Motorcycle Cultures

Motorcycle Cultures Fashioning Bikes, Building Identities

Further Information

About the Exhibition Motorcycle culture has been a source of inspiration for fashion, film, literature and music ever since motorcycles and their riders were first seen on the streets. The exhibition brings together contemporary art, photography and design, image and object, concept and documentation. Motorcycle Cultures seeks to explore the close link between motorcycle styles and visual identities that are fashioned in tandem with these. Themes addressed include: the aesthetics of speed; the DIY ethos of the custom culture scene; and the importance of community, lifestyle and value that the motorcycle can engender. The work shown is a curated eclectic mix of designed objects, advertising, fashion, photography, film and textiles rather than a comprehensive survey of styles. Exhibits include: Cathie Pilkington’s HEAVY METAL sculpture; Sam Christmas’ custom culture photographs; Phil Polglaze’s original documentary photographs of the Rockers’ Reunion; Mac Motorcycles’ prototype motorbike; Tom Helyar-Cardwell’s ‘Battle Jacket’ paintings and drawings; Philippa Brock’s woven denims ‘Cherish’; Kate Smith’s video work; Caryn Simonson’s ‘dressed up’ motorcycle portraits; Nick Clements’ re-enactment photographs; Erling T.V Klingenberg’s motorbike painting performance; Craig Fisher’s hazard installation; Rachael House’s Angels, Kathryn Round’s jacket on jacket; Chris Watson’s Bad Motorcycle screenprints; and David Simmonds’ photos exploring speed and embodiment at the TT. Exhibitors: Philippa Brock Sam Christmas Nick Clements Craig Fisher Adam Fuller Tom Helyar-Cardwell Rachael House Erling T.V. Klingenberg Cathie Pilkington Ellis Pitt Phil Polglaze Kathryn Round David Simmonds Caryn Simonson Kate Smith Chris Watson

Philippa Brock Artist’s Biography: Philippa Brock is a woven textile designer, researcher and jacquard artist with a portfolio practice. She also runs the Weave department at Central Saint Martins College of Arts & Design, UAL. Brock’s work ranges from designing textiles for the fashion and interiors industry, e-textiles/ smart textiles, research into innovative digital weaving production methods, through to exhibiting woven jacquard textiles internationally. Her most recent exhibitions have included a solo exhibition at the Montreal Centre for Contemporary Textiles (2012) and a group exhibition, Digital Jacquard: Mythologies (2013), which opened in Hong Kong and is currently touring in China at the Shenzhen Modern Design Museum and will travel to The China National Silk Museum Hangzhou in September. About the work: Cherish explores a series of concepts for sustainable long life denim; from hardwearing and digitally engineered woven jacquard fabrics, through to customisation by the consumer, without radically shortening the life of the denim. The works were commissioned to research and demonstrate ideas around how to encourage consumers to love and cherish their denim clothing, to wear them for a long time and become part of the owner’s ‘emotional wardrobe’ of much loved clothing items. Within Europe by 2015 no textiles will be able to be put in landfill sites. These works explore the potential encouragement of consumers to not buy into fast fashion inbuilt seasonal obsolescence, but to consider their clothing as heirlooms which change in a good or ‘new’ way over time. Ideally once the denim has worn out it can then be recycled or up-cycled. The research investigated a variety of existing approaches including the normal wear and tear points of jeans, known as ‘whiskers’ (groin area), ‘honeycombs’ (behind the knees) and ‘stacks’ (the bottoms of the legs). Further investigations were made into the devastating impact of some of the finishing techniques employed to speed up fashion-led wear and tear of the denim and existing home DIY self-customisation techniques. The works exhibited illustrate techniques such as double denim layers, rip and reveal selfcustomisation and the use of yarns which give added strength. Further research ranged from bikers who layer new jeans under their old worn out denim to extend the life of their jeans (‘ridges & primaries) to interviews with construction workers who wear denim as work wear. Also, the original use of denim; interviews with devotees of both raw/ dry denim (a sustainable approach to wearing denim and minimal washing) and selvedge/selvage denim (denim woven on narrow width looms so there is minimal wastage in the pattern cutting), through to young adults’ views on both their fast fashion denim choices and their own existing long life denim items. These works also illustrate how consumers could potentially choose their own designs to appear underneath the double denim layer, either by designing their own rip and reveal layer at the denim weaving stage (Leg 1 & 1A). By home customising rips and slashes without damaging the bottom layer (Leg 5 & 5B) and encouraging DIY distressing and fringing, but retaining the integrity of the fabric through the different double denim layering systems, therefore extending the life of the denim (All Legs).

Philippa Brock

Leg 5.

Leg 5b.

Cherish 2012 Digitally woven jacquard. Produced by the designer on a Dataweave Bonas industrial power loom. Warp yarn: cotton 2 ply. Weft yarns: Bossa indigo dyed cotton, Invista nylon, indigo dyed cotton. Each individual panel, 50 x 128cm.

Sam Christmas Photographer’s Biography: Sam Christmas is a London based photographer who has been shooting professionally for four years. As a portrait photographer subjects have included Benicio Del Toro, Michael Fassbender, Vincent Cassel, Francis Ford Coppola, Viggo Mortensen, the Beastie Boys, Cee Lo Green and many more. More recently Sam has focused on his passion for motorcycles and his name has become synonymous with the custom motorcycle scene in the UK.  In January this year his personal work on the subject culminated in a solo exhibition called Natural Habitats. About the work: Natural Habitats offers a look inside the growing custom motorcycle scene in London and the UK. Ranging from enthusiasts building bikes in their bedrooms, to some of the best professional custom bike builders in the country. This exhibition introduces many of the characters that form the scene alongside their unique motorcycles, in the spaces they keep and work on them.

Sam Christmas

James Jordan, Triumph T120 2011 C-Type Fuji print. 84 x 64 cm, framed.

Nick Clements Photographer’s Biography and background to the work: Involved in subcultures, in the self-proclaimed role of “stylist” – since the early 1970s, Nick Clements turned his devotion to street style into a career through men’s fashion photography. Using the language of the tableau vivant Clements has moved from the supposed theatricality of fashion into the largely unexplored area of re-enactment – itself a highly developed subculture. Unexpectedly the photographer has not focused on the predictable English Civil War or World War II, but on the golden era of youth style in Britain and the US that roughly coincides with the start of roll’n’roll in 1953 with the demise of punk in 1979. After publication of the book Simulacra (2005) Nick Clements enrolled at the RCA and embarked on a practice based research degree in the Dept. of Fashion and Textiles; the subject of his research being the relationship between revival subcultures and contemporary men’s fashion. In 2009 he opened Men’s File, a magazine that addressed the full range of aesthetic pastimes that had become associated with male dress and style but are manifested in objects such as hot rod cars, period motorcycles or ancient surfboards. He is currently working on a series of men’s style books, published by Men’s File Archive.

Nick Clements

From the Revival Subculture Series.

Craig Fisher Artist’s Biography: Craig Fisher (b. 1976) graduated from Goldsmiths College, University of London with an MA in Fine Art in 2000. Fisher has exhibited his work nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Beach Gallery, London (2013), James Freeman Gallery, London (2012), Millais Gallery, Southampton Solent University, Southampton (2008) and Galerie BK, Bern, Switzerland (2008). Fisher has been included in group exhibitions at venues such as APT Gallery, London (2013), Space Station Sixty-Five, London, Danielle Arnaud contemporary Art, London, Catalyst Arts, Belfast and Grand Union, Birmingham (2012), South London Gallery, London (2010), Artspace, Sydney (2007) and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles (2006). Fisher curated Pile, Surface Gallery, Nottingham (2010), which then went on to tour to Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, (2011) About the work: A major car crash has occurred – a head on collision. Skid marks are emblazoned across the floor, there is wreckage strewn everywhere and blood is splattered up the walls – glistening and fresh. You are being filmed by surveillance cameras, are you the victim or perpetrator? Spaces seem inaccessible, areas cordoned off by hazard tape… where are you, in a major disaster, crime scene or spoof horror film? These are just some of the scenarios that Craig Fisher explores in his sculptural installations, which are seductive in nature and ask the viewer to question the representations of macho stereotypes, violence and disaster laid out before them. He collects and employs images of violence, disaster and its aftermath from Film, TV and the Media in the production of his sculptural installations and painting. On viewing his work the overall impression is that you are being transported by your TV to the latest media disaster: Or is it a film set – Kill Bill meets South Park, The Shining via The Wizard of Oz and then back again through Bowling for Columbine! Ideas of filmic or cartoon violence are juxtaposed with decorative and ornamental motifs; the sense of saturation at play in the work makes it easy to miss the horror due to the seductive nature and materiality of the artwork. Fisher creates an aftermath of multiple popular references, which need to be unpicked.

Craig Fisher

Above, You are Entering a Secure Zone (installation view) 2008 Neoprene, silk, MDF, wood and acrylic paint. Dimensions variable.

Below, Caught on Camera (detail) 2009 Neoprene, MDF, wood and acrylic paint. Dimensions variable.

Tom Helyar-Cardwell Artist’s Biography: Tom Helyar-Cardwell’s practice sits within a tradition of contemporary object painting, with direct reference to the still life painting of the Northern Renaissance. Helyar-Cardwell studied MA Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art, and is currently undertaking practice-based PhD research in painting at Chelsea College of Art & Design. Solo exhibitions include ASC, London and Bearspace, London. Recent Group exhibitions include Bond House Space, London, National Open Art Competition, London and Chichester and APT, London. More info at www.tomhc.com About the work: A Battle Jacket is a customised garment worn in Heavy Metal subcultures. Battle Jackets are significant in the expression of sub-cultural identity for those that wear them, and constitute a global phenomenon dating back at least to the 1970s. The Battle Jacket or Kutte has developed from motorcycle culture, and has a heritage that can be traced back to medieval heraldry. Still life painting presents cultural artefacts and recreates them within a network of symbols. Recent critical perspectives identify inherent concerns with the history of capitalist society, power relations and the very mechanics of visualisation. My practice identifies such objects and analyses their messages through painting.

Tom Helyar-Cardwell

Amebix 2012 Watercolour on paper. 38 x 26 cm

Rachael House Artist’s Biography: Rachael House is an artist who makes large-scale art events and objects. She is based in London and shows work locally, nationally and internationally. Her work often takes the form of participatory events happening outside of gallery spaces. This work brings people together in public space, and in it Rachael tries to facilitate what writer Barbara Ehrenreich termed ‘collective joy’. Rachael has a lo-fi aesthetic, interspersing the hand made with commercially manufactured vinyl banners, utilising advertising methods with a more subversive message. These banners are objects but also an invitation: to consider, and to participate in, an alternative. Rachael House’s recent projects include A Space of Potential at Stratford Circus, Pittsburgh PetTastic, USA, Apathy’s a Drag at CGP London and Peckham Peacocks, a mobility scooter meet for the launch of Peckham Space. With Jo David, Rachael House is co-director of Space Station Sixty-Five, an artist run space in Kennington, London.

Rachael House

Left, Peckham Peacocks 2010 Invitation for the launch of Peckham Space.

Right, Feminist Disco Pennants (installation view) 2011

Erling T.V. Klingenberg Artist’s Biography: Erling T.V. Klingenberg studied at the Icelandic College of Art & Craft and graduated from there in 1994. He also studied at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Frankfurt am Main and in Kiel in Germany. From there he went to Halifax, Canada and graduated with a MFA degree in 1997 from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. 
Erling T.V. Klingenberg has both exhibited in his native Iceland and in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Sweden, Netherland, Ireland, Canada and China. Beside his own practice, Erling is a founder of Kling & Bang gallery (2003) that also ran the artist base KlinK and BanK (2004 and 2005). He has, with his colleagues at Kling & Bang, organized and collaborated on various project with many other artists, such as Sheep Plug with Jason Rhoades and Paul McCarthy, the film Skipholt with John Bock, Two Hanks with David Askevold, Hugris with Gelitin and Sirkus Bar at Frieze Projects (Frieze Art Fair 2008). http://this.is/klingandbang About the work: Rather than the typical art tools – brushes, pallet knives, etc. – he uses a motorcycle in creating these works on canvas by placing a container of paint under its rear wheel before hitting the accelerator to unleash its raw horsepower. The resulting paintings are accompanied by others made through variations on this process that is steeped in overt clichés of masculinity. In another set of works, for example, the artist drove his bike through paint and over pieces of paper and canvas to create a series of tire “prints.” Continuing his onslaught, there was a massive rubber burnout in the gallery space to reveal several layers of paint on the gallery floor and on 8 sheets of wood. For all of these works, the creative process has been made visible through a series of videos that capture the artist in the act of making. - David Diviney 2012.

Erling T.V. Klingenberg

The making of Powerful Pictures - Obsession - Original Image credit: Henrike Mueller

Cathie Pilkington Artist’s Biography: Cathie Pilkington is a figurative artist with a reputation for intriguingly ambivalent forms. Her work collages approaches that are drawn from the interrelated and antagonistic worlds of fine art and craft. This strategy has enabled her to develop an important authorial voice, one that satirises the inherent privilege of art and articulates an interesting relationship with reality. Cathie Pilkington was born in Manchester in 1968. She studied Silversmithing at Edinburgh College of Art 1986-1991 and completed her MA in Sculpture at the RCA in 1997. She is represented by Marlborough Fine Art and lives and works in Bethnal Green, London. About the work: Pilkington’s practice thematizes material and making. Simple materials are often employed to perform supernatural tasks. Stories of lust, violence and visions are played out using a heterogeneous array of characters, materials and finishes. Plaster, clay, wood, fabric and straw are spliced with found and appropriated objects, surfaces may be glittering and glossy, organic coarse or sensitively refined. The work has a life like richness that emerges from an intuitive synthesis of materials and blends layers of subtle and unsettling meaning. The presentational mode of Pilkington’s work is often the sculptural tableaux. The tableau is a popular and sentimental mode. Its aim is to involve the beholder as directly as possible with a presence that is vivid and theatrical. But the tableau’s promise of involvement can never be fulfilled. It is this simultaneous involvement and estrangement from the subject that is at the heart of Pilkington’s figuration.

Cathie Pilkington

HEAVY METAL 2007 Welded polished steel, fur and glass eyes. 56 x 47 x 63 cm

Ellis Pitt Designer’s Biography: Ellis spent most of his childhood, either in the back garden of the late Alan Mountain’s home, riding and modifying a Honda C50, or in the showroom of his Honda motorcycle shop in York, pointing-out the specifications of Honda’s range to his eternally patient mother, who had to drive him there most Saturday afternoons. He raced as a schoolboy scrambler in the late 1970’s on a Honda CR125 Elsinore and dispatched in London on an early Sportster to ‘pay the rent’ whilst at Kingston Poly’, studying to become a product designer. Alongside running several manufacturing businesses and working laterly as an independent design director with the Design Council, he’s always ridden, maintained and modified a variety of motorbikes. A chance meeting with Xenophya Design in 2009 led to starting Mac Motorcycles.

Ellis Pitt

Mac ‘Spud’ prototype motorbike 2013

Phil Polglaze Took Up Photography as a Teenager, (in the 60s) If It Looked Good Snap It, Simple, Met Lenny in the 80”s Became Official Photographer to The Rockers Reunion Club From The Chelsea Bridge To SarfendorBrighton From 83/86..... Where Are They Now?????? Phil Polglaze..

Phil Polglaze

From the Rockers’ Reunion series 1983-1986

David Simmonds Photographer’s Biography: I work across a range of genres and have spent more than 20 years documenting London’s street culture through the Notting Hill Carnival. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in the early 1990s I worked for a range of clients including GQ, Elle, the Sunday Times, View on Colour and Madam Figaro, shooting portraits, fashion and interiors. I’ve exhibited in public and private galleries in the UK and overseas including the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A in London where I am Programme Leader for Photography at Middlesex University. I am developing a publication project that extends on photographic work I undertook in the PuDong and MinHang Districts of Shanghai in 2010. About the work: As they proceed along the TT course visiting motorcyclists have time only to glance as opposed to luxuriate in protracted gaze at the landscape. It is forever in motion with horizons titling and shifting as machines lean through bends and swoop through dips. (Crowther, 2007) My current work explores how speed shapes the relationship different people have with specific environments, built and natural. I explore how one particular landscape - the TT Mountain Course on the Isle of Man - is experienced and understood by those who travel through it at speeds of up to 200 mph. Does speed of this kind leave evidence on the bodies of those who have experienced it? Using large and medium format cameras I have produced a series of still photographs focused on the race route and the spent racers - contrasting the slowness of my process with the effect of speed as experienced by the racers.

David Simmonds

Isle of Man TT 2013 2013 Framed Giclee Prints Diptych. Each panel 920 x 1100cm

Caryn Simonson Artist’s Biography: Caryn Simonson is curious about people, their clothes, bodies, passions, harbouring secret lives or holding allegiance to social groups. Her work has centred around the performance of gender, sexuality, the subversion of identity, clothing and the body. She is Course Leader for BA (Hons) Textile Design at the University of the Arts London (Chelsea College of Art and Design). She is also the Theory Co-ordinator and a member of the Textile Environment Design (TED) and Textile Futures Research Centre groups (TFRC) at the university. As an artist and curator, she has presented work across photography, video, sculpture, installation and writing. In 2007, she curated a group exhibition with Renata Brink called Textile Transporter at arttransponder Gallery, Berlin. Recently, Caryn co-curated an exhibition of TFRC members’ work in the 3D digital online social networking environment Second Life. In 2008 she guest-edited a special themed issue – Skin and Cloth – for Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture (Berg, 2008). She is a member of the International Advisory Board for Textile. About the work: Classic or custom motorbikes get ’recycled’ - often passed on to new owners or modified, customised and upgraded. They represent not only nostalgia for the past but a model for the re-use of objects. Caryn Simonson’s work exploits the use of old objects and found materials to render the functional dysfunctional or transform the readings of objects causing us to re-think their context often in relation to identity and gender. This work forms part of a series of digital photographs depicting motorbikes that are customised using fabrics and found objects from charity shops, personal junk etc. Semi-documentary portraits are staged in ways to open up questions around individuality or group allegiance, fact and fiction. Esther and Lyn with the Cossack has been described as a contemporary twist on a Gainsborough painting – might the figures standing with their bikes have been the land-owners – modern-day nobles, or the chauffeurs? Today, there is less room for the individual to ‘know’ their motorbike in terms of dismantling it, reassembling or restoring it themselves, with the ever-increasingly complex new bikes engineered to encourage minimum interference. Obsolescence is designed into consumer goods increasingly making the consumer less emotionally attached to their object of desire; it’s all about the latest model rather than longevity. In some ways these images are romantic in that they hark back to another era of biking which, although not lost, has been superseded by more emphasis on images of biking, speed and performance. Yet at the same time these images don’t fit into any past era as they are ‘impossible’ images too.

Caryn Simonson

Esther and Lyn with the Cossack, at the yard, London 2007 Digital photograph 80 x 60 cm Edition of 10

Kate Smith Artist’s Biography: Kate Smith completed her BA in Fine Art at Sunderland Polytechnic in 1983 and an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in 1986. Since then she has worked from a sculptural perspective in an expanded field, employing mixed media. She currently lives and works in London, teaching as a lecturer on MFA Fine Art at Goldsmiths.

Kate Smith

David/Workshop 2002 Video Installation Dimensions variable

Chris Watson Artist’s Biography: Bikes and drawing were always in Chris Watson’s blood; as a boy he rode every Sunday with Central Scotland Wheelers Cycling Club. After meeting master illustrator Harry Horse, he began drawing with steel pens dipped in ink. While studying at Glasgow School of Art, he became a keen motorcyclist and joined the Mercury M.C. His award winning artwork has been commissioned around the world for a variety of fashion & record labels, magazines, books, liquor, logos and fonts. His silkscreened prints and t-shirts have been snapped up at dozens of galleries and boutiques in Europe, Japan and the USA. About the work: It begins here for me on this road, how the whole mess happened I don’t know -the Wild One

What interests me is where disciplines overlap, making connections between Modernism, Rockers, road movies, landscape painting, jazz record sleeves, bandes dessinees, German Expressionists, comic strips, medieval tapestries, Aztec codices, folk art, Cubism, Graphism, pin ups, old masters, Greek legends, Folk tales, Tex Avery, Urban myths, Television, Porn, Punk, DIY, Doo Wop, Yeh-yeh, Hot Rods, Minimalism, Café Racers, street style, high fashion, illustration & printmaking. I don’t believe in artificial notions of high and low culture, or an elitist definition of literature – every interesting piece of art I’ve ever come across has a zig zag trail of wide ranging influences which can be traced back behind it. Artists, despite what critics may think, are insatiable omnivores or ruthless magpies even, stealing little bits of everything and anything they can use for their purpose. - Chris Watson, June 2013

Chris Watson

Left, Deadbeat 2002 Silkscreen on paper 30 x 42 cm Edition of 20

Right, She’s a Bad Motorcycle 2002 Silkscreen on paper 21 x 42 cm Edition of 17

Each produced for Bad Motorcycle, an editioned series of 9 silkscreen prints and a t-shirt in a decorated hand-bound buckrum box.