INDEX explores work by Mike Ballard, Jack Evans, Melloney Harvey and Andrea V.Wright in response to the visual language in architecture. Whether it is work highlighting rampant redevelopment, or concerned with decorative, period, architectural trends, each artist uses transformation, re-invention and documentation to create an index of the impressions made by the semiotics of buildings.

Decorative bricks from post-war housing estates become cultural icons and then fine art – plasterwork, forgotten interiors of buildings and the detritus of redevelopment are used to create something contemporary and unique, with flashes of history and ubiquity. The mundane is transformed into something crucial and compelling.

Each work acts as part of an index of remembrance and change in the urban landscape, as well marking when these changes occur. Through this documentation the exhibition becomes a log of objects that are often ignored, but now given a second life or prevalence by contextually inserting them into a sequential arrangement of materials. 

As an artist living in London, surrounded by the wave of gentrification flooding the city, Mike Ballard is a spectator of the everyday urban environment in its constant fluctuation. Using the cityscape as his primary source for material, Ballard conveys the weight of visual noise displayed in the urban matter, immortalising the fabric of a city, giving new life to the often ignored.

Jack Evans is a visual artist, film maker and sculptor. His work is interested in ideas of aspiration and masculinity, drawing motifs from the aesthetic ideas of ‘luxury’, and the people who reinforce it. Through recreation and imitation, his work draws from the semiotics of architecture and taste, ranging through classicism, brutalism and minimalism, through to the more obscure symbols of aspiration revived from his Nineties childhood in the midlands and package holidays to the Med. His work questions and examines the ideas of form and beauty, especially in regard to the places we occupy and inhabit, whilst alluding to what may be the banal and farcical nature of it all.
 
Andrea V. Wright’s practice interweaves stable and fragile compositions through fabrication, transformation and re-invention. For example, geometric structures act as substrates for skin-like surface residues, or provide a starting point for temporal spatial drawing installations, where the shadows of these structures are traced onto architectural spaces using tape and threads. Key to all her works is the relationship between the human form and the physical/emotional spaces which we inhabit.

Melloney Harvey Uses the historic craft of fibrous plaster-work as a method of making. Much of her work is comprised of architectural details – often supporting structures such as columns, plinths, corbels and arches. Her work takes inspiration from Vanitas and still life fruit paintings – the symbolism centuries old yet still being as relevant now. Beauty and abundance lure through the more sinister warning symbols of the transient and vain earthly pleasures.