arrive at an artistic action that brings about an altered perception of things? Huws takes the approach of an ethnologist tracing the origin and identity of readymades….” – Burkhard Meltzer translated by Nicholas Grindell for Frieze Magazine.

via Piet Mondriaan.

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