ARTIST BIO/EXHIBITIONS/PRESS

BIOGRAPHY

Charlie Tuesday Gates creates surreal assemblage sculpture out of the things she finds and collects – including the dead. She has a reputation for unique and challenging sculpture, video and performance art that confronts, questions and challenges issues of morality, ethics and the very nature of controversy itself.

Although she doesn’t classify herself as such, she has been listed as one of the
U.K’s top taxidermists, instrumental in bringing the new wave of taxidermy into the mainstream.
Her pioneering series ‘D.I.Y Taxidermy LIVE!’ embraced an entirely new medium of workshops and live demonstrations that simply didn’t exist before. Evolving from a tongue-in-cheek demonstration in 2009, this bizarre mix of performance, improvisation, storytelling, video, puppetry and song is now a sell-out show. Working with audience participation, she skins and stuffs an animal using only the most basic ingredients: salt, sanitary towels and shake n’ vac. Participants can even eat and compete for artwork during the interval and finale of the show. Her video work uses the  medium of 'Animalation', where Gates animates and distorts  dead characters, real animals are manipulated by hand to perform, sing and dance.

Her artwork has appeared on the cover of DESIGN WEEK, inside THE HUFFINGTON POST,  TIME OUT, THE INDEPENDENT, NOTION, CLASH, MIX MAG, BIZARRE MAGAZINE, DAZED AND CONFUSED & VICE. She has worked with DIESEL, BBC FILM, FILM LONDON,
UTURE CINEMA, LOST LECTURES, ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL of
ARCHITECTURE, and been commissioned for set design and art direction for music videos and theatre.

Born in Dorset, Gates studied sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts. She lives and works in London.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT:

My work comes from the time that we are all affected by the most. Childhood was a fantastically unstable affair. A strange kind of madness surrounded me. My world was constantly being destroyed and changed in a never-ending struggle to find a home.

My obsession with the discarded stems from years of playing on a rubbish dump and observing my mother accumulate, sort and meticulously arrange endless amounts of other people’s dumped possessions, forgotten memories and abandoned army lives. Constantly moving home, schools, friends and father figures meant I was always new and always alone. With few friends and no constants, I would seek security in my collections... and eventually even the dead.

 I started saving and recycling the seemingly useless and unwanted, transforming them into emotive and provocative assemblages. By twisting the natural with artificial, creatures become characters and lives once lost are brought back in strange, imaginary creations. Inner worlds and external realities are manifested in macabre and absurd vignettes that provoke disgust, fear, hilarity and a sense of the tragic.

These works are like biographies of life and loss, mortality and morality.

 I love the obvious, the irony of it all.
My work is littered with blunt and crass visual puns and sardonic nods to the canon. Processes and practices mock popular culture, tradition and the cult of celebrity. Context becomes a vortex, subsumed in a sort of absurd alchemy.


I started pushing my materials to the limits of taste and beyond through my live performance and animalation video pieces, in which real dead animals are manipulated to perform, sing and dance as animated. I’m driven by the fantastically hypocritical nature of the relationship between humans and animals – how vehemently we purport to care about our fellow species, and yet are blinded and driven to cruelty by narcissism and commodity. Art awakens the senses and brings darkness to light, exposing the cracks in humanity and even questioning the very principles that underpin our reality.

Contact:charlietuesdaywinnergates@gmail.com 

Twitter:GOODNESSGATES
Facebook:TUESDAYGATES

EXHIBITIONS/EVENTS

SOLO SHOWS

2017- 'Near Death Experience', The Vestibules City Hall, Bristol

2017- 'Near Death Experience', Space Gallery, Bristol

2017- S.O Amazement', Vintage, Bristol

2016- 'Taxidermy In The Toilet', The Edwardian Cloakroom, Bristol
2016 'Window To My Soul', The Last Tuesday Society, London

2015 -Musical Production- 'Sing For Your Life', The Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

2015- Musical Production- 'Sing For Your Life', Vault Festival, London

2013- 'D.I.Y Taxidermy VII: Cat Got Your Tongue', The Book Club, London

2012 -'D.I.Y Taxidermy 6: Throw The Book Away', The Book Club, London

2011- 'D.I.Y Taxidermy' Corsica studios, London

2011- 'D.I.Y TAXIDERMY IIII' Diesel, Red Gallery, London

2011- 'D.I.Y Taxidermy lll: Back From The Dead', Future Gallery, London

2010-  'D.I.Y Taxidermy II: Dicing With Death', Counter Culture, London

2010- 'D.I.Y Taxidermy', The Nunnery, The Bow Arts Trust, London

2010- 'I'm Thinking Of Something Stranger', The Old Asphaltic Building, London


GROUP SHOWS

2017-  ' Still Lives', X Gallery, Dublin.

2015-  'Modern Panic', Apiary Studios, London

2015 - 'Beauty is the Beast', Arnhem Museum, Netherlands
2014 - 'Modern Panic', Apiary Studios, London
2014 - 'Museum House Of Death', The Vaults, London

2013 - 'Mad About Art', Rowan Arts Charity, London

2013 - 'Sound Tracks Festival', 100 Years Gallery, London

2012 - 'Art Club', Red Gallery, London
2012 - 'Modern Panic III', Apiary Studios, London

2012 - 'Spare Parts', The Rag Factory, London

2012 - 'Water Under The Moon', Menier Gallery, London

2011-- 'Modern Panic', Gorilla Zoo, The Old Abattoir, London

2011- , 'Collagerie', Stew Gallery, Sussex


 



Talks/ Demonstrations/Workshops
Artist Talk: The Doodle Bar
Lost Boys: Future Cinema, Interactive D.I.Y Taxidermy workshop.
Thrilling Wonder Stories: Artist Talk and D.I.Y Taxidermy demonstration, Architectural Association 
Borrowed Time: In association with BBC Film & Film London, D.I.Y Taxidermy workshop
*Prop making workshop for the microwave budget feature film ‘Borrowed Time’, written and directed by Jules Bishop.

Group shows
FREAKS: Shoreditch Basement Gallery
Ishihara 14:Queen on Hoxton
SURREAL NIGHTMARES: SHUNT
Counter Culture: Opening night
Ishihara 12: The Book Club
El Ray: El Colorado
A Moving Exhibition: 10 Gale Gallery 
Fishtank: Queen of Hoxton
This Is What It Is: Artevict- East London

2009 Group shows
Ishihara: Sixty Million Postcards, 1 year Birthday
Tales That Witness Madness: The Elevator Gallery
CrabWolf: The Queen of Hoxton
Ishihara 10:Sixty Million Postcards

2008 Group shows:
Ishihara: Sixty Million Postcards
Five Years Gallery: Regent Studios
Mink Schmink: Wilson Williams Gallery
About The Size of a Small Cat: Supine Studios

2007 Group Shows
2nd Place: Area 10 (London)  07
Cows Under No Title: Tottenham Court S

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PRESS
-----------------------------------------------------

Sing For Your Life

Sing For Your Life


Death Becomes Her




MIXMAG



Cara Delevingne 
Put something I made on her head!!!!

My shamanic headdress appears in the MIXMAG fashion pages


Check out the list from the link above.. 
You'll see that I'm on there with Walter Potter, Peter Spicer and Polly Morgan!!!!!



BIZARRE Magazine issue 183 Dec 11
With Alix Fox




Thrilling Wonder Stories in The Guardian 30th Oct



BIZARRE MAGAZINE April- May






TIME OUT Dec 10
Christmas 2010
'Charlie Gates is rapidly becoming one of the UK's most talked about young artists. Her work is thought provoking and bold, and to many, extremely distasteful'
Design Week 
More articles and reviews:

Taxidermy for one
Stuffed animals are conquering the art world
Stuffed animals are fashionable again and London has become the focus for a new wave of high-art taxidermists.

Taxidermy -  the act of mounting or reproducing dead animals for display - was once seen as a distasteful, traditional, and unattractive piece of art. For a start, taxidermy was often done badly. The Facebook page, Badly Stuffed Animals, has attracted a cult following.
It was also seen as barbaric, especially when it was used to display the results of a hunting trip. A stuffed tiger is no longer a good look in a lounge.
 
A new wave of taxidermists
But a new generation are reinvigorating the profession.
Charlie Tuesday Gates is one of the most high profile. She got into taxidermy through her work as an artist, buying some bits and pieces of dead animals to use in her regular art, before making a name for herself.

‘It was a complete accident, really,’ Gates has said. “I bought a couple of bits of dead things, made them into pieces and said I was into taxidermy. Then all of a sudden, I got given the fox, and I thought: Oh, I’ve got to put my money where my mouth is.”

Art not decoration
Polly Morgan is the taxidermist with the most artistic credibility, though. She uses roadkill for her elegant and haunting pieces. They’ve been bought by celebrities like Kate Moss, and she had a high-profile show at the fashionable Haunch of Venison Gallery. Artist Banksy has called her “Britain’s hottest bird stuffer”.

Her success has been built on the incongruous settings for her work, and on the way the animals become human (or are anthropomorphised).

Is this a trend or is taxidermy here for good. Morgan suggests that she’s producing art, not taxidermy. “I suppose other people might get sick of it - it is a bit faddish - but hopefully what will stand me in good stead is that I’ve never sold to taxidermy buyers but to art buyers”.

And why have they become so successful? ‘It makes you appreciate animals in a different way,’ Gates suggests. ‘It’s really intimate. You understand life at a whole new level.’






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