Into the Grey
Landscape and Natural History Series

Cover Up project space presented five exhibitions of contemporary art engaged with natural history and landscape. Each exhibition took place over three to six days and included artists and curators from Europe and America. These events were not a comprehensive survey of their theme, but rather a sequence of pipette samples from a broad territory of activity. This series was directed by Finlay Taylor and invited curators and gallerists.

Into the Grey
29th - 30th June 2003

Kiera Bennett
Jasone Miranda-Bilbao
Dan Howard-Birt
Sophie Brown
Judith Goddard
Jacqueline Hallum
Ian Kiaer
Denis Masi
Bruce McLean
Jacques Nimki
Christopher Orr
Sophy Rickett
Emily-Jo Sargent
Kate Scrivener
Jem Southam
Corin Sworn
Finlay Taylor

Into The Grey presents seventeen artists working in this area and is bound together by the predominant use of colour, the colour grey.

In colour genetics, grey is said to be the centre of humans’ sphere of colours. A human is thus grey in the midst of a chromatic world.

Grey as defined in Japanese aestetics ‘ is not so much the result of a mixing of equal parts of black and white as it is 'the colour of no colour' in which all colours are cancelling each other out. The new hue is a distinct colour of it's own, neither black nor white, but somewhere inbetween - in the middle where possibilities are boundless.' – Trinh T. Minh-ha

In Christian symbolics, grey designates the resurrection of the dead, a colour of ash and fog. A place for transition and hiding, a place for change.

The French expression se griser or to be half drunk, resorts to grey as a colour of semi-consiousness.

This twilight colour appears in the natural world as a colour of camouflage, a lizard skin or wolf coat and as a rocky expance or tree bark detail.

The artists presented here explore their ideas through photography, video, drawing, painting and sculptual works venturing into the grey.

Ian Kiaer appears courtesy of Asprey Jacques

Jacques Nimki appears courtesy of Approach

Sophy Rickett appears courtesy of Emily Tsingou

Jem Southam appears courtesy of Hirschl Contemporary Art