FRACTURE! The inaugural exhibition by Portable Collective at The Old Fire Station, Oxford, January 2022
Emerging from a year or more of lockdowns and limitations on all sorts of personal, social and creative activity, we find ourselves in the fractured, unstable landscape of the “New Normal”.
FRACTURE! is an exhibition of work by PORTABLE Collective which explores both the disorientation and the opportunities of this new landscape. The outcomes are varied, ranging from personal and psychological responses, to explorations into how this changed space offers new ways of experiencing our lived environment.
Change and instability can be dis-orientating and alarming, especially when forced upon us by an unforeseeable global pandemic. But are they always negative? In recognising our innate adaptability, the work in this exhibition seeks to walk the paths between the disruption of a world broken from its past and the opportunity which this fracture offers to re-build and move forward.
The Portable Collective is a group of seven Oxford-based UK artists formed in 2019 here at The Old Fire Station, and nurtured through the long lockdown months of 2020. We explore notions of agility, transience, fragility and impermanence in the modern, mobile world, especially in a post-pandemic context. FRACTURE! Is our debut exhibition as a collective.
Portable Collective consists of: John Blythe, Zelga Miller, Mark Clay, Anne Griffiths, Miranda Miller, Jeremy Morgan and Sarah Wills-Brown