Margaret Sharrow - biography

Born in Buffalo, New York, United States

Lives and works in west Wales, United Kingdom

Education

2007-2009

B.A. Fine Art (hons, first class), Aberystwyth University School of Art.

2006-2007

PGCE Secondary (English), Aberystwyth University.

2000-2001

Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship, University of Wales, Lampeter.

Exhibitions

2011

'Holy Ghost: The Collection' at New Gallery London (group)

http://hgcollection.blogspot.com/search/label/DAY%206.

Fragile: global performance chain journey, Verena Stenke and Andrea Pagnes, Firenze (group) http://www.fragile-global-performance.net/FRAGILE/HOME.html.

Ultimate Stillness (curator and collaborator with participants) http://ultimatestillness.blogspot.com/.

2010

EMERGENCY WORDS, performances in Lampeter, 9 September (solo); 'emergency', greenroom, Manchester, 1 October (group) http://emergencymcr.posterous.com/ and http://www.greenroomarts.org/archive/events/emergency-2010/.

sooner or later, participant in collaboration with Artic (Pete Judge & Reuben Knutson), 29 July (group) http://www.artic.org.uk/sooner.htm.

Shrouded artist, performance art, 10 June, Poets and Peasants, Lampeter (solo).

Shrouded car (bird), ongoing tour of Wales and UK (solo).

Shrouded forms, Town Hall Café-Deli, Lampeter, Ceredigion (solo).

Art Bin, Michael Landy, South London Gallery (group) http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/144/Michael+Landy+Art+Bin/85.

Re: Contemplating the Void, Guggenheim Museum Flickr group, New York (group) http://www.flickr.com/groups/recontemplating/pool/.

Tate Modern is 10, Tate Modern Flickr group (group) http://www.flickr.com/groups/tatemodern10/pool/.

Exposed, Tate Modern online group (group) http://apps.facebook.com/tate-exposed/?ref=bookmarks.

Documenting Contemporary London, Royal Academy Flickr group (group) http://www.flickr.com/groups/documentingcontemporarylondon/pool/page10/, http://www.flickr.com/groups/documentingcontemporarylondon/pool/page11/ and http://www.flickr.com/groups/documentingcontemporarylondon/pool/page12/.

Great British Art Debate, Facebook group (group).

Life in a Day, dir. Ridley Scott http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3aPoD-zJZw and http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeinaday (group).

2009

Greenland and Wales, Erwood Station Gallery and Craft Centre, Powys (solo).

Aberystwyth University School of Art Degree Show (group).

Niagara, Tea With Warriors, background paintings on CD cover, http://www.teawithwarriors.com/niagara.htm (collaboration with Tea With Warriors).

2008

Current work, Café Print, Lampeter, Ceredigion (solo).

St Dogmaels Gallery Christmas Show, St Dogmaels, Pembrokeshire (group).

Salon des Refuses, @ the Gallery, Rhayader, Powys (group).

Christmas Open Art Fair, Oriel Cambria Gallery, Tregaron, Ceredigion (group).

Free, Morlan Centre, Aberystwyth (group).

Aberystwyth Art Society Spring Show, Morlan Centre, Aberystwyth (group).

Imaging the Bible, Aberystwyth University School of Art (group).

2003-2006

Various exhibitions with Cambria Arts, Tregaron, and Lampeter Festival, Ceredigion, UK (group).

1998

Traces, with Petra Kuppers of the Olimpias, various venues in Swansea and the south Wales valleys, UK. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~petra/animatedtraces.htm (collaboration with the Olimpias).

1992

A Hell of Our Own Making, Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York, USA (group).

Online

Margaret Sharrow (main portfolio and blog) margaretsharrow.blogspot.com

Portfolio 2009. sharrow.mosaicglobe.com

Current photographs. www.flickr.com/photos/margaretsharrow/

News and current photographs. www.facebook.com/pages/Margaret-Sharrow/48770277575

News, links and observations. twitter.com/sharrowart

Greenland travel 2008, and Arctic-related news. margaretsharrowgreenland.blogspot.com/

UK travel articles and photographs. aroundbritainwithsharrow.blogspot.com/

Fine art books. gwasgorielpress.blogspot.com/

Fine art books sales. www.blurb.com/user/GwasgOriel/

Bibliography

'Margaret's saving words.' Cambrian News, 16 September 2010.

Klopfenstein, Karly. 'Guggenheim holds online competition to Re: Contemplate the Void.' artcritical 9 June 2010. http://artcritical.com/2010/06/09/guggenheim-competition/

‘This woman’s car is literally a work of art’, Cambrian News, 15 April 2010.

'Artist's career moving up a gear with car sculpture', This is South Wales, 14 April 2010. http://www.thisissouthwales.co.uk/news/article-2009215-detail/article.html

‘Lampeter artist turns car into sculpture’, BBC Midwales, April 2010, news.bbc.co.uk/local/midwales/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8609000/8609184.stm

Anna Holmes, ‘Give a Toss’, Jezebel. jezebel.com/5493472/give-a-toss

India Times, iplextra.indiatimes.com/photo/0cUieWa97Vaxo?q=London

‘Give a Toss [Snap Judgement]’, Had News. 15 March 2010. us.hadnews.com/tag/margaret-sharrow

Treehugger. topics.treehugger.com/photo/07l615EdEB3ck?q=artist+OR+painter+OR+sculptor+OR+illustrator

Ben Hoyle, ‘Michael Landy: make it, break it? Love it’, The Times, 11 March 2010. entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article7057249.ece

Petra Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge, Routledge, 2003.

Publications and reviews

Shrouded forms. Gwasg Oriel Press, 2010.

Soul Matters. Gwasg Oriel Press, 2010.

Qaqortoq. Gwasg Oriel Press, 2010.

In response to Michael Glover, ‘Hot metal: Anthony Caro's sculpture is showing a wonderful late flowering of creativity and spirituality’, The Independent 15 April 2010.

www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/hot-metal-anthony-caros-sculpture-is-showing-a-wonderful-late-flowering-of-creativity-and-spirituality-1945242.html

Margaret Sharrow. margaretsharrow.blogspot.com. Numerous reviews of UK exhibitions: Mirosław Bałka, Francis Bacon, Colour Chart at Tate Liverpool, Nadav Kandar, Per Kirkeby, Michael Landy, Cildo Miereles, Mark Rothko, Stimulation for the Nation at Bicha/gallery@oxo; various at Aberystwyth University School of Art

Margaret Sharrow in Greenland. http://margaretsharrowgreenland.blogspot.com/

Talks

2010-2011

'Exploring art', series of illustrated lectures for Women's Workshop, Lampeter, September 2010 - present.

2009
'Greenland', Aberystwyth University School of Art, March.

Awards

Geoffrey Crawshay Memorial Travel Scholarship, University of Wales, 2008. £2000 award.

Aberystwyth University award, 2008.

S4C award, Founders’ Library video, National Eisteddfod, Builth Wells, 1993.

home . statement . portfolio . exhibitions . books . biography . links . contact . archive

Review: Michael Roberts - a close encounter with the face

Detail of 'Face X', painting by Michael Roberts, copyright Michael Roberts 2010. All photographs this page by Margaret Sharrow, 2011.

Imaging the Face

PhD exhibition

Aberystwyth University School of Art Gallery

29 November - 28 January

Larger and closer than life, a series of faces loom up to the imaginary windows of a short series of canvases. This is 'Imaging the Face' by Michael Roberts, a select study of a few persons rendered in such detail and yet in a way that would make it difficult to identify them, even if they were known personally to the viewer. Roberts has been exploring this theme since his MA, slowly producing a series of paintings all titled Face and differentiated by Roman numerals. The most recent work, Face X took 18 months to complete, between 2009 and 2010.

Roberts, who describes his oeuvre as 'hyperrealist representation of the human face', has an almost scientific procedure he follows as a working method, appropriate enough for one who always works dressed in an immaculately clean white laboratory coat. The paintings originate from one digital photo, which is drawn on canvas. Roberts then reshoots details of key elements of the face using macro photography at a scale of 1:1 to 1:6, which are then the basis for painting. For Face X, he further used microscopic photography to a magnification of between twenty and four hundred times life size. This third layer of photography was presumably also taken directly from the face, rather than enlarging the first photograph. The notes on the exhibition panel suggest that details such as translucent hairs may be lit differently at different times.

It is inevitable that the work will be compared with other photorealist painters such as Chuck Close. However, while Close's famous hyper-enlargements of the 1970's were larger than most photographic reproduction technology could produce at the time, Roberts is working at a time when the only limits on printing size seem to be the width of the paper roll. Roberts emphasises the 'handmade' quality of his images, produced over the course of months, the opposite of speedy digital printing. Close's work also mimicked the limitations of the camera, particularly that of depth of field, so that features of his sitter's faces are 'in focus' while hair and clothing slightly further back in the picture plane are blurred. Roberts, in contrast, has invested features in different parts of the picture plane with equal levels of detail, detail beyond the level that could be achieved by a single photographic image encompassing the entire face. In assembling details from a mosaic of microphotographs, he has actually flattened the perspective of the face. While wide angle lenses emphasise the distance between close and distant objects, zoom lenses compress that apparent distance, making a row of buildings on a street appear to pile on top of each other. Macro lenses are essentially zoom lenses, and so a series of details of a nose shot with extreme, even mircroscopic macro lenses, when set side by side will make the nose appear more flattened against the face than we are used to, our 'normal' naked eye vision being equivalent to a 55mm camera lens, and most portrait photography shot around a familiar 80mm.

The effect of the flattening, combined with the close cropping removing all hairstyles, clothing and other signifiers of gender, social status, etc. is disconcerting. As is the detailed rendering of blemishes, bloodshot eyes, moles, even fine hairs we don't normally see. The effect is rather like staring into a magnifier makeup mirror my grandmother used to have: it had a set of glamourous lights down both sides, which could be set to 'evening' or 'day', in which case a ghoulish fluorescent green light illuminated every pore to garish proportions. Roberts is forcing us to confront the aspects of skin that we dwell on obsessively in the mirror, when it is our own skin, and yet that we politely ignore or recoil from in others. He has crafted images that are the opposite of those in Photoshop-filtered glossy magazines. The obsessive attention to detail, ironically bringing beauty to overlooked and sometimes (to put it bluntly) repulsive minutiae, is at its best when Roberts lets go a little, leaving the paint to make its own contribution to the rich texture of the human surface.

Installation views and details of paintings from the exhibition, below.

Greenland blog 02: How my art took me to Greenland, and a Danish tongue twister

Parting clouds, west coast of Greenland. Image copyright Margaret Sharrow, 2008

I mentioned yesterday about the grant that allowed me to travel to Greenland, generously provided by the University of Wales, on condition that I was engaged in some sort of creative project (drama, cinema, creative writing, or in this case, fine art) with a further outcome to enhance my educational experience. I was at the time pursuing a BA at the Aberystwyth University School of Art, having hurried straight into the second year and begun experimenting with alternative photographic processes. This means that although I started out making some digital work, my main focus was in the darkroom, first doing traditional prints, and gradually moving into different techniques and chemical processes until it became photography, Jim, but not as we know it. By the end of the year I was cheerfully pouring bleach over multiple-exposure prints then wailing when I discovered that Sigmar Polke had already done exactly the same thing in 1971. To cap it all I’d been awarded a massive travel scholarship, which made for an interesting summer. After I finished marking a million media studies A level papers I had flown straight into preparations: daily study of Danish, in hopes of being able to speak Greenland’s colonial language, if not Greenlandic itself, which is difficult to find recordings for the essential comic attempts at mimicry. Now Danish can be difficult for the English speaker because of its range of guttural sounds produced at the back of the palette. Though Danish is reasonably similar to English in terms of word order, linguistic roots, etc., and I’d spent hours making vocabulary flashcards in my favourite cafe, I found that when confronted with actual Greenlanders speaking their colonial tongue I had my usual reaction - I froze (metaphorically, as it was still summer) and forgot everything I’d ever learned. There was one exception - I was able to amuse people by reciting the never-to-be-forgotten tongue twister taught to me years ago in Toronto by a Danish-Canadian friend. It employed a string of the guttural sounds, and provided guaranteed hilarity, by dint of my pronunciation: rød grød med flød på - which is red pudding with cream, as I remember.

Somehow I have diverged onto Danish tongue twisters and puddings, which throws up the whole question of Greenland’s relationship to Denmark. But more political thinking would leave us both up in the air, ignoring the spectacular views unfolding out the window of the descending plane. I can assure you unreservedly that at the time I took the photograph shown here, I was as fully present as I have ever been in my life, allowing for the fact that a certain detachment is inevitable when taking photographs at a furious rate. By the time we landed I was convinced that if I never took another picture over the next three weeks, I would still have enough material for an exhibition. The land was chiseled out of the green-blue sea, its elaphantine wrinkles washed with rusty red. And here I must say something about the colours I experienced, and have passed on to you. As with all my digital photos from this trip, I have made no alterations to saturation, contrast, density, etc., avoiding the current fashion in advertising and on Flickr for playing with these mechanics in Photoshop, producing supersaturated landscapes that anyone who has been to the place will recognise as overhyped, and setting up anyone who has not been for disappointment. Suffice it to say that with my photographs, as far as colour goes, what you see is what you get. Unless of course I have rendered the whole scene blue, by printing it as a cyanotype...

26 August 2008 09:32 (Greenlandic time) recalled 6 January 2011

Want more? Then please VOTE FOR ME TO BE THE OFFICIAL BLOGGER & ARTIST ON AN EXPEDITION TO THE NORTH POLE http://www.blogyourwaytothenorthpole.com/entries/166

then lope over to my Greenland blog http://margaretsharrowgreenland.blogspot.com/

and stay tuned for another episode tomorrow!

why I'm blogging about Greenland
archive of Greenland stories

Degree Show stars of Wales

Once again the degree shows of Wales have turned up a lot of interesting work (as well as the odd persons who weren't trying very hard, or who lacked or shunned guidance - but I shall cheerfully mention these no more). The shows at Aberystwyth University School of Art, Newport (Caerleon) and Trinity College (Carmarthen) were very different in scale, concept and emphasis. Having been spoiled by the fabulous architecture at Aberystwyth, I still find it a bit odd to see people at other schools having to exhibit underneath stairwells and in other spaces that might be bypassed by the visitor, although these spaces present obvious challenges and opportunities for creativity.

Above: Sophie Guiver, Trinity College Carmarthen

Aberystwyth continues to present a more conservative approach to exhibition overall (although it is always lifted by the light pouring through the magnificent skylights upstairs) - though a growing number (and not just in the Contemporary Concepts and Practice group) are bursting away from the white cube approach to use a variety of presentation styles, which I applaud. In this way they are perhaps catching up with other schools of art, while maintaining standards of technique, particularly in printmaking. It was also good to see those who had grasped drawing skills, though it is still rare to see someone who has done so to a level that they feel confident to become playful or to introduce deliberate rather than clearly accidental distortions.

Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now. Because I did genuinely enjoy all the shows I attended. I was, by turns, inspired, challenged, intrigued and amused. I shall leave you with a series of image of pieces that particularly struck me, in no particular order. They are all installation views and as such do not perhaps convey the full intent of the artists, for which apologies, but then I am loath to reproduce things in an accurate, copyable form without permission. So you will have to make do with my own style of recording.





















Rob Perry, Aberystwyth (MA)






























Laurence Stephens, Newport (documentary photography)

Tristan Hooper, Newport (documentary photography)

Heather Dobbins, Trinity College Carmarthen

Heather Dobbins, Trinity College Carmarthen

Amber Bolwell, Trinity College Carmarthen

Nikki Warlow, Trinity College Carmarthen

Elisabeth Williams, Trinity College Carmarthen

Elisabeth Williams, Trinity College Carmarthen

Daniel Roberson, Aberystwyth (MA)

Samuel Cooper, Aberystwyth

Aletia Thomas, Aberystwyth

Aletia Thomas, Aberystwyth

Kimberley Lewis, Aberystwyth























Rosemary Fahimi, Aberystwyth






















Aberystwyth. I thought I'd taken photos of everyone's labels, but I missed this one - apologies. Could someone help me out, please?























Chiara Tocci, Newport (documentary photography)

Ella Edwards, Newport (fine art)





























David Hucklesby, Aberystwyth

























Rebecca Backshall, Aberystwyth





























Lisa Stiff, Aberystwyth





























Sarah Poole, Aberystwyth






























Constanze Thielecke, Aberystwyth























Emily Payne, Newport (fine art)
























Emily Payne, Newport (fine art)

Rowena Clee, Newport (fine art)





Richard Wood, Aberystwyth

Shrouded car (bird) on BBC Mid Wales

Lampeter artist turns car into sculpture

Margaret Sharrow won an University of Wales Geoffrey Crawshay Memorial Travel Scholarship in 2008 Lampeter artist Margaret Sharrow has given up her car for art's sake. She has turned her vehicle into a sculpture to be exhibited at Lampeter Town Hall. 'Shrouded car (bird)' is being featured at a special exhibition at the venue on Saturday 10 April from 1100 GMT and 1500 GMT It complements Margaret's exhibition 'Shrouded Forms', which also runs at the Town Hall Café-Deli until 30 April 2010.  I'll be taking 'Shrouded car (bird)' on tour - look out for me photographing it at locations around Wales  Margaret Sharrow Margaret Sharrow said: "I began studying alternative ways of making photographs at Aberystwyth University, with my tutor Dr Christopher Webster. "He really opened my mind to completely different ways of taking and making images, and provided a very supportive environment for experimentation." Travel While still an undergraduate, Margaret showed work at the School of Art's 'Imaging the Bible' exhibition in 2008. Margaret intends to take the exhibition on tour Since graduating in 2009 she has also had a solo show at the Erwood Station Gallery, contributed to Michael Landy's 'Art Bin', and plans to continue expanding her artistic career. "I'm entering work from the Shrouded Forms series in shows in Wales and London and I'm also planning a large collaborative project involving travel," she added. Margaret was the winner of a £2,000 University of Wales Geoffrey Crawshay Memorial Travel Scholarship in 2008, which allowed her to travel to Greenland. She said: "l still have more work planned following on from that trip and I'll be taking 'Shrouded car (bird) on tour - look out for me photographing it at locations around Wales." http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/midwales/hi/people_and_places/arts_and_culture/newsid_8609000/8609184.stm