Lila De Magalhaes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1986. She moved to Zurich in 1989, studied at Glasgow School of Art 2004-2008, and University of Southern California 2011-2013 and currently lives and works in L.A.

Lila De Magalhaes is interested in perching right on the unsteady cusp between desire and abject, instinct and composure, animal and human. From video, soap, ink, or a performance with a Saint Bernard dog, her practice varies greatly in form.

Most recently she has made two mermaids out of clay resembling herself and her flat-mate. They sit together in a transient state, in a plastic bag filled with water. For Tall Tales Lila will showcase this new work Room mates alongside an accompanying video work ‘Rain Control’, which animates these mermaid figures through an everyday yet uncanny scenario – played out by non other than Lila and her flat mate.

Lila will also showcase a recent work, Same Together (The Lady and the Lion) a painting based upon a found artwork by American artist Terry Bowden from an artist project space called Creative Growth in Oakland, which supports adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities. In his original image, the artist only paints in an albino palette with even fruits only depicted in white and pink.

Lila wanted to insert herself within this artist’s imagery, and pay homage to the work and its maker, creating a new piece Same Together (The Lady and Lion).

Image C. Lila De Magahlaes. Top image shots from Room Mates, 2015, Bottom image: Lila with the original Terry Bowden painting at Creative Growth, 2015

Ruth Barker is a Glasgow based artist who works with text and performance. Her practice throws together moments of strange poetry and autobiographical sketches, with echoes of humanity’s oldest stories.

Reflecting theoretical ideas of connectivity and finitude, Barker often recounts her complex prose-poems from memory. Her performances, on first examination, foreground the artist’s own daily experiences and the quotidian narratives of life in contemporary Scotland (shopping lists from Lidl, Hovis bread with cut crusts, plastic bags, stubbled legs and the TV news). However, the work regularly suggests echoes of the larger, longer stories of our own mortality, our sense of self, and our internalisation of ancient myth.

Barker’s performance poems are hypnotic, ritualised, events. They are layered in structure and intensity, and use repetition, mnemonic, and moments of unexpected humour.

Recent projects include performance commissions for CCA (Glasgow) Siobhan Davies Dance (London), Radiophrenia (Glasgow), Resonance FM (London), Camden Arts Centre (London), Sils Projects (Rotterdam), Glasgow International festival of Visual Art; Cartel Gallery, (London) and Machon Hamayim (Tel Aviv). The Artist is represented by the Agency Gallery, London.

For Tall Tales Ruth Barker will present Glass, Blinded To The Room, a new video installation developed following the artist’s Tall Tales residency with the Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust and time spent with the Freud Museum collection in 2014. For the London leg of Tall Tales,Glass will be installed on Anna Freud’s desk at the Freud Museum London. An iPhone on Anna’s desk will loop a silent video clip. Around the phone, a series of texts overlaid with rough photocopies of the artist’s hands will stand upright on folded, coloured, sheets of A4 paper, composed in small desktop arrangements. Elsewhere on the desk will be detectable objects from the flotsam of the artist’s personal studio desk: fluorescent yellow earrings that were a gift form her husband, and a small photograph of the artist herself as a teenager, and dispersed in amongst Ann’s own belongings.

The work will overlay the artist’s world across the ephemera of another life. Recollections and associations will underscore the presence of Anna Freud as both subject and landmark in a personal and un-analysed creative landscape.

The Foot Exerts a Pressure On The Surface Of The Glass, is Ruth Barker’s Tall Tales performance commission developed specifically for Freud Museum London in its 30th anniversary year. Climbing onto and performing from a table in the Freud family dining room, the artist will fasten an elaborate, layered dress around herself. She will speculate on the nature of memory, improvising questions and asking the audience to silently revisit their dreams, Barker will ask museum staff to select and insert objects from the Freud collection and archive into her performance, onto the fabric of her skirt, whilst encouraging audiences to offer spoken responses to her dreamlike calls. The artist will recite a self-composed script from memory, enveloping the audience with her words which will become dreamlike, immersing those present in the performance. At pre-arranged moments, audiences will offer their own spoken responses to Barker’s calls. The atmosphere will be meditative, shared, intense, and irreverent: a very contemporary take on an ancient oral tradition.

The Foot Exerts a Pressure On The Surface Of The Glass will be performed only once on the afternoon of Saturday 16 April. The performance is intended to be immersive and an intimate experience, therefore capacity will be extremely limited. Until further information is released and if interested in attending please contact talltalestouring@gmail.com

Glass, Blinded To The Room  will be re-contextualised alongside  The Foot Exerts a Pressure On The Surface Of The Glass, to travel with Tall Tales and presented in Rochdale and Glasgow.

For more information about the artist please see Agency Gallery’s website, link here

As part of the 2016 programme Tall Tales will be working with artist writing commissioner and developer Akerman Daly. Akerman Daly will support Ruth Barker in producing and publishing new writings for the Tall Tales tour. See www.akermandaly.com

Image Credits: Top Right – Flash, 2015,  Bottom Image:  Circle Work, 2015, Photography by Christopher MacInnes, CCA Glasgow

Image C. Top Right: On Hearing of his Illness (I realized there were plants that needed watering) 1 of 6 Giclee Prints,
Bottom Image:  On Hearing of his Illness (Mapping Household Management) Fabric quilt, 2014, Jacqueline Butler

Nina Yuen’s films are playfully composed narratives made up of performances, collages and montages, beautifully assembled and often with artist playing multiple roles as narrator. Her fluid and enchanting spoken monologues merge personal and collective memory, stretching the limitations of our relationship with fact and fiction.

Nina Yuen will be showcasing existing work ‘Hermione’ alongside a more recent work, and its debut in the UK, ‘Raymond’.

C. Top image from ‘Hermione’ 2013, Bottom images from ‘Raymond’ 2015, both Nina Yuen

Ma Qiusha was born in 1982 and currently lives and works in Beijing, China. Ma Qiusha’s work reflects a special sensitivity with ordinary everyday objects and materials. She carefully re-stages them in unfamiliar environments to tell a story or express suppressed emotions. Mainly working with video and painting, at first glance her work is calm and expressionless but upon closer inspection or time with the work, deeper stories and symbols emerge which reflect personal memories and emotions to family and identity as well as wider topics around historical, political, social and economic transitions Chinese Society has gone through in the course of the 21st century.

For the Tall Tales programme Ma Quisha will be showcasing two distinct and pivotal works:

‘Rainbow’ is a one shot high-definition video work, which present to the viewers a dream like scene: three girls in a typical figure skating costume appear to be circling the camera, hand in hand. The film slowly reveals the girls are striving to mash tomatoes under their boots, causing a splash of fruit into nearby glass vessels – every sense and splash amplified by the use of HD recording, creating an immersive relationship between the audience and the figures. The work plays homage to the ring-a-ring-o’rose nursery rhyme and the chromatic contrast between the use of red and white in the piece, echoes an all too familiar play of against good and evil, fight or flight in storytelling.

‘Two  Years Younger Than Me’ presents a series of curious found objects by the artist’s late Grandfather and represents a new found understanding the artist had for her relative once she discovered these objects.

Ma Qiusha explains “My Grandad is the only elderly family member who have ever argues with me. Unlike most his age, he never spoiled his grandkids. My Grandad was an only child, just like me, and that’s why he was kind of weird. I remember clearly his odd, but always serious manner. He would keep his beard hair in a pill pottle and lock all the bottles up away. It was only after he passed away that I found these bottles in a pile of his personal belongings, which were going to be thrown away. Since 1984 he had used a pill bottle each year to save all his removed beard hairs from the last 12 months. I counted the bottle, 27 in total and exactly ‘two years younger than me”.

Image Credits: Top Right – Still from Rainbow, Single Channel Video 2013, Bottom Image – Two Years Younger than Me, medicine bottle, beard clippings, 2011 Copyright Ma Qiusha 

Tall Tales is delighted to be showcasing the Award Winning ‘Chandelier of Lost Earrings’ by Manchester based artists Lauren Sagar and Sharon Campbell.

The Chandelier of Lost Earrings was initially stimulated by a collaboration with staff at St Mary’s Maternity Unit (at Central Manchester University Hospitals), where staff were asked to donate lone earrings, which had formerly been a pair, and which had some emotional resonance or significance for the wearer.

A successful press and social media campaign followed, gathering in many thousands of earrings over 12 months. The act of individuals contributing something of personal value, towards a communal project to form something new, found strong resonance amongst hundreds of people (in the main women) locally, nationally and internationally.

For the Tall Tales programme the Chandelier will arrive at each City/ Town prior to the full programmed exhibition, signalling the arrival of Tall Tales to the venues and acting as a talking point for initial engagement work around Lauren Sagar’s new Commission ‘Call for Cloth’. To find out more about Call for Cloth click here.

For more information about Sharon Campbell from the Chandelier of Lost Earrings project click here

For more information about Lauren Sagar from the Chandelier of Lost Earrings project click here 

Images C. Geoff Brokate (Chandelier)

Oona Grimes is a compulsive scribbler, maker and storyteller. Using meticulously cut stencils and spray paint, Grimes’ illusionistic portrayal of architectural structures and the denizens that haunt them, whip up a froth of misinterpretation, loss of language and a celebration of flatness.

Her drawings are an investigation into language, beginnings and ends of it, learning and losing it. Clay is the in­ between bit ­ the instinctive making­ness that fills in the gaps.

Together the drawings and the clay objects are a celebration of the absurd, a transformation of ordinary objects and simmering consomme of fact & fiction, an ongoing series of parallel worlds. Although physically separate, the three dimensional “Clay Things” shared a powerfully intimate relationship with the drawings. It is this symbiosis, this highly tensioned space between the more conscious drawings and the haptic language of clay­making that drives her current work, and a selection of both clay and drawing based works will be showcased for the Tall Tales programme.

Recent exhibitions include: Volta , New York NY : Danielle Arnaud 2016; Stop Bugging Me : Frame 2, Tintype, London, 2015; Bread & Jam, Whitbread Road, London, 2015; Delta, Five Years, London, 2015; Impact, Hangzhou, China, 2015; Abstract Apartment, Deborah House, London, 2015; Pigdogandmonkey Manifesto, Airspace Gallery, Stoke On Trent, UK, 2014; chapter two, Danielle Arnaud , 2014; against Nature, Camberwell Space, London, 2014; Glass Cat #2, Wimbledon Space, London, 2014; Hackney Harpoon, Saison Poetry Library, London Lines, in collaboration with Writer Iain Sinclair, 2013.

She is a visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London, and Ruskin School of Art Oxford University & University of the Arts London.

As part of the 2016 programme Tall Tales will be working with artist writing commissioner and developer Akerman Daly. Oona Grimes will be working with Akerman Daly taking up an library shelf on art and writing with AD online. See www.akermandaly.com

Born in 1978 in Croix-Lille, France, Laure Prouvost lives and works in London. Since graduating from Central Saint Martins in 2002, her work has been exhibited extensively across the UK and internationally. Since winning the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2011 Prouvost went on to win the Turner Prize in 2013

For Tall Tales the artist will be showcasing  The Wantee Fountain. The work is drawn from Laure’s work Wantee – a multi media installation based on her depiction of the feud between her fictional grandparents and their arguments over art and use – the grandmother tries to make the grandfather’s art into useful things. The title is drawn from Kurt Schwitters pet name for his tea obsessed partner who helped him with his work in the final phase of his life in the Lake District of England.

For more information about the artist click here

Image C. Install shot Wantee Fountain, Grizedale Arts & the Artist 2013

Alison Erika Forde (born 1985, Wigan, Greater Manchester) gained a first class BA (Hons) Fine Art from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2008. She has been practising art in and around Manchester ever since, exhibiting regularly in the UK and overseas. Self published works include picture zines such as The Sleeping Death and the collaborative Putrid Paints.  Alison Erika Forde is represented by The International 3, Manchester.

Alison Erika Forde paints all sorts of anxiety stricken characters, often awaiting impending peril in their playful scenarios. She creates her daydream-inspired paintings on an eclectic mix of objects. By re-using old, unwanted items including mass-produced second-hand prints, bric-a-brac and household wood, Alison transforms these undesirables with her imagined story-book snippets. Drawing on imagery sourced from high art to the subcultural, she produces misleading twists on reality, with a pinch of mischief and dark humour.

Alison is also one third of the artists’ collective Yiiikes! Making vibrant multi-dimensional art that incorporates sculpture, paint and performance, aiming to engage and entertain the viewer with escapism into a parallel universe.

For Tall Tales, Alison Erika Forde’s Speak No Evil (2015) will feature alongside a selection of other wall based as well as sculptural works. Through Speak No Evil, the artist points to what she identifies as a ‘new wave of feminism’ taking place on social media and a perceived backlash against this, as well as attempt to suppress it. Silhouette busts in the style of enlarged Victorian silhouette portraits are cut so that the woodgrain almost appears as blind folds, gags, potentially even historical torture devices used once to silence ‘unruly women’.

Forde’s sculptural works will include a Shame Pole, as opposed to a totem pole, inspired by traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, and The Tower which explores themes of mortality and the cycle of life.

Image Credits: Top right Image – The Outsiders, Acrylic and emulsion on modified wooden object, 2015
Bottom Image – Poaching the familiar, Acrylic on found print, 2015, Both C. Alison Erika Forde

Beth Collar is an artist based in Bristol, her practice questions the construction of a collective historical consciousness and the desire to commune with pasts both real and imagined. Her performances drag the audience into a vividly drawn narrative through the reading aloud of text, often enacted in front of effigies or piles of earth, or while interacting with hand-made props or while performing certain symbolic gestures.

For Tall Tales Beth Collar’s new work, inspired by texts and ephemera held by Glasgow Women’s Library, explores the gender politics of the frown or the furrowed brow in contemporary imagery. Her research manifests as sculptures of women’s faces, carved in Lime wood and finished with cosmetics, which explore this complex expression. Collar is very interested in the repetition or reiteration of painted image on top of sculpted image which occurs in medieval polychrome sculpture and how that could relate to the application of make up and to the depiction, in the media, of the idealised female visage.

In Glasgow, Collar will deliver a specially devised performance piece for Glasgow Women’s Library. Thinking of the performance as an inauguration address or blessing ritual for the library’s new gallery the artist will give voice to some of the more unusual stories she came across while digging into the GWL archive and library. For Beth this performance will see her work come full circle, with the return to Glasgow where she began her journey as artist in residence at Glasgow Women’s Library in late 2014.

Image Credits, Top Image: probably, like a melon rolling off a table part 1, 2015, C. Artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery
&  Bottom Image: how i’ve lived (Mongol Hordes), 2015 C. The Artist