Opening of the Exhibition ‘Apodidraskinda’ (Hide-and-seek) in Casa d’Avenida in Setubal (P)

Last Saturday my solo-exhibition in Casa d’Avenida in Setubal opened and even with all the restrictions still going on around here there was a good amount of public and friends. Many of the works that I made in the last challenging year were finally having a place to be shown. Not just in any place, not in the regular white-cube gallery but in a wonderful old house, a small palace in the center of Setubal, inherited by Maria-Joao Frade and turned into an art-space with all the love and passion she has in her. The house shows its soul and gives a warm welcome to the visitors from the moment you enter the big, wooden front door. It is a bit of a challenge to get to the top floor on these monumental stone stairs but once on the top floor, one can admire a beautiful view over the city . It is there on that second floor that I installed my pieces in a perfect combination with their antique environment and sometimes even merging together with the space or the furniture. In the old ‘salon’ my ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ seems to be an old collection of the previous owner, as it has always been there and is part of the paraphernalia of the interior. The big textile works I sewed together from patches of old clothes my mom made during a lifetime, look as if they where there since the beginning and have been torn and consumed by time and use during centuries of habitation.

The exhibition is on show until the 9th of May.

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APODIDRASKINDA (Hide-and-seek)

Saturday 10th of April opens my solo-exhibition in Casa d’Avenida in Setubal (P). I will show a new series of works under the titel of ‘Apodidraskinda’ which is an Old-Greek word for the game ‘hide-and-seek’. You are all welcome to visit the exhibition from 16h on that day. The exhibition it will stay on show until the 9th of May.

A drawing inspired by my work

On the 17th of December, the group-exhibition ‘o gato invisível de tão preto que era’ opened its doors in the Galeria Santa Maria Maior in the center of Lisbon. There were a lot of people hungry to see art in these days of pandemic. Even with the social distancing measures that were respected, we could say it was cosily crowded.

Under the public there was a youngster of 10 years very intrigued by a series of works made by me, called ‘Fake Stones’. These objects look like real stones from a distance but the closer he got to the stones the more he understood that these stones were not real. They are objects from dried clay in the form of a stone with pencil drawing on them. With this work I play with the spectator’s observation. So this smart guy started to ask me questions and with this game of questions and answers, he got more and more interested in what was shown there.

What I didn’t realise at that particular moment was that Kasper, that is his name, turned into a real fan of that series of work. These things happen, you know, you are not aware, there is a lot of buzz going on, a lot of conversations, people to talk to or newly to meet.

But not long after that evening his father send me this drawing which Kasper made for school, inspired by what he saw on our exhibition: the fake stones, the planets in the photographs of Luis Barata, the sunlight in my images of ‘Capturing the Sun’, the tables with the ‘Gabinetes de Curiosidades’, … it is all integrated in this very colourful interpretation.

I proudly share Kasper’s drawing with you. Isn’t it lovely? Isn’t that part of why we are making art?

How did Covid-19 affect my work?

“The Digit ditches the Darkness” curated by REGINA FRANK selecting work from the exhibition “Sem Limites” looking specifically at the way artists deal(t) with the confinement during COVID-19. For this selection Regina Frank asked each artist participating how the pandemic influenced their practices.

Even before COVID-19 became a reality in our lives, I was delving into a number of themes that can be linked to the recent lockdown. Certainly with the works from the Roadworks series, I touched a point that later became reality: changing routes, blocking the road or the access to a place, now evoke memories of the limited space that was and often still is available to us. My Jersey Barriers can also be included in this series of works. They are copies of concrete blocks that I transformed into ceramic objects, which I placed at the entrance of exhibitions thus limiting the space to the visitors.

The Fakestones, chosen by Regina for her part of the “sem-limites”-echibition, were initiated before but further refined during the isolation. For these works, I used several of the moulds that I made over the years from stones and pieces of street. I filled them with recycled clay. After drying, I drew lines and scribbled on the works with a graphite pencil.

On the one hand, the work has a reference to the time we were locked up in our houses: that which is outside, there on the street, outside our reach is brought inside, into the safe seclusion of our houses. On the other hand, the work refers to the question of what is real, what is fake? And in that sense it refers to the uncertainty that people increasingly feel: what is real in the whole story, what is not, is it real or does it seem like it?

COVID-19 deprived me of the opportunity to work on the street as an artist, which is an important part of my practice. Instead of using my silicone mobile lab, I took to the streets with my camera on silent moments and was able to take pictures for my artist’s book about pink walls. I would not have been able or even willing to take many of the photos under normal circumstances.

The months of isolation also gave me time to look with new eyes at the work I have been developing spontaneously for several years and it gave me the opportunity to look at some of them with new eyes and took some ideas which until then remained in embryonic state, out of the closet.

Katie Lagast

Website: https://katielagast.com

#Outofoffice in Campo & Campo

Vanaf donderdag 2 juli t/m 29 augustus staat mijn keramische installatie ‘Pavement I’ op de groepstentoonstelling: #outofoffice. Daarnaast is ook één van de Jersey Barriers te zien, die heerlijk de weg verspert aan de ingang van de expositie. Twee tekeningen in blauwe bic maken het geheel compleet.

Samenstelling van de tentoonstelling staat op naam van Hans Willemse.

Van dinsdag t/m zaterdag van 9u – 16u

Adres: Grote Steenweg 19/20 in Berchem, Antwerpen (B)

meer info op: campocampo.be/exhibition/out-of-office

 

 

artist talk: silent witnesses of a shared environment

Conversas à Volta do Tijolo held on the 11th of May 2019 in Montemor-O-Novo (P)

Synopsis: Lagast does not work with bricks, which is why they are not found in her work. Still, bricks appear here and there in her artistic works: as an existing wall covered with aluminum foil to catch the daylight or as a form of detail in a brick wall. Lagast uses moulds in her work to reproduce details that characterize spaces and cities but also provides a certain type of repetition of the elements. This repetition of one or more modular elements can be found in many of the artist’s installations and gives the artist the freedom to adapt them, every time again, to a new space. They are materializations of a continuous observation of the surrounding urban environment, resulting from an incessant curiosity about the identity of a city.

silent witnesses of a shared environment

 

 

New Website online

My new website is online!

Visual Artist

Moderno Escondido – exposição

The Corner Piece #3, a project by Ligia Dias

Lisbon, September 14 – October 5, 2019

with: BLESS, Marta Costa Reis, Ligia Dias, Raquel Dias, Jorge Dias, Patrícia Domingues, Julien Fronsacq, Jenna Kaës, Katie Lagast, Vera Pinto, and LRC with Sophie Andes Gascon, CFGNY, Lydia and Fabio Quaranta x Giovanna Maria Chiades.

For The Corner Piece in Lisbon, Ligia Dias brings together artists that have an innate or symbolic relationship with Portugal. The works are displayed in the concrete cubes of Belo Campo, the artist-run space funded by the artist Adrien Missika and hosted by Galeria Francisco Fino.

The Corner Piece is a play on words referring to the store and the exhibition. The project wishes to be interdisciplinary and puts together conceptual and craft practices. The principle is to invite artists, designers and creators according to productions they have made within or at the edge of their framework. In a spirit of transversality, the project questions the notion of artistic field, the subjective value of a given object (be it art-work or product), as well as the exhibition form in itself.

We are pleased to invite you to the
OPENING on SEPTEMBER 13 / 10PM

Belo Campo
Galeria Francisco Fino
Rua Capitão Leitão, 76
1950-052 Lisboa
Portugal

Rain puddles in glass

My fascination for rain puddles, mainly on the streets of Lisbon (P), began a few years ago. I started to make pictures, drawings, prints, etc. to study their ever changing form. In the meanwhile trying to figure out how I could be able to translate these puddles of water into glass objects. Objects that capture the form and imprint of whatever is there on the ground but which also keep a reference to the reflection of the surface and the transparency of a pool of water.

The first tests I made were still small in size: between 15 cm up to 35 cm in length. I made the models for these elements right there on the streets with clay. Fernando Quintas, professor of the glass departement of the academia de Belas Artes in Lisbon (P),  gave me the chance and space to dive into the wonderful world of glass melting and in his presence I started with my first experiments.

After a while I got the idea to make them bigger in size, deeper, more transparent. So I had to find a suitable place to do so. In Beeldenstorm, an artist workshop in Eindhoven (NL), I found the perfect environment to excecute this project. I changed from clay to silicones to make traveling easier and didn’t worry to much about the final size of each of the puddles I was casting. Only to find out in Beeldenstorm that I was very lucky the biggest of the models only merely fitted into the kiln. It shouldn’t have been a little bigger or it would have been a different story.

In January of this year I started making the moulds. Some of which took me two days to prepare. Each of the moulds had 4 layers of a different mixture of plaster and silica. A  piece of fiber glass was put between the second and the third layer to avoid the mould falling completely apart after firing.

In June we started to fill the first moulds with a gorgeous type of glass (bullseye) and just a little more than one week ago I finally took the first results out of the kiln. Two of the objects still need a good and final cleaning but I feel eager to share already some of the pictures here with you.